Prosody and the Old Celtic Verbal Complex

PROSODY AND THE OLD CELTIC VERBAL COMPLEX

JOHNT. KOCH

Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

A. ANOMALOUS SANOHI GEMINATION AND THE PROTO-CELTIC ACCENT

§l. Most if not all of the so-called phonological ' irregularities' associated with the early Neo-Celtic verbal complex can be understood as regular effects of the position and nature of the accent in Proto-Celtic, itself a development of the Indo-European situation. The theory presented in this article rests upon two key principles: (i) that Proto-Celtic had regular external sandhi patterns (such as phonetic gemination following a vowel across juncture) prevailing between stressed words and following enclitics which differed drastically from the behaviour between stressed words, between a proclitic and a st ressed word, or between two enclitics in synenclisis; (ii) that an Old Celtic atonic word ending in a short front vowel tended to lose that vowel while the tonic form of the same word (under certain conditions) tended to retain it, e.g. MW dy < *to(u) v. teu < *tbwe or *Iewe.

In the Indo-European and Proto-Celtic systems, the word accent and lack thereof had had morpho-syntactic significance. In the diverging Celtic dialects, when the accent became mechanical, the secondary effects which the old accent had had on the segmental phonology came in some important instances to carryon these information-carrying functions. Consequently, these effects were often extended as morpho-phonemes to contexts where they had not originally occurred as normal phonetic phenomena. In earlier investigations of the origins of deuterotonic gemination, the absoluteconjunct opposition, and so on, the possible impact of older accentual patterns upon the segmental phonology has been all but ignored . Lacking the prosodic dimension, it comes to look as though Neo-Celtic phonology has been somehow systematically distorted at the juncture of Indo-European tonic words and following enclitics. To account for this apparent discrepancy on the segmental level, numerous scholars have resorted to factoring a hypothetical obligatory Wackernagel 's enclitic into their reconstructed protoforms of British and Primitive Irish minimal sentential syntagmata.'

1 A particle theory of deuterotonic gemi nation was first presented by Thurney~n in a paper entitled 'On certain initial changes in the Irish verb after preverbal particles', £riu iii ( 1907) 18- 19, and was first transferred from Oir. to be applied to the language of Hengerdd in Strachan's paper immediately following in the same volume. Since then , the idea has been represented in many versions. The etymology·of the enclitic has been accounted for variously- as a nom. pron ., sentence connective, or reduced form of the pres. 3 sg. copu la- and its phonetic

Eriu xxxviii (1987) 141 - 174 © Royal Irish Academy, Dublin

144 JOHNT. KOCH

§2. Like Old Irish, Early Brittonic shows, in certain phrasal combinations, the reflexes of old unweakened or geminated consonants where the established principles of Celtic historical phonology would lead us to expect lenited values; e.g., MW y'm Uad 'to kill me' < Brit. 'do mon slad- violates the principle that an initial single consonant which had stood in intervocal position in an Old Celtic close group should show lenition in Neo-Celtic, i.e. **y'f Uad is expected. Similarly, in the verbal complex, ry-m'gwares (RT 3.13), dy-m'gwares (41.2) 'may he deliver me' < oro med lVare88it, '<Ii med lVare88it ( / 88 / = ['s's]), against the incorrectly predicted **ry-f'gwares, **dy-f·gwares. In Hengerdd, the principle first identified by Strachan ('On some mutations of initial consonants in the Old Welsh verb', Eriu iii (1907) 20fl) is found to operate in main clauses where no infix is present, e.g. gochanwn gochenyn wythgeith 'I sang, the eight slaves sang' (CA 1104[A)'Peis Dinogat' interpolation).' The spirantization between PYB and Y is not the predicted result of Brit. 'IVO canon(-) , 'IVO canint (-) ; rather, lenition is looked for (i.e. goganwn, gogenyn(t», which is what became normal usage with this Y in the language of Middle Welsh prose.

§3. The cognate phenomenon in the Old Irish verbal complex (but not as it occurs elsewhere) has received an enormouS amount of attention, and it is now widely held that the opposition of abs. v. cjt verbal endings (which also has its analogue in Early Brittonic) shows in some sense a complementary distribution with anomalous non-lenition . Thus, an overall integrated solution has become a high priority for historical linguists working in Celtic. The quest's failure thus far to produce an explanation secure enough for widespread acceptance must loom as a general indictment and points out the likelihood that the various competing hypotheses share in some major oversight or preliminary misassumption. §4. The theory proposed here derives from a premise which has long been accepted by many scholars, namely that the Late Indo-European dialect

~hape modified minimally (- es. *is, - ed, and others); the abs . and cjt endings and non·lenition of mfixed and suffixed prons. have also been incorporated into the theory. The status queslionis up to 1963 is thoroughly and conveniently summarized by W. Meid, Die indogermanischen G'"!I'!dlagen de: allirischen, absoi!4ten und konjunkten VerbaI.J1exion (1963) 10-52. Cowgill CThe OriginS, of the Insular CeltiC conjunct and absolute verbal end ings' , in H. Rix (cd.), Flexion und Jf!ortblldung, v. !"ac~tagun$ der indogermanischen Gesellschaift , Regensburg (1975) 40ft) proVides another review mcludmg some more recent work . The revision and growth of the theory culminated (for the tim~ being) with Cowgill's publications of 1975, which stand very squarely on the ~houlders of Boling, 'Some problems of the phonology and morphology of the Old Irish verb' , Eriu xxiii (1972) 73- 101. A summary critique of the pte. theory and earlier alternative hy~theses is presented in the appendix.

The exx collccted by Strachan suggest that the rule reI. lenition v. main-clause spirantization had ~orked fairly consistently in archaic bardic diction after the particles ny and ry and more margmally after dy-. In compound verbs starting with other preverbs. spirantization or lenition tended to become petrified before the earliest literature; e.g. gogel : gocbel had split into two verbs. The cognate ofOlr. fo'cain almost always appears in Hengerdd as gogan- even when non· reI. and not preceded by a further PYB; see J. Lloyd·Jones, Geirfa 541 , 548, who li sts only one further ex. of gocb~ as a V. It is likely then that .non.rel. spi rantization was still working in this V, or perhaps workmg generally after go-, at the hme the lullaby was composed. The genre is not likely to have attracted the high arcane style.

PROSODY AND THE CELTIC VERB 145

which became Celtic had had a system like that directly observable in Vedic Sanskrit, in which a PVB, in a main clause, bore the accent, and verbs in main clauses--except when they stood in sentence-initial position- were enclitic.' Sir John Morris-Jones believed this to have been the case and consistently reconstructed the preforms of Welsh compound Vs along these lines in his Welsh grammar (1913): e.g. he reconstructed the famous proverb' Trenghit golut, ny threingk molut 'wealth perishes, fame perishes not' as 'Kelt. *lrank{:.li yo ... , ne ttrankl-I mo .. .' (WG §179). However, he brought no fresh Celtic evidence forward in support of this position for the accent and proposed no direct connection between the accented PVB and following doubled initial. Nor did he make use of the relevant doctrine presented by Anwyl a few years before that the Welsh infixed prons. 'm, th, s, have arisen from mme, tte, and sse respectively, the initial consonant in each case having been strongly accented and stressed" Meid (Idg. Grundlagen) like MorrisJones started from the premise of an Indo-European compound V with tonic PVB and enclitic injunctive, e.g. OIr. dO'beir < IE 10 bherel. But the construct was again seen neither as directly indicated by the Celtic evidence nor even independently confirmed by it, and it is Meid's view that it is proto tonic tabair that is the direct reflex of *10 bherel and 'that dO'beir is a reformation. Recently, F. O. Lindeman reaffirmed the nohon of an IndoEuropean enclitic V in the course of a discussion of 'Old Irish and Brythonic deuterotonic verbal forms' (Eriu xxxvii 23-8). But the remark is more or less incidental to his case and must derive from evidence supplied by other languages. He does not use it to explain any of the deuterotonic phenomena, resorting rather to a pte. (Proto-Celt. *1 < IE sentence connective *Ii, cf. Luwian, Hieroglyphic, and Lycian Ii, Hill. z(a); see also Lindeman, 'Une correspondance syntactique entre les langues anatoliennes et Ie celtique', EC xv (2) 495- 500). Calvert Watkins states explicitly that, as against 'the recessive accent of the verb in Classical Greek, which is rightly regarded generally as a reflection of its original atonic character' (Ce/lica vi 21), 'The position of the Indo-European word accent, or even its presence or absence, cannot be presumed to have left any trace in Old Irish. Even the conservation of Wackemagel 's Law position for enclitics implies only the absence of syntactic stress ... Irish can provide no information as to the tonic or atonic character of the Indo-European finite verb in principal clauses. The accentual situation which we have represents only the generalization of demarcative stress on the first syllable of the word' (Ce/lica vi 39). Hamp (ZCP xxxix 344-{), continuing footnote) is unique in seeing reflexions of the IndoEuropean enclitic V in Celtic phonology. Thus, nasalization of the V in 'Bergin's Law' and tmesis constructions (e.g. the famous ceso femmuin m-

l The attribution of such a system to the proto-language is further supported by the recessive accent of the Gk finite V and likewise by # £(n1 . .. # v. # . . . Eun ( . .. ) #.

4 The poetry of the Gogynfeirdd from the Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales (Denbigh 19(9) 16.

146 JOHNT. KOCH

bolgaig m-bung 'although I reap blistered seaweed") would be a trace of enclisis.

§5. Before the late Primitive Irish and Late British periods at the latest, the accent became one of powerful stress (the ultimate consequence of which was wholesa le syllable loss), distributed according to mechanical, syllablecounting principles. These· principles diverge within the attested dialects. There are no vowel reductions in either branch of Neo-Celtic that would indicate that Brittonic was once stressed on the pa ttern of Old Irish or that Irish was formerly stressed like OWCB. What evidence Meyer- Lubke assembled in 'D ie Betonung im Gallischen' (Silzungberichle der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaflen (Wien) CXLIII, paper 2 (190 1)) suggests that Gaulish sometimes had penultimate accent like British, but sometimes antepenultimate. There is no trace of the Gaulish accent preceding the antepenultimate. Several French place-names indicate that Gaulish, and thence Gallo-Latin, could have antepenultimate accent in words which would normally receive penultimate stress in Classical Latin, e.g. Bayeux < Bodi6casses, Dreux < Dur6casses, Troyes < Tricasses, Chorge < Cattiriges (v. Chery < Caturlges), Bourges < Bittiriges (v. ·Berry < Biturlges); cf. also Conde < Condilte v. Condes < Condate. Several examples suggest that in Gaulish as in Neo-Celtic the accent was primarily one of intensity, thus leading to syllable loss: Armorica, beside unsyncopated Aremorica, Lugdunum < ·LugudUnon; ac, pone, and etie, e66ic with -c < ·-k""e. In a number of cases vowel reductions and syllable loss pattern after the position of the Indo-European accent; thus the Gaulish preposi tions ande-, ate-, and areshow Indo-European i centralized to e, cf. Skt 6dhi, illi, pari, Gk. £n, 7TEP£, v. Gaul. ambi- with i preserved under the Indo-European accent, cf. Skt abhi, Gk. al-'q,{ (see VKG §163; L&P §98). In Armorica, the unaccented vowel is fully lost, as is seen also in the Gaulish gen. pronouns in procli tic use: in mon derco ' in my eye'" mon gnatha 'my girl',' cf. Skt mama, W fyN, Vannetais meN, to Divo 'thy God' ,· cf. Skt lava, OIr. do, W dy, B da. Gaulish, Goidelic, and Brittonic participated in these reductions and losses at a common stage. At this stage, the accent was still (often, at least) in its Indo-European position but its primary prominence had been converted from pitch to stress. Further evidence fo r such a stage has been recently provided by the Soviet linguist V. A. Dybo (conveniently summarized by Kortlandt, 'More evidence for Italo-Celtic', Eriu xxxii 1- 22) who has compiled examples in which Celtic (and Italic and sometimes Germanic) have shortened Indo-European pretonic long vowels: e.g. 0Ir. beo, W byw, C byw, hew, B beo - Sktjlvah (Latin

.s Cormac's Glossary 1059 (ed. K. Meyer, Allea!Qlajrom Irish manuscripts 4). 6 See L. Fleuriot. 'Sur quelques texts gaulois', EC xiv (1) 57-66. 7 See Fleuriot, ZCP xxxix 297- 9. 8 See R. Thumcysen, ZCP xiv 10-11; W. Meid. Gallisch oder Laleinisch? (Innsbruck 1980)

12- 13; Fleuriot, review of Meid. ZCP xxxix 297- 9.


retains the long vowel in that case); OIr. fer, OW gur-, OC gur, OB uur-, Gaul. uiro- - Skt vlrah; W cwn (old nom. pl.), 0Ir. con (gen. sg.) - Skt gen. sg. suntlh; W hwch, C hoch (La!. sucula) - Skt sukarah. At a later stage, after the breakup of the Celtic dialects, the stress moved according to the various new principles.

§6. As revealed in Vedic and Classical Greek, the accent of (Late) IndoEuropean was essentially musical and therefore distributed independently of syllabic and vocalic quantity. (The phenomenon of ablaut grades is perhaps indicative of an older stress accent in the position of the Vedic udiilla or elevated pitch.) Within such a prosodic system, it was perfectly possible for a word-final short vowel to have rising pitch, as e.g. in the separable PVB ·pro. Thus, a minimal main-clause syntagm like 'pro kan-DESINENCE 'sing forth' was in no way phonetically anomalous. But in languages with stress accents, e.g. Latin, Irish, Welsh and English, the placement of the accent is generally not indifferent to syllabic quantity, and in those four languages, as well as many others, a final syllable ending in a stressed short vowel is impossible; e.g. La!. -que, W fy, and OIr. do 'thy' cannot bear the stress. In the rare instances when English the is accented, it is pronounced ' [ili:] with a long vowel. What, then, became of accented 'pro as it passed into stress-based prosodic systems? A great number of Latin Vs show lengthened pro, e.g. procedii, providii, procrastino. In Mod. W, my when it is a stressed preposed ADV and not a compound-forming prefix is pronounced [rhi:] [rhi:] with a long vowel. Thus, simple loss of stress is one possibility and vowel lengthening with retention of stress another. A third alternative is illustrated by the mutational system of Tuscan Italian. There, the juncture of a short stressed vowel + consonant results in gemination: e.g. cajR nero [kaffe nne:ro], resteri, con me [resteni kkom me], sto benino [st6 bbeni:no], carita divina [karitit ddivi:na]; see M. Chapallaz, The pronunciation of Italian (London 1979) 133ff. The obvious explanation for this phenomenon is that the first consonant of the initial geminate, though belonging semantically to the following word, belongs phonetically to the preceding syllable, making it thereby a heavy syllable capable of bearing stress. The first Italian example may now be rewritten using periods to show syllabic boundaries: [kaf.fe n.ne:.ro]. W. S. Allen (Accent and rhythm (Cambridge 1973) 80) remarks that it is a more common tendency for languages to lengthen light stressed syllables with a long vowel or diphthongization but that consonant doubling is also well attested. In some languages, vowel lengthening v. gemination varies from dialect to dialect; Allen gives Norwegian as an example. A comparable alternation is found in association with the calediad phenomenon of the dialects of south-east Wales (on which see further below), in' which the outcome of the provection results, in some words, in a lengthened vowel in the penult followed by a simplex voiceless stop (e.g. digon [di:.kon],

148 JOHNT. KOCH

cegin [ke:.kin)) and in other examples a short vowel followed by a geminate (e.g. rhyw beth [rup.pa9], dywedodd [gweuus], credu [kreui)).

Though the accentual patterns which had caused the gemination in ProtoCeltic had changed at the relevant junctures already in the earliest NeoCeltic, the mutations of Early Welsh and Irish show that the ancestral language had once behaved in a way comparable to Tuscan Italian as regards this one phonetic detail: e.g. MW y'm kereint (Archaic carant), Olr. do-m(m) chairtib 'to my friends / kinsmen' reHects a Proto-Celtic syntagm like '[do m.mon ka.ran.to.bos] (the position of the stress on the last word has been inserted arbitrarily), Olr. ro·cechain and Archaic MW rY'chant ' he has sung' reHect, mutatis mutandis, Proto-Celt. '[ro k.kan-] + INFLEXION. Similarly, MW ry-th'welas reHects Proto-Celt. *[ro uu welest] (by way of Brit. *lVela99it), cf. also B ra-z, C re-th, Olr. ro-t.

§7. In an obvious way, the gemination of initial Proto-Celtic consonants after the Indo- European accent is reminiscent of the principle known as Verner's Law whereby the Indo-European accent blocked the weakening of following consonants in prehistoric Germanic. One may also compare calediad, in which a voiced stop standing intervocalically after a synchronically stressed penult can be turned into the corresponding voiceless geminate (see above). The situation reconstructed for Proto-Celtic differs in that the old accent there only had impact upon the initial consonants of enclitics and not consonants in the interior of words. To explain why this should be so, an understanding of the properties oflhe Proto-Celtic stress accent and of stress accents in general is necessary. As stated, words like Lat. -que, W fy, OIr. do, and English a are normally not capable of bearing stress. Nor are syllables of such phonetic shape possible as accented finals of polysyllables. However, syllables of precisely these same shapes are quite regularly stressed in words such as querulus [que.ru.Jus], fynydd [v:>.ni3], dorus [do.rus], and ul/er [:>.t,] or [:>.<if]. This apparent paradox has been successfully explained by means of a 'disyllabic stress matrix ' , on which see Allen, Accent and rhythm 163-79. According to this analysis, a stressed light syllable is in fact only the most prominent member of a compound accent comprising two syllables, namely the so-called accented syllable and the following one. It is the role of the following syllable in completing the stress matrix which renders it impossible for an accented light syllable to stand as a word final. Accordingly the four type words may be represented as follows with the stress accent covering two syllables: [que.m.lus], [v:>.ni3], [do.nis], [:>. to] / [:>.<if]" In the cases of stressed heavy syllables, the stress matrix is completed within one syllable, thus Lat.

9 In Mod. W the compound nature of the accent in all words with penultimate stress is particularly obvious because the ultima has rising pitch and audible secondary stress, so that non-Welsh English speakers often find it difficult to distinguish the Donnal penultimate stress type from that minority of forms with ultimate stress resulting from contracted hiatus, e.g. mwynhau, Cymraeg. ysgolhaig. See D. M. Jones. "The accent in Modern Welsh', DDCS xiii (2) (1949) 63-4.


virtus [wir.tus], W mwynhau [muin.hai], Olr. fert(a)e [fer.te], English robot [roll.bot]. As heavy syllables with monosyllabic stress matrices, these are capable of standing as independent full words, thus vir, hau, fer, and rolV.

§8. A group comprising a stressed word and following unstressed word may be thought of as a single accentable unit or 'word-like' combination. The practical question is whether the phonological unity of such a grouping is sufficiently close that a disyllabic stress matrix can be shared between them. There is no a priori reason that all stress-accent languages must agree on this point. In Modern Welsh and English, it is clearly not possible; e.g., W hynaf (usually pronounced hyns in informal speech) and English letter are [ho.na(v)] and [Ie. to] / [Ie.(lr] with disyllabic stress matrices. But the phrasal combinations hyn a hynny, let or hindrance have [hin] and [let]. The stressed monosyllables do not pass their final consonants to the following clitic or share their stress with it. And, in any combination, the t of English let is far more resistant to weakening to the North American lenis alveolar [(I], or to a glottal stop in the varieties of British English where this occurs, than is the tt in letter.

Welsh does have a class of true enclitics, i.e. the affixed prons. These are optionally stressed but more frequently not. Their accentual properties are strikingly different from those of word-forming suffixes; e.g., the pI. of bryn [brin] is bryniau [bro.nje] with a light initial (containing the 'obscure y' sound, which is impossible in (native) stressed monosyllables), but in ei fryn ef [i. vrin.o], with the affixed pronoun, the enclitic has essentially no prosodic effect on the stressed word. In Latin a following enclitic moves the stress, as in uirum-que [wi .ruD .kWe], homines-que, etc. In examples of this type, a monosyllabic stress matrix is contained completely within the limits of the accented word. The actual realization of combinations like Musa-que, liminaque, Saturnia-que is not certain. The Latin grammarians imply that it was the final short vowel preceding the enclitic that carried the accent, which would mean that there was a disyllabic stress matrix which included the enclitic, but the metrical evidence suggests that the stress fell further back in such cases; see Allen, Accent and rhythm I 58ff. The lengthening of the vowel in the PVB of Latin Vs of the proceao type indicates that PVB was once a stressed independent word which could not share its stress matrix with the following enclitic V.

§9. It is apparent, then, that at least in the languages examined above the stress belonging to one word is usually not permitted to make use of an adjacent syllable in another word, even a word lacking its own accent, cf. once more Tuscan [re.ste.ra k.kom. me]. Passing from Indo-European to Proto-Celtic and thus from a pitch-based to a stress-based accentual system, a syntagm like *t6 bhereti could have taken one of several conceivable phonetic routes: the accent could have moved, the two words could have

150 JOHNT. KOCH

fused into a true compound which would have allowed a disyllabic stress matrix to be shared by the elements, or the vowel of the PVB could have been lengthened or diphthongized. What did happen was that the initial consonant of the enclitic was doubled to create a monosyllabic stress matrix for the PVB, thus Primitive Irish *[to b.be.ret]. Contrast Proto-Celt. *[de.kam] J *[de.kem] 'ten' (> W deg, B dek, 0Ir. deicb) with an internal light tonic syllable as part of a disyllabic stress matrix and consequent lack of consonant doubling.

§IO. Further examples: 'o gocbanwn gochenyn wythgeith (CA 1104[A]) < Brit. *[Wo-k.ka.non(-) Wo-k.ka.nint(-) ox'uiiii kax'Uii] < Proto-Celt. *[wo k.ka.non - wo k.ka.nont -]; gochely 'thou avoidest' < Proto-Celt. *[wo k.ke.le.si]; rY'chedwis 'he has kept' (LiDu 3.34) « Brit. - *catw/OOit) < *[ro k.kat.wiist] (on the formation of the Celt. s-pret. see C. Watkins, IndoEuropean origins of the Celtic verb, I . The sigmatic aorist (Dublin 1962) 174-80); ry'chynis ' he has maintained' (LiDu 3.35; see Geirfa 107) « Brit. -*cann/OOit) < *[ro k.kan.niist]; ry'gallas 'he has gone' (MA 149.1) < *[ro g.gal.last]; ry'phrinhom 'may we purchase' (LlDu 29.37) < *[r6 k.kwrii.naa.so.mos] (on the formation of the Bnttonic SUbjunctive see C. Watkins, IE origins 145- 56); ry'maetb 'she has nourished' (LlDu 29.4) < *[r6 m.makt] (on the Celt. t-preterite, IE origins 156-74); ny-m'kar 'loves me not' (CLIH 11.19') < orne m.med ka.rat(-)]; dy-m'ryt 'he gives me' (LiHen 280.9) < *[t6 m.muu ro.diit(-)]; dy-m'kyneirch ' he greets me' (LiHen 30.15) < *[to m.med ko.m-ark.kiit(-)]; ry-th'peris ' he has made thee' (CTJ PTIV.13) < *[ro Uu kWa.riist]; OB ni""guilom-(ni) 'we see her not' (Ang. 477 prima manus) < orne s.sim we.lo.mos]; ni-m'dioclas) gl. ' non me piguit' (Fleuriot, 'Nouvelles gloses vieilles-bretonnes a Amalarius', EC xi (2) 413-64) < orne m.med dii.aa.kast]; MB ra-m'dougo 'may it bear me' (HMSB §53. 1) < *[ro m.med du.k]-INFLEXION; C rn-m'kymmer 'it can take me' (Lewis, Llawlyfr Cernyweg Canol§50.3) < *[ro m.med kom-.be.ret]; rn-m'kemeres ' it tookJhas taken me' (ibid. §27.Nod I) < *[r6 m.med kom-.bert]."

Enclitic stress

§II. As noted above, in Latin combinations of stressed word + enclitic, like uirum-que, the enclitic has the effect of moving the stress to the final syllable. [n Greek, the parallel phenomenon of enclitic-induced secondary accents is found: e.g. ay8pwrros TLS' and Homeric </>6AA6. T£, AafL1TE T€, aMos 'TtS', £vB& 'TrOT£.,

10 The system of phonetic notation used in the foregoing and below is essentially that which Allen used for Lat. in Accent and rhythm. A similar nota tion is applied to Vedic by the same author in Phonetics in ancient India (London 1953).

11 The foregoing (and similar reconstructions below) 8"re intended primarily to ill ustrate a phonetic principle and are by no means meant to imply that any of these specific syntagmata actually go back to Proto-Celt. , though the syntactic patterns surely do and all the vocabulary is native to Celt. The reconstructed Proto-Celt. verbal inflexions arc also supplied purely for


7V.pO<VT<1. 7(, avSpa P.O. (Allen, Accent and rhythm 24011). In Proto-Celtic also, a special enclitic accent arose and became generalized. Thus, edi-somicaf 'I esteem him' (CA 1246[B]) < "[a.tl s.so's mi.ka.mi]; ery-s'mygei ' he brought it about' (CA 205[A]) < "[a.rl s.so's mi.k]-INFLEXION; ery-th'gwynant 'they will lament thee' (LiHen 171.14) < "[a.rl Uu kee.nant(-)]; ery-th'uaccei ' fostered thee ' (CA I I 49[B]) < '[a.r1 t.tu ma.k)-INFLEXION. The enclitic accent devdoped sufficiently early to block in these combinations the general GalloBrittonic development of 'ati, 'ari > ate-, are (cf. LBrit. Arecluta 'Strathclyde' (Ruys Life of Gildas»; Brit. "[a.te-s.sos), "[a.re-s.sos), "[a.re-uu) would have given W **ade-s, ·*are-s, **are-th.

§12. The behaviour of the Old Irish suffixed prons. shows that enclitic stress developed on the final vowels ofVs: e.g. gabthas 'he seizes her' (L. Breatnach, The suffixed pronouns in early Irish' , Celtica xii 75- 107 no. 198) < '[gabje.tl s.sim), be(i)rtbius 'he brings them' (Breatnach nos 258-60) < '[be.re.tl s.so's), bentus ' he strikes them' (Breatnach no. 261) < "[bi.na.tl s.so's), cech(ra(dut each 'everyone will love thee' (Breatnach no. 43) < "[ke.ka.raa.tl Uu -j. It is not immediately evident wheth9r enclitic stress in prons. suffixed to S-initial verbs was at any stage the only accent on the Venclitic combination or was merely secondary to the undisplaced primary accent, e.g. , "[be.re.tl s.so's). In theory, it is possible that the enclitic accent preceding suffixed prons. persisted as sole accent of the combination until the time of Primitive Irish syllable loss. In other words, a Late Pr.lr. "[be.re.lIis.sus) could have first given '[berellius) by apocope and a secondary stress then arisen on the initial and become predominant before Early Old Irish. That some sort of stress- primary or secondary-was still in place immediately ahead of the pron. at the period of Irish syllable loss is shown by the following facts: (i) the syllable under the enclitic stress never falls; (ii) the following syllable always falls in the Proto-Irish apocope; (iii) in orig. trisyllabic Vs the preceding (second) syllable always falls (by syncope); Breatnach lists only one counter ex. out of a collection of 300, s.nithi 'he stretches himself (no. 82 and p. 85). He goes on to make the point-which can hardly be made strongly enough- that The suffixation of an object pronoun is of a different order from the suffixation of an emphasizing particle (contrast leicthi with leicid-som), and the combination of verb + suffixed pronoun might well be regarded as a single word'- regarded as a single word in terms of syncope and apocope, that is. Semantically these accentable units were two words, unless and until the pron. became reanaly-

illustrative purposes and largely tentative. The o riginal vowel stem classes of the s·prelerites are not certain. and the s-pret. has expanded at the expense of other formations. Where an older formation is known for a particular V. it has been supplied in the reconstruction . The derivation of the Bri tt . subjunctive is particularly problematical. Along with C. Watkins's discussion (1£ origins 145fT), one should perhaps now compare OW abs. boil. cjt boi, DB bo, boh, po with the newly discovered Gaul. fo rms buet-id and de-uuor-buet-id.

152 JOHNT. KOCH

sed as part of the ending of the V or otherwise petrified. And the gemination of the initial of the pron. is not intelligible as word-internal phonology, but must be understood as a consequence of the inability of a stressed word and an enclitic to share a disyllabic stress matrix. The affixed prons. or notae augentes, on the other hand, have no prosodic effect on the preceding 'host' word. They do not lose their own syllabic nucleus, save the unaccented final syllable of the preceding word, nor precipitate syncope of the Old Celtic penultimate. The affixed series is also not obliged to follow Wackernagel's Law (WL) as the suffixed and infixed obj. prons. are. In Welsh, at least, the affixed series all commence in lenited initials (where the originals were mutable) and can still be stressed for emphasis (e.g. yo fy marn i), which the infixed series never can. Given all these differences, there can be no justification for treating both classes of prons. under the single bland rubric of 'enclitics' without further qualification, either in historical analysis or for any synchronic stage l

' For the present purpose the key distinction is that the obj. prons. obeying WL conditioned enclitic stress in Old Celtic until the transition into Neo-Celtic (on some Breton exceptions see §19), whereas the emphasizing prons. had ceased to induce enclitic stress (if they ever had done so) by the time of the Neo-Celtic syllable losses.

§ 13. The background of the generalization of enclitic stress can best be understood by turning back to a stage at which the accent was sti ll essentially musical, i.e. Late Indo-European to Early Proto-Celtic. To judge from the ancient Indian and Greek grammarians, taken along with such phenomena as Verner's Law and the correspondences of the Indo-European accent position and vowel grades, the prominent syllable of an accented word was characterized by udatta (elevated pitch). It is this which is marked in Greek, Romanized Sanskrit, reconstructed Indo-European, and so on, with an

1 2 Pronouns functionally cogna te to the Olr. suffixed prons. do not exist as a class in NeoBritt . To judge from the language of Hengerdd and the remains of OWB, it is the infixed series which ousted the suffixed. A parallel process is evident within the Olr. literary record. The independent obj. prons. used syntactically like obj. nouns belong to a later stage. Forms constituting debris of the older system are few and confined to Hengerdd, e.g. dat. prons. suffixed to the copula, yssym, yssyn (GMW §147.d). The other personal forms. ·yssyth, "'yssy(w)ch. etc., are not attested. Tne copula with suffixed reI. yssyO is of course closely analogous. The development of the initial semi-vowel of the pte. into a dental spirant is comparable to gemination and the product of encli tic stress, Brit. ·[e's.'si-j .jo). B a zo reflects the same preform lacking enclitic stress and consequently gemination, Brit. ·[e's.'si ioJ; see §.I9. Cf. also Olr. as < Archaic asa; see C. Watkins, 'On the prehistory of Celtic verb inflexion', £riu xxi 9: l. Breatnach, 'Some remarks on the relative in Old Irish', Eriu xxxi I ff. Scholars have perhaps not paid adequate attention to certain ambiguous exx like HGC XXXII1.33 rodyssit yn Duw yn an dKbreu 'God gave us in our(?) beginning' and LIHen 232.26 ygvneuthvm ytt glot ' I made fame for thee'. If the first instance of yn in the first ex. is the conjugated prep., as would appear in the light of Middle and Mod.W, it is rather odd for it to stand between the V and subj ., but historically it is perfectly possible that rodyssit yn reflects Brit. ·[Ro.da's.'sii.ti-n .niiJ with a suffixed dat. pron. In the same poem, 1. 36 reads yoy wnaeth an paeth an gweithredeu. As the ed itor saw, this must mean 'nes i'n gweithredoedd ein gwneud yn waeth' Cuntil our deeds made us worse'). But, if the first an is a gen. prOD. like the second, this is a very peculiar use for it. The sense is ace., and a pron. with that sense would normally be infixed ahead ofV- *yny'nn gwnaeth (yn) waeth ... , which would thus accord with Wl.


acute. The other syllables also had their pitch. That immediately following the udiitta had a pitch fall or svarila in Sanskrit terminology, descending from the level of the udiitta (or perhaps slightly higher) to that of an atonic syllable or anudiilla13 Thus, a late Indo-European syntagm 'pro soms bhereli had a pitch contour r: \ :_._:_}. In general, the svarita was merely a consequence of the preceding udiitta, but in some cases (such as coalescence of hiatus between an oxytone and following word across juncture or an i or u with udiitta coming to be pronounced as a semi-vowel) a so-called ' independent svarita' arose in Indic: thus, Skt vrkyas, lanvas with independent svarita superseded Vedic vrkias, lanuas with the svarita merely enclitic upon the udiitta. As stated above, enclisis had had morphological and syntactic significance in Pre-Celtic and Proto-Celtic, carrying much grammatical information. It was therefore continually conserved and renewed so as to be maximally characterized phonetically. From the circumstances where an enclitic was immediately preceded by an oxytone--which must have been very common in the proto-Ianguage--the svarita (or its Celtic reflex) came 10

be felt as the distinctive accent of enclitics in general (or of the first enclitic in a chain of enclitics). In other words, the grammatically crucial juncture of tonic word + enclitic became uniformly characterized by the pitch sequence udiitta / svarita C: \ }, thus imposing oxytone accentuation:or at least a new udiitta, on any preceding accented word. Anwyl had been nearly right in the first place with his belief that the accent had somehow belonged to the initial of the enclitic in British. Accordingly, Pre-Celtic enclitics like acc. 'med, 'Iu, ·ed, ·em, ·sim, ·sons became *med, ·tu, ·ed, ·em, ·sim, ·sims with a fixed independent svarita . Consequently, a combination like Pre-Celt. 'ali + sons, which had originally been accented 'ali sons r: \ :_}, turned to 'ali sons { _ :-: \ }.

§14. PVBs and Vs would have been particularly vulnerable to displacement of their original accents by such re-analysis since they frequently were unaccented, the V in main c1auses, PVBs in subordinate clauses and nominal compounds; e.g., in Gallo-Brittonic compounds like Aremoriea and Arecluta, are- was probably an unaccented prefix. In Celtic at least, and perhaps already in Indo-European, a preposition directly preceding a noun in a prepositional phrase tended to become a proclitic. The enclitic was therefore 'awakening' an accent in a word which was otherwise often a clitic itself (for a Greek parallel see Allen, Accent and rhylhm 248 tl). This circumstance

I J On the accent in Vedic and IE see B. Delbriick, Altindisch Syntax (1888; rpt Darmstadt 1968) 26-51 ; K. Brugmann, Gundrissder vergleichenden Grammatik deT idg. Sprachen I (2nd edn , Strassburg 1897) 59-63, 944ff; A . A. MacDonell, A Vedic grammar for siudems ( 1916; rpt Delhi 198 1) 448-69; Allen, Phonetics in ancient India 87- 93; Accen/ and rhythm 230-4, 239--40; J. Kurylowicz, L 'Accentualion des /angues indoeuropeennes (Wroclaw 1958); Jdg. Grommatik , II. Akzent. Ablaut (Heidelberg 1968); T. Burrow, The Sanskrillanguage (2nd edn , 1955; rpt London 1977) 112- 16; W. D . Whitney, 'On the nature and designation of the accent in Sanskrit ', in Whitney on language , ed. M. Silverstein (Cambridge, Mass. 1971) 261 If.

154 JOHNT. KOCH

naturally contributed to the interpretation that the accent was a function of enclisis and not inherent in the accented word .

§15. When the accent became dynamic, the udalla turned to a monosyllabic stress, requiring doubling of the following consonant, thus '[ati s.so's]. Eventually, the accent was to move in many cases (e.g. the main accent in the verbal complex receded from the first PVB in both Irish and British), thus phonemicizing enclisis gemination (e.g. Brit. ' Ira mmact(-)I [> Archaic W rY'maeth]) and carrying the further result that the Indo- European category of enclitic was once again phonemically recharacterized, this time in a way which had nothing to do with the synchronic accent." The obj . prons. remained unaccented as they had always been up to Late British and Late Primitive Irish times and therefore lost their syllabic nuclei with the NeoCeltic apocope. Main-clause verbs, however (both simplex and loosely compounded), had come under the stress before syncope and apocope. Consequently old disyllabic PVBs ('ati, 'ari, ambi) , when loosely compounded with V, lost their final when this was not preserved by an enclitic pron. or reI. pte. But the gemination which had arisen before the accent moved remained, as can be seen consistently in Old ('rish and fragmentarily in Middle Irish, cf. Olr. ar'cain 'recites' (in law tracts) ·< Pr.Ir. '[a.ri k.ka.net] < '[a.ri k.ka.net]."

Synenclisis

§16. In the Indo-European dialect underlying Celtic, a syntagm like 'pro tu we/est 'he saw thee further' (assuming purely for illustration that the V formation goes back that far) had one udatta and one svarita: C: \ :_ :_ }. At the subsequent stages, this principle was reanalysed as follows: Proto-

\4 Once gemination had come to mark main clauses and become a distinctive characteristic of obj . prODS., it na tura lly spread to the minority o f instances where it had not been phonetically conditi oned by the old accen t. E.g. the Celt. PVB - 0, « IE -de) would not have originally geminated the initial consonant of a fo llowing enclitic because it ended in a long vowel, but morphophonemic gemination (as in non-reI. compound Vs) eventually spread to such contexts, as is shown by MW dichawn v. digaun from the Brit. non-reI. v. reI. forms respectively.

15 Though it is a very risky course to in voke the possible effects of linguistic substrata on the ea rly development of the IE dialects and especially so fo r CelL, where notorious excesses have been committed , the misanalysis or reanalysis of an accent is a very common occurrence when a language is acquired by speakers of another. E.g ., in Mod. English, the stress co-occu rs with elevated pitch. In Hindi, stress co-occurs with low pitch. Due to misinterpreting the pitch factor, the native English speaker will often perceive the Hindi stressed syllable as unst ressed . As Mod. W, like the spoken English of Wales, follows penultimate stress with a pitch rise, the speaker of other varieties of English will often incorrectly perceive the stress as falling on the W ultima, particularly when the ultima is heavy. Thus, the name Geraint (ge .niint) is commonly turned to (ge .r.iint) or even (grili nt] by the Englishman or North American . While it is perfectly conceivable that internal forces at work within a single language could have resulted in the successive redefinition of an enclitic first as unaccented word, then as word with initial pitch fall (svari ta), then as word preceded by monosyllabic stress, then word with initial gemination, one should not ignore the possible impact of spea kers of other languages (in which o ther phonetic oppositions were phonemically significant) who acquired IE and then Celt. during their eras of geographical expansion .


Celtic-a single monosyllabic stress on the final of PVB and consequent phonetic gemination of the first enclitic but not the second, i.e. '[ro t.tu welest]; British- morphophonemic gemination of the infixed pron. but not of V, i.e. '[Ro-t.tu we.la's.'sit] / ro-I/u - / . Cf. also ery-th'gwynant, erytb'uaccei, OIr. fo-t-cberd, B ra-z"garo, etc.

Retained final consonants of prepositions

§17. In Old Irish, a (non-Ieniting / geminating) 'out or < Pr.Ir. ' ess appears as as when preceding clilics in the combinations asmo 'from my' < ProtoCelt. '[eks mon] and as each < Proto-Celt. 'leks kWa(a). kWuu]. These examples suggest that at an early stage while sandhi assimilations were arising between accented words and between proclitics and accented words, these assimilations were resisted at the juncture of a stressed word and a following enclitic. Retention of Old Celtic final consonants is the regular treatment in pretonic PVBs in Old Irish de uterotonic Vs and thus contrasts with the behaviour of non-finite and other prototonic forms of compound Vs and prepositions preceding nouns: so, using McCone's examples (Eriu xxx 1- 2), as'beir 'says' v. its VN epert (both from Proto-Celt. '~ks + 'ber-) and the PP a bruidin 'out of a hostel' , con'fuili ' sleeps' v. VN cotlud and the PP co tig 'with a house'; see a lso Boling, Eriu xxiii 76-7. Assuming that as'beir goes back to 'leks be.ret] « older *[eks be.re.ti]) with tonic PVB and enclitic V, it is exactly parallel to as each and therefore phonologically regular.

In Brittonic, a few traces suggest that a similar situation once obtained for verb forms: e.g. OB ecdiecncis 'escaped' (VBG §138) < *eks + <Ii (+eks) + ~k-, MW echtywynnu 'to shine', echdibenedic 'exhausted' . In other compounds, this same P shows different reflexes, e.g. MW esgar 'enemy' (cf. Olr. escar(a)e), esgor 'to be delivered' , ehofyn ' bold' (cf. Gaul. Exobnus, Cisalpine ESOPNOS (M . Lejeune, Lepontica§20), 0Ir. essamin). [n orig. word-internal position -kst- gave Neo-Brin. [j8] in MW eilhyr < 'ekster. In external sandhi, the same clusters involved in juncture in ecdiecncis, echtywynnu, etc:, have contrasting outcomes in MW chwe dyn, C whe den 'six people' < Brit. 'swexs donj/, and MW chwe thy, C whe ehy 'six houses' < Brit. 'swexs teg-; however, in Breton and south Welsh dialect, final [x] is retained even when the numeral is used as a quasi-proclitic before nouns commencing in consonants. The W myn used in oaths, e.g. myn Duw! ' by God! ' (RBH 115), is a stressed variant of the gen. pron. which as a proditic gives fyN 'my'. This derivation of myn was recognized by Bishop Cormac c. 900 and is confirmed by the fact that oaths employing it commonly incorporate the I sg. affix -i in present-day Welsh: e.g. myn diawl i, myn yffarn i ' by hell' , 16 and the common

16 c r. E. Pontshan. Twyll Dyn: 0 Gwymp Adda Ian yr UgeinJed Ga"rif(Talybont : Y Lolra 1982) 16.66-7. c r. rurther the Archaic Ir. hypochori stic names consisting or Mo-. To- + nom. in -oe or voc. (ror nom.) in -Die. The whole rorma tion is or Britt . origin. cr. OB Toconoc; sec GOI §271.

156 JOHNT. KOCH

myn brain i. [n the former case, the stress prohibits the initial lenition of the prefix and blocks the loss of its final and coalescence of the final with the following initial, so that the following word remains unmutated: thus W fy Nuw 'my God' < Brit. '[mon.dee.wos] but myn Duw! < '[Mon Dee.we]; see further I. Williams, Beginnings of Welsh poetry, ed. R. Bromwich (2nd edn, Cardiff 1982) 14-1 5; LHEB 633.

Gaul. -c, 0Ir. -ch, Neo-Britt . [-g] < IE '_kwe

§18. The fact that Gallo-Brittoruc has here a velar and not a labial (cf. Gaul. -c of eti-c, -ac, etc., and Neo-Britt. ! ag, nag ! ) shows that '_kwe had given '-k before k W had given p generally in that dialect group. We therefore have to do with an old development which went in advance of the key sound change which has traditionally been used to mark the emergence of Gallo-Brittonic. We may then look for this old apocope having occurred at some higher node on the family tree and thereby embracing non-Gallo-Brittonic languages. Ctb. -Cue and Lpt. -PE show that those languages did not participate in a generalized apocope of -e in this enclitic. The behaviour of O[r. na, nach-, on the other hand, implies a Proto-Irish ' preform that was *nak just as in contemporary British and not ne-Cue as in Celtiberian; see Gal §868. Nonetheless, Archaic [r. to-ch, ro-ch, no-ch, se-ch, and ba-ch have been taken as demanding Pr.Ir. *to-kwe. *,o-kwe, *nu-kwe, *se-kwe, *bo(u)-kwe. elc., rather than *to-k, *ro-k, *nu-k , *se-k , *bo(u}-k; see Binchy, Ce/ljca v 82 note. '7 [n light of the prosodic theory, apocopated Proto-Irish forms are now indicated. Though a number of Binchy's examples (op. cit.) require -chto be translated 'and who' rather than merely 'and', -ch- is always followed by a main-clause V from the historical point of view, which is to sayan [ndoEuropean enclitic. The conjunction *_kwe was of course itself also an enclitic, so that in Indo-European and Proto-Celtic the last two elements of the syntagm #PVB + *_kwe + V( . .. )# formed a synenclitic string. Now, on the pattern of the outcome of such synenclitic strings as W ry-th'peris < Proto-Celt. '[ro Ltu kWa.riist] and [r. ro-t'charus < '[ro Ltu ka.raas.tuu], we would expect Pre-Irish '[ro k.kwe win.de.to.ri] 'and he is discovered', without old apocope, to yield Ir. "ro-c(c)!intar, in which the old initial of the first enclitic was a geminate and the following initial !enited. But the form is in fact ro-ch·fintar (Binchy, Celtica v 83) with lenited -cll- (and the evidence collected in Binchy's paper shows that the following initial was not lenited by -ch). That the enclitic conjunction thus appears to behave differently from enclitic prons. can be explained on the basis of an early apocope as in Britt. (and Gall.Britt. and Pr.Ir.) 'nak. Syllabic and non-syllabic enclitics naturally

11 11 should be noted at the outset thai , though the last member of the group is synchronically in Early IT. li ke the rest. a clause-initial proclitic immediately preceding a st ressed word. it is, from the point of view of its I E backgro und, of completely different o rigin and would in earlier times have been accented unlike the rest. It is likely, therefore. that it fell in with the patlcrn of the rest at a later date. by analogy.


had quite different prosodic and sandhi properties. Whereas we saw that languages tend not to allow a syllabic enclitic to be incorporated into the stress matrix of the preceding word, no language known to me has such a restriction on non-syllabic enclitics; e.g., English don't can be realized as stressed [d' nt] , although a stressed [d'] for do is altogether impossible Similarly, in spoken W ydyw'ch is realized with a shorter vowel in the second syllable than is ydyw without the coalesced gen. pron. , but in a combination with a syllabic c1itic---e.g. ydyw dy~the vowel has the normal length as in the isolated responsive. The non-syllabic c1itic counts towards the syllable length of the preceding syllable; the syllabic c1itic does not. Therefore, assuming a uniform reduction of Proto-Goidelic-Gallo-Brittonic '_kwe > 'ok, this would have given rise to a series of stressed contracted monosyllables, "[rok], '[tok], etc., preceding enclitic verbs in main clauses. As these contractions (cf. English don't, W ydyw'ch) behaved phonetically just like single words, there was no gemination. As in as'beir < *[eks be.re.ti], ascach, asmo and con'tuili, the final consonant of the accented monosyllable survived into Old Irish. As clearly seen with the PVB ad---e.g. ad 'cobra, ad'slig, ad'ghidathar~the final of the tonic monosyllable was lenis in such circumstances and the following initial (of the original enclitic) an un mutated fortis. The failure of the consonants to coalesce at all at juncture can be seen as a prosodic effect in that the accented monosyllable depended on its final consonant to complete its stress matrix and therefore resisted passing that final to the next syllable, even in rapid speech. An Old Celtic unstressed syllable, on the other hand, had no such prosodic requirement and freel y passed its final to the following element in close groups, so that such junctures generally show greater assimilation and coalescence. Ro-ch·fintar is thus the regular reflex of Pre-Ir. '[rok win.de.tor] (the V was later reformed; see GOI §552). One must say 'Pre-Irish' or 'Proto-Gallo-Brittonic/Goidelic', rather than, 'Proto-Celtic' or 'Common Celtic', because Lepontic and Celtiberian did not participate in *_kwe > *-k.

Ir. ro-ch, etc., as opposed to **ro-c(c) or **ro-, etc., + gemination/nonlenition of V implies that the proto-language still had accented preverbs and enclitic verbs when *_kwe > *-k occurred. This information can be deduced independently from the fact that Gallo-Brittonic and Irish share the striking and peculiar innovation *nak < *ne*-kwe but have independently diverged from the Proto-Celtic « IE) position of the accent.

'Synprociisis'

§19. In Neo-Brittonic pretonic phrases comprising two elements, two treatments occur: (i) the second element infixes into the first and the former effects of enclitic stress are evident; e.g. kan am coffawys (historically kanam'coffawys 'since he remembered me' reflecting a Proto-Celt. form like '[kan.ui. m.med ko.me(n).ha.geest], ery-th'uacce; 'nourished thee' (CA

158 JOHNT. KOCH

1149[B]) < '[a.ri !.tu ma .k-]; (ii) the elements form a chain of syllabic proclitics showing no effects of former enclitic stress (i.e. gemination or apocope in the second element); e.g. W gan fy mod 'since I am' < 'with my being' < '[kan.ta man bu.t-], C er..the-byn 'against thee' < '[a.ri to(u) kwen.nuu]. It is treatment (ii) for which the shorthand 'synproclisis' is coined. Welsh and Cornish are strongly consistent in showing only treatment (i), infixation in the narrow sense, before finite Vs.1s This continues the pattern oflndo-European main-clauses whereby the accent fell upon the PVB in such combinations. Treatment (ii) is usual with following non-finite forms (the infixed forms, -m, -th, etc. , employed with the high frequency MW 0 and y [ < OW di] are exceptional and probably an archaism). Such treatment in these instances correlates with the fact that the following non-finite form had always had an accent in Indo-European, and that it was this accent which came to be the predominant one of the phrase (even if the preposition had had its own in the first place).

In Middle and Modern Breton, however, certain personal prons. take treatment (ii) ahead of finite Vs. Thus, whereas Breton has ra-m and ra-z, agreeing with C ru-m, re-th, MW ry-m, ry-th, Olr. ro-m(m), ro-t , it shows roo and roe (3 pI. and sg. fern . respectively) in contrast to C re-s, MW ry-s, and Olr. ro-s. The Irish and Welsh/Cornish forms reflect '[r6 s.sin], '[r6 s.sos] with enclitic stress, the B 'fro sin] and 'fro sos] without it. Breton he and ho have remained syllabic and do not show the reflex of geminate initials. Unlike WC -s, which are followed by the radical , he, ho are followed by spirantization < British gemination, indicating that the proto-forms of the B leaned forward onto the next word in proclisis, thus favouring coalescence at that juncture, rather than leaning away from the following in enclisis.

OB ni-s guilom-ni 'we see it not' (DGVB 301; GRVB 262; v. Mod. noe gwelomp-ni) and MB feminine -s used with the reflexive (e.g. hac ez s-em gouarnissas 'and she protected herself (HMSB §53.4 note)) are traces of the form found in the other languages.

It would be easier to explain these B data if we had full evidence for the Old Breton pron . system. As it stands two explanations suggest themselves: (i) that Breton has at a relatively late date substituted proclitic gen. prons. for enclitic (i.e. infixed) acc. ones (cf. SE Glamorgan dialect, note 18 above); (ii ) that ho, he, etc., are the debris of old patterns of which all trace has been lost by the other Neo-Celtic languages. A few points argue against possibility (i). The non-etymological h- of gen. he and (h)o must be explained as contamination by proclitic ace. he, ho < ·sin, *sos. Breton also shows a completely parallel development in synproclitic a zo < OB isio v. MW yssyd,

18 Dr Ceinwen H. Thomas ofCardifr kindly informs me that there are SE G lamorgan dialects in which ' I will sec you' is normally sa id Ii dy wela' di , with a syllabic proclitic pmn. showing initial lenition. This contrasts wi th the more usual fe'th wela' i di (hea rd by the writer at Machynlleth. Powys) with its non-syllabic spirantizcd pron. I know of no ea rly exx of the SE Glamorgan type, so it is most likcly that the acc. series has been replaced by thc gen . at a fairly late date.


OW issid with its suffixed reI. ptc. The latter presupposes Brit. '[e's.'s; j.joj with enclitic stress, the former '[e's.'si [oj without it. In this case, the Old Celtic origins of the Breton combination cannot be doubted because the reI. pron. {j)o occurs nowhere else in the language from which it might have influenced the reI. copula. Since Breton has gone farthest of the Neo-Celtic languages in extending historically relative sentence types to non-reI. function, it is possible that the constructions in question reflect old subordinate clause patterns. V would have originally been tonic in these which could have led to the pron. being treated as a proclitic on V rather than an enclitic upon the preceding element.

He, ho occur also in B SUBJ. + PRON. + V orders: e.g. B Iud he c'bar 'people love her', contrast with C luz as car, MW Iud a'y car. The speech pattern underlying Breton seems to have stereotyped proditic *sin, ·sos, etc., + accented V. In Weish and Cornish the pron. became a proclitic by a fresh segmentation and analysis after apocope. So, while the Breton continues Brit. '[Tou.ta sin ka .nltj, the Cornish reHects '(Tou.ti s.sin ... j. The syllabifying ptc. a is historically the final syllable of the N subj. The Middle Welsh equivalent continues the British masc. sg. pron. 'en .

B. THE ABSOLUTE AND CONJUNCT VERBAL ENDINGS

§20. Since Osborn Bergin identified the construction which today bears his name, I' we have understood the distribution of abs. and cjt endings at the earliest documented stage of Old Irish: the abs. endings occur in simplex verbs in S-initial position; cjt forms occur in all other positions. It can be seen from the evidence of Vedic Sansk rit tha t tonic and atonic verbs had had precisely this same distribution in Indo-European main clauses: the S-initial simplex V was accented; V in all other positions was unaccented. The obvious implication of this correspondence is that the Neo-Celtic abs. V forms as a class continue the Indo-European tonic simplex verbs and the cjt continue the enclitic forms, or to state it as a formal proportion~IE #V .. . # : # ... V( ... )# > Neo-Ceit. #V·b' ... # : # ... V'j'( ... ).

Though this explanation has never been presen ted before, nor the distributional correspondence, to my knowledge, even been pointed out, the derivation afforded is quite straightforward. It does not require, as various earlier theories have, distortion of the standard reconstruction of IndoEuropean or multiplication of hypothetical word-order recombinations in prehistoric Celtic. Certain earlier proposals in the latter category have lacked not only independent Celtic evidence to corroborate them, but have also had no parallel morphosyntactic developments in any attested language adduced (or adducible, I fear) in their favour. 2o The present prosodic theory gets us to our destination- which is to say from Indo-European to Early Neo-Ceitic-

19'On the syntax of the verb in Old Irish ', Eriu xii (1938) 197- 2 14. 20 See appendix for specific criticisms.

160 JOHNT. KOCH

along a considerably less tortuous path than those down which we have been led by other authorities, and takes us by way of reconstructed protolanguages that do not grossly disresemble attested Old Indo-European languages in general and Continental Celtic specifically.

Excursus General typological parallels to the historical developments proposed here are so

readily forthcoming that it is preferable not to clutter the main text of the argument with them. It is very common in the languages of the world for opposed syntagmata to contain accented and unaccented [onns of the same word. In the context of a stress accent, these variants often come to be realized with different segmental phonology, so that the unstressed by-form will show vowel reductions, syllable losses, consonant weakenings, etc. , and low-frequency stressed forms can show unusual and apparently irregular lengthenings and strengthenings; e.g., in spoken Welsh, the phrase os oeddet ti is often realized as [6s ;)ui); while in other contexts where the V is fu lly stressed, like the responsive, one hea rs [6:t], [60etl, [6jOi:t]. Similarly, in spoken English, one hears, as a response to the question is it? affirmative it is, never it's; yet in everyday speech, neg. it 's 110 1 more commonly than not replaces careful and formal il is 1101 . There is nothing very remarkable or inscrutable about such effects insofar as they are completely congruent with synchronic accentual patterns. If, on the other hand, the languages were some day to reach a stage where is and [6j3et] never appeared in the unstressed position, even in the most careful speech, then one could legi timately rega rd these words as having split into positional variants. Something of the sort has in fact occurred in substandard American English: thus, from neutral syntagmata like / have v. / should've, some speakers will extract emphat ic versions / have v. / should of Stressed and unstressed by·forms have split into two words for them.

Quite a lot of this went on in ea rly Celtic, e.g. air. ba v. boi < *[bo.we) v. *[b6.we]; cach, gach v. cach; MW pob v. pawb < *[kWaa.kwo·] v. *[kWaa.kwo·); tros, dros v. traws; rae v. yrhawc; B rak v. araok; OW is v. ois. In the last two examples, we have phonological intensification of the stressed form rather than shortening of the proclitic.

Such small beginnings have led to the creation of en tire unhistorica l paradigms by analogy; e.g., Celtic inherited from Indo·European another category of words which were tonic or atonic depending on position and syntactic func tion, namely the personal prons. The doublets MW dy, teu, aIr. do, tai « *1Oi) reflect respectively unaccented and accented positional variants of the I E gen. sg. pron. *,ewe or * lowe; see GO / §446. The corresponding accen ted I sg. form , MW meu, OIr. moi, mui, derives not from an accented form of IE *mome or *meme, but from analogy appl ied to the Old Celtic proportion *to : lowe = *mo(lI): X (on W myn in oaths, see§17). Middle Welsh proclitic y ' his' v. stressed eidaw reflects the atonic a nd ton ic forms of the IE 3 sg. masc. gen. *esjo. Already in Middle Welsh eidaw had become the analogical basis for the stressed gen. pronouns 3 sg. fern. eidi and 3 pI. eidu, later eidunt, in which the endings were supplied on the pattern of the conj ugated prepositions. In Modern Welsh, the process has gone further, so that all seven personal forms are built on eiddo, with mau and tau relegated to biblical and poetic language:

Sg. I eiddof 2 eiddot 3 eiddo

eiddi

PI. eiddom eiddoch eiddynt

MW eidaw, Mod. eiddo, itself is difficult to derive as a phonologically regular outcome of *esjo. in so far as its Indo·European final syllable appears to have


survived. It is seen therefore that a tonic word which surrenders its accent in certain syntactic situations may evolve according to sound laws that differ somewhat from those applying to tonic words that are nevcr clitics. This effect is easy enough to understand. The function of contrastive accent differs from that of simple word accent. In the former instance, but not the latter, there is motivation to maximalize the accent and its secondary effects. Note also that with the W stressed and proclitic gen. prons. it is the latter, MW fyN, dyL, yL, yS, 3pl. yR, euR, which have higtier frequency and derive more regularly from the proto-forms. All have survived into Modern Welsh and are reconstructabJe as Common Briltonic, even Common Celtic. In the Middle Welsh stressed series, only teu is altogether regular. and it has since become moribund. On this analogy. we expect that it would be the low-frequency abs. « IE tonic) verbs which had been more subject to analogical overcharacterization and specialized phonological development (like MW eidaw).

Regularizations of the Indo-European word accent

§2 I. As shown above, one of the key developments in the transfonnation of the original Indo-European prosodic system into that of Celtic was that enclitics shifted from a passive to a dynamic accentual role. Originally, the first syllable of an enclitic had either sva rita or anudatta accentuation depending on whether the preceding word was an oxytorie or not. Later, in the dialect leading to Celtic, the first syllable of an enclitic immediately following a tonic word (as opposed to the second enclitic in a chain) always had a svarita (or its Proto-Celtic reflex). Consequently, the preceding word was always treated as an oxytone (i.e. given final udatta) whether this was its underlying and original accentuation or not.

This innovation is readily understandable as part of a regularization of accentual sandhi patterns, whereby one variant of a word (as this occurred in a given morphosyntactic function) became general. Given such a tendencythe elTects of which are also quite pronounced in Early Greek (on which see Allen, Accellt and rhy thm 244 et passim)- inherited fluctuations of the sort 'sons (svarita) in # 'pro sons ... # v. 'sons (anudatta) in # 'bilereti sons . .. # had been anomalous in the original system.

Looking more broadly at sentential prosody, it is seen that regularization of the accent of enclitics could only have been at the expense of new complications elsewhere unless this regularization had come as part of a more general rearrangement; e.g. , original # *bhereti sons ... #, pitch contour r: \ :_:_ ... j, became # 'bilereti sons .. . # {_ . _ :-:\ ... j or # 'bhereti SOliS . •• # r: \ : -: \ ... j. Potentially, such a development could have led to the accentual bifurcation of the marked S-initial simplex V, so that original # *bhereti sons . .. # 'he carries those' v. # *bhereti wlrims . .. # 'he carries the men', both with invariable # 'bilereti ... #, would have given # *bhereti sons . .. # or # *bhereti sons . .. # v. # *bhereti wlrons . .. #, with constrasting tonic forms. Since simplification of sandhi variation had motivated this change-as so many changes in the Indo-European daughterlanguages-in the first place, it does not seem likely that the system would ever have shifted itself in this direction.

162 JOHNTKOCH

The shape of the abs. verbal endings of Old Irish indicate that what actually happened was that oxytone accentuation became general for Sinitial simplex verbs, even in syntagmata where no enclitic was present. Sinitial preverbs and other particles which commonly supported Wackernagel's enclitics probably underwent this change as well (though nouns- as tonic words for which Ihere had been no inherited principle of accent change according to position- would have tended to resist such a generalization and only taken on enclitic accentuation when an actual enclitic was there to induce it). So, alongside # 'bhereli sons ... # { _ : _ :- :\ ... } or # 'bhheli sons . .. # C: \ :-: \ ... }, there came to be # 'bhereli WP IV/rims . . . # or # 'bhereli WP IV/rons . .. # (WP standing here for a vacant Wackernagel's position). In such a way, both 'sons {\ } and marked S-initial 'bilereli {- :- :1 or bhheli r: \ :1 became fixed. One may think in terms of a columnar accent in the fore part of S at this stage and going into the succeeding stage (when intensive accent came to predominate) as illustrated below.2I

Indo-European # 'pro{ so)ns . .. # # *blzereli SOliS . . . # # *bhereli wIrons . . . # ·~,bhi sims . . . # # ·pari kaneti . . . # # ·pari sons . . . #

> > # > > >

Pre-Celtic # ·prb sims ... # >

# *bhereti sims . . . # > # *bhereli ItIlrolls .. . # 2 2

# • '!lbhi sons . .. # > # ·pari kiIneli . . . # > # ·pari sims . .. # >

Developments common to British and Proto-Irish

Proto-Celtic *[r6 S.SO'5]

*{be.re.ti s.so's] *[be.re.tih Wi.ro<)ls]22

*[rp. .bi 5.50 I S]

*[a.ri k.ka.nc.ti] *[a.ri 5.So'S]

§22. The paradigmatic abs. and cj t alternation is well illustrated by Archaic Welsh proverbs of the famous type Iricid gur wrth ei barch, oi Ihrig wrth ei gyvarwys ('man lives by his respect, he lives not by his wages' (M A 859); see GMW §129.d.1 for further examples), presupposing a Brit. formation like

21 I again leave o pen the question as to whether the new pre--cncJitic udatta was a secondary accent or altogether superseded the old free accent in such contexts. In the following reconstructions, only the word-final udatta will be marked, understanding that this was possibly a secondary accent.

22 In the absence of enclitics, the svarita may have fallcn across the fi rst syllabic of the following to nic word- if this syllabic was unacccnted-or have fa llen silently across the vacant WP, or have been inco rporated into the udatta as a fina l down-turn . In many tonal1anguages, an accentable unit (comprising a tonic word and whatever enclitics and proclitics it might support) tends to be acccntually a utonomous, which would favour the latter two possibilities; cf. the discussion of the Gk grave accent in Allen , Accent and rhy thm 244fT. The trend towards regularization of accentual sandhi va riation and that towards word-group autonomy are of course aspects of the same phenomenon. In the evolution from I E towards Celt .• the main trend was certainly towards autonomy. In the latcr stress-accent system, the principle of autonomy would lead us to expect that a stressed word would be less prone than an cnclitic to be incorporated in any way into the stress matrix of another word . Accordingly, abs. verbs in Early W neither spiranlize nor lenite following accentual units, e.g. gellit pob defoyd (HGC XXIV.58). This pattern suggests that in such syntagmata Proto-Celt. -i had perhaps completed its stress matrix with a breath glide [-hI or glottal stop [-1) followed by a brief inter-word pause, thus ·[GaUii.tih Paa.pos . .. I.


*tiiciti wiros . .. ; ne-Ilrlcif . .. [Trii.kLti Wi.ros .. ; Ne t.trii.kit ... J < ProtoCelt. *trlciti wiros ... ; ne tricitl ... [triiki .ti w.wi .ros .. ; ne t.lrii .ki.ti .. ]; cf. OIr. beirid, oi'heir < Pr.Ir. *bereti, *berel < Proto-Celt. *bereli, *bereli < IE "birereti, "bilereti. The apocope of the final short -i of the Indo-European primary ending in the non-initial unaccented verb forms was the key development in the translation of the original opposition into Neo-Celti"c abs. and cjt. This early apocope was first proposed by Cowgill as a fairly isolated development (,Origins of the insular Celt. cjt. & abs. verbal endings', 56-7) and was thence taken up by McCone who regards it as having the character of a general sound law (Eriu xxx 28fI).23 It is most recently a key facet of Sims-Williams's theories (TPS (1984) 140, 150fI). While it is perhaps not specifically conditioned by enclisis, Old Celtic atonic words underwent closely comparable developments, e.g. Gaul., Brit. and Pr.lr. -k < IE "_kWe in Gaul. eti-c, e88i-c, Neo-Britt . / nag / , aIr. na, nacho, etc. Final short -e was likewise lost in the preforms of proclitic Gaul. to, aIr. OB do, OW di, etc., < *towe or *tewe, Gaul. mOD, OW miN, OB moS, Vannetais meN, MW myn in oaths, etc., < *mome or *meme. In Gaul. Armorica, Proto-Celt. proclitic *ari was first reduced to are, then to ar. Naturally, final-i in an ~- initial simplex V could not undergo reduction or loss at the stage thaI it was still under the Proto-Celtic accent. The final -; is seen in the one apparent example of Gaulish S-initial simplex 3 sg. V not followed by any enclitic sioxti Albanos . .. . 24 The accent had shifted off this -; by the era of Irish and Brittonic apocope and therefore the syllable did not survive into Neo-Celtic.

Once non-initial verbs had lost primary -i, what had o riginally been a mark of the present tenses ceased to be such, turning to an auxiliary sign of the stylistically marked S-initial simplex V. As recognized in the treatments of McCone and Sims-Williams, old apocope opened the door to the analogical spread of final -i to desinences which had not had it in Indo-European, e.g. air. abs. bermai < Pr.lr. "beromos-i and Neo-Celt. preterites « IE aorists) like air. carais < Pr.!r. "caraOOi, Archaic W keressyt < "caraOOiti, eithyt < 'axtiti [ax"l.lLti]. Once this analogical -i had spread extensively through the abs. system, the forces favouring mechanical stress placement which had been building in Celtic were free to level accentual differences which had distinguished stylistically marked initial simplex from unmarked final and internal verbs without overturning the principle of phonological differentiation. When both initial and non-initial verbs were stressed and stressed according to the same rules, it was in many instances the abs. -i « IE

2l Old apocope of primary -; was probably not a CC innovalion. as indicated by !he Ctb. compound V forms from BOlorrita , uersoniTi, amBiTiseTi, and roBiseTi: see Cowgill . Eriu ;t;tvi 27ff; Tovar and Beltran. BronCi' de Botorrita (Zaragoza 1982) 82. Unless -Ti is a grapheme for [-I] here-which does nOI seem likely. as it appears impervious to harmony with the preceding vowel- this apocope belongs to the dialect group Goidelic/GaII.Brit!. and ch ronologically after the earliest Celtic migrations of the Hallstatt period.

24 Graffito from La Graufesenque: see Thurneysen, ZCP ;tvi (1927) 30 1- 3: H. Lewis. The senlence itl Welsh (1942) 5; J. Whatmough. The dialects of ancient Galli (Cambridge. Mass. 1970) no . 114; Meid. /dg. Grrmdlagen 79-80.

164 JOHNT. KOCH

primary) alone which carried on the phonological distinction. The important point is that the special form for S-initial V was still a functioning morphosyntactic principle when the accent was being drastically redistributed in late antiquity.

§23. The use of simplex verb forms identical to the cjt (e.g. heir) in the stressed Old Irish responsive may be explained within the framework of the present theory- as Calvert Watkins has kindly pointed out to me-<>n the assumption that IE # 'bhereti ( .. . ) # , etc., in such syntagmata never developed the final accent discussed above. Their failure to do so is easily understood insofar as the new accent had originated as an effect of following enclitics. The responsive is characterized by the absence of enclitics and had presumably always been so. Accordingly, one reconstructs a contrast in Proto-Celtic between declarative # 'bereti (. .. ) # , etc. , v. # 'bereti ( ... ) # , etc" as echo-fashion affirmative responses to direct questions.

Developments peculiar to Irish

§24. (a) The mechanical stress patterns of the Insular Celtic languages did not replace the older system overnight. They were undoubtedly at first mere tendencies and affected only words with unmarked accentuation (which is to say accentuation of a common sort, lacking special morphosyntactic significance). Words with marked accent- like stressed prons. and S-initial simplex verbs- resisted the new pattern until secondary changes in segmental phonology arose whereby these forms became distinctive otherwise; e.g. at one stage in Proto-Irish the dat. of the word for 'man' (Proto-Celt. '[wiroo]}-for which there was no paradigmatic contrast with a clitic or alternatively stressed variant- became *[Wi.ruu] in accordance with the new pattern. But at the same time S-ioitial *[Be.ruu] remained, because it contrasted with unmarked internal '[be.ruu] and perhaps also '[be.ruu] (internally in subordinate clauses) at this point. At a subsequent stage the words in question had become '[WLru], '[Bi.ruu], '[bLru], and '[bi.ru]; unaccented long vowels had been shortened, but accented u remained long in the second ex. just as in '[Kuu] 'dog' . The S-initial V was now distinguished from the internal form by both accent and vowel length; so the marked accent--which was by now quite anomalous from the point of view of general speech habits-had become dispensible. Speakers following a more innovative pattern could now use '[Bi.ruu] to contrast with '[bLru]. With the next wave of reductions in final syllables, long u was shortened and short u lost giving u-epenthesis in the preceding syllable, thus the OIr. forms biru, ·biur.

(b) The patterns of Irish syncope show that words of four or more Primitive Irish syllables had an additional stress on the third syllable and that words of six or more syllables had yet another stress on the fifth. These


stresses are usually thought of as secondary, but it is by no means certain that they had been so originally.

One of the most striking features of Old Irish sentential syntax- namely that Wackernagel's enelitics can attach only to verbs, PVBs, and 'cj t particles'-can be understood as having arisen in Primitive Irish as a consequence of the accentual system. Old Celt ic had had the sentence type # Subj.-E( .. . )V( . . . ) # as had Indo-European. We find it, e.g., in Olat. DVENOS MED FECED EN MANOM ' Bonus me fecit in bonum', OE AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN 'Alfred had me made' , and Gaul. BUSCILLA SOSIO lEGASIT IN ALlXlE MAGAlU ' B. placed this in A. for M.'." A(i) as a non-reI. preverbal ptc. standing directly between subj. and V had not existed in the earliest Neo-Brittonic. 26 Thus, examples like OW gur dicones remedaultl elbid I an'guorit an-guoraut ' he who made the wonder of the world will save us, did save us' (Juvencus Englynion) do not have ptc. a + non-syllabic pron. -n, but synchronically a syllabic elitic pron. an (which historically happens to be the initial of the Old Celtic eli tic pron . plus the lost final syllable of the preceding word).27 We think , therefore, in terms of Brit. syntagmata like ·wiros-nis .vo-ratit or *touta sin carat. Though McCone believes that the restriclion of Wackernagel 's enelitics to the verbal complex was an innovation of'lnsular Celtic' (Eriu xxx 13f.; he gives no reason for the development), such examples are much more easily taken thus as direct survivals of the Gallo-Brittonic and ultimately the Indo-European type, rather than the results of some Brittonic innovation . The total absence of any trace in Old Irish of sentences like **rer ann·ro-raith or **tiJath as'cara is,

B Fourth-century Old Latin insc., see A. Ernoult. Recueil de lexles Jalin archaiques (2nd edn, Paris 1957) 7- 9; Old English 'Alfred Jewel" inse. ; Gaulish inse. from seraucourt, see Whatmough no. 144; Mcid , Idg. Grundlagen 84-5; Koch, 'The sentence in Gaulish ' , Proceeding.f o/ Ihe Han-artl Cellic Colloquium iii ( 1983) 173-4, 202.

26 See H. Lewis (1942) 18- 19; M. Richards, Cystrawen y Frawddeg Gymraeg (Caerdydd 1970) §144; Koch, Harvard Celtic Colloquium iii 173-5 (where I give an etymology of the pte . which I have since abandoned).

2 7 T. Arwyn Watkins discusses an'guorit, an'guoraut in his recent re-examination of the Juvcncus Englynion (Bardos: Penodau lIr y traddodiad barddol Cymreig a Chellaidd. eyJiwynedig i J . E. Caerwyn Williams, ed . R. Geraint Gruffydd (Caerdydd 1982) 43). It is his view that **gUO-P'rit, **gUO-O'raut were barred in the ninth century by the position of the accent at that time. Professor Watkins believes that W had already developed penultimate stress by that time; "The accent in Old Welsh- its quality and development', BBCS xxv (1972) Iff: 'The accent shift in Old Welsh' , in Indo-Celliea, Gediichtsschrift fur Alf Sommer/ell , ed. H. Pilch and J. Thurow (Munich 1972) 201ff. Jackson, on the o ther hand , believes that the accent did not shift from the ultima to penu lt till later in the OW period , i.e. the eleventh century; LHEB 265- 70,300-1 and note I; 'The date of the Old Welsh accent shift', SC x/xi (1975- 6) 40-53. Of course it would be a point in favour of Watkins's case if he could deduce a morphosyntactic rule as reflecting penultimate stress in the ninth century. However, it seems that there is no such syllable-counting restriction on the placement of infixes in early W: e.g. dy-m'ryt 'gives me' (LIHen 280.9), dy-s·twc ·he brings them' (CT/PT 1.17). infixed forms of the verbs dyrydd and dyddwg, both of which came to have penultimate stress.

Therefore. the explanation offered here fo r the Juvencus exx- that the order #SU BJ . + PRON. + PVB+ V .. . # had survived continuously from IE to Early W----seems preferable. It should also be noted that the PVB guo-. g(w)o-, gwa- is never found supporting an infix in OW or Hengerdd no matter how many syllables follow. It lost that ability before the crystallization of ou r oldest surviving texts; thus we find dy-m'gwares (BT 41.2), ry-m'gwares (BT 3. 12- 13) ' may he deliver me', never **g(w)o-m·res.

166 JOHNT. KOCH

Iherefore, all the more remarkable and late-looking. When we look at Liam Breatnach'scollection of Old Irish suffixed prons. (Celrica xii 75-107) we see that the overwhelming majority comprise forms which had had four syllables in Primitive Irish, a three syllable V + monosyllabic pron., e.g. beirthius < ·bereli-ssus. This had been a large and influential class in Primitive Irish including most 3 sg. present verbs and most 3 sg. s-preterites (once these had received primary -i in abs. position), e.g. gabsus 'seized them' < ' gabaOOissus. In such four-syllable combinations of stressed word plus enclitic, the new stress placement rule was wholly consonant with the Proto-Celtic rule whereby an enclitic automatically threw an accent back onto the final syllable of a tonic word. In Proto-Celtic, a combination like ·[be.roo so's] ' I carry them' was perfectly regular; word-final stress was permissible generally and was the fixed pattern for S-initial verbs. But Primitive Irish initial word stress ran counter to enclitic accentuation in such combinations. Most stress-accent languages cannot tolerate two adjacent stresses within a single word or close group; 'ber{,-sslls was thus not a possibi lity. The combination could either have relinquished its enclitic stress or resisted the new initial stress. What in fact happened was that ·ber~-ssus was replaced by *nu-ssus beru ( > nos·biur). In a three-syllable combination like 'ari-llu ( > Olr. ara-t·, Archaic W ery-th') or 'eOOi-mmii ( > OIr. issum, Archaic W yssym), the problem never arose; the disyllables were proclitics which never developed Ir. initial stress anyway_

That small group of Old Irish suffixed pron. form s which seem to go back to trisyllabic Proto-Irish preforms are likely to be analogical creations of the post-syncope period. It was syncope that consolidated primary stress on the initial and levelled the pattern of secondary stresses; e.g., OIr. beirthius, just like beirid, was a simple disyllable in which the first syllable was stressed and the second was not. Synchronically, the former was understood as stem beirth- + pron. -us. A form like I-pret. bertus could easily have been generated then on the model of the suffixed presents and s-preterites. As Liam Breatnach points out to me, a form like Olr. baTthium ' I had' (lit. ' there was to me') is unhistorica l, remade on the model of syncopated Proto-Irish four-syllable combinations ending in primary *-li + pron . The direct reflex of Pr.Ir. *boue + *mii has not come down to us.

Whereas the predominant and highest-frequency class of Primitive Irish abs. verbs were trisyllables, the most common noun forms, particularly in their nom. sg., were disyllables. Pr.Ir. "[Wi.ros tu ka .raat] was as much an accentual impossibility as ·'[Be.rull tu]. The language simply gave up the suffixing of Wackernagel's enclitics to nouns.

Penultimate stress and syllable loss in British

§25. The Brittonic mechan ical stress worked from the rear of the word and applied rigidly so that the addition of a suffix always displaced it: e.g. MW


daw(1) < 'damas, pI. dofion < *damjOnes28 Within the context of such an emerging pattern, there was at first no push to modify the inherited ProtoCeltic treatment of tonic word plus monosyllabic enclitic, insofar as such accentable units already had penultimate stress; thus, Brit. *wiros caral toutan , alongside *wiros tu caral; cf. Lat. que. 29

It is important to recognize that an S like lIaw ath'dyrr 'a hand breaks thee' < Brit. '[Laa.maa.tu tor.riit] has always comprised three separate words. Therefore '[Laa.maa.tu] does not give **lIorawt as though it were a single word. Basic isolate form s of the words have at all periods acted as a check on the evolution of the sandhi variants. In Late British, the basic form for 'hand' was the isolate *[L60.va] with penultimate stress and a reduced final vowel; similarly, *[Wu.roh] for 'man'.'o Through the British and Late British periods, unstressed final syllables had become more and more reduced and indistinct; see LH E8 § 151. When a vowel which is usually unstressed and reduced comes to be stressed in special syntactic combinations, the resulting vowel quality is often not the same as if it had always been stressed throughout its history; e.g., the stressed versions of English a and an do not reveal their common origin with one; W rhy (NW [rhil] SW [rhii]) 'too' is a stressed version of a proclitic, but in the impv. rhodd ihe same prep. has always been under the stress and preserves its original vowel quality. Similarly, a Late British reduced vowel when stressed before an enclitic had only two values, [a] > WB a and [i] > W y, B e. Our type sentence was thus at this stage *[Lo:viitt, dorrid].

At the time of apocope, Brittonic was moving strongly in the direction of an isolating analytical language. Immediately after syllable loss, our type S had become '[Lo:viiO dorr], contrasting with a noun-obj. counterpart '[Lo:v torr Galan]. At this point, a natural reanalysis took place: *[-liO] was resegmented as a syllabic pron. In keeping with the language's leading patterns applying to pronominal objects standing ahead of their governing category, Oath tended to be treated thenceforth as a proclitic upon V rather than an enclitic upon N. *[Lo:v], now isolated from the pron., was treated like all other occurrences of the same word, i.e. stressed. As we can see from LH E8, the position of the stress did not cause any pretonic reductions (apart from those in some proclitics) until after syncope and apocope. Consequently, Middle Welsh does not precede obj. prons. with pretonic forms of nouns:

211 This pl. ending is not original with this N and may not go back to the period prior to the reduction or vowels in final syllables.

29 On.~e V standing in interna l positi,o," had become accented (e.g. ·[Ro k.kat.wii's .'sitJ < ·lro k,kaLwlIstJ), the old pattern of enclitic stress had become totally consonant with the new pattern of penultimate stress. as all the remaining enclitics were monosyllables.

30 That a can reflect an unaccented 0 which was reduced in Brit. but survives into Nco-Britt. is shown by OW forms like Tutagual < *lowoli'a/os and Du'!!nagual < *dumnowa/os in the northern genealogies of Harl. 3859 and Urbagen < · ourbogenos in H B (ed. Mommsen 119); see LHEB§194 for further exx. The marked A + N combinations of the type da 0 was < da a was represent, I believe, direct survivals of the emphatic use of the old compounding pattern seen in Gaul. Dagouassus. See GMW§39.c for MW cu.

168 JOHNT. KOCH

e.g. naw a!b·dyrr, not » nor-ath dyrr. The complete isolation of these new syllabic prons. is shown a lready in the Archaic litera ry language by the fact that ath, as, etc. can stand at the head of its clause" or in tmesis from its preceding N or pYB. 32

The function of absolute verb forms

§26. It has been assumed here that the category of abs. verbs had a morphosyntactic function and tha t this was more or less the same function as Indo-European tonic verbs had had in the first place. Heretofore, scholars have paid little attention to the possible role of the opposition wi thin the early literary languages. 33 However, even a cursory examination of the Old Irish evidence shows that the distribution of the abs. /cjt phenomenon was such as to be appropriate to a synchronically functioning morphosyntactic fea ture and not to the debris of some long-defunct principle. When we conceive of the early Neo-Celtic languages as st reams of sounds rather than edited texts, it must be conceded that the special positional form of Y carried information which was useful in the disambiguation of utterances; e.g. , in tricid gur wrth ei barch; ni thrig wrth ei gyvarwys, tricid confirmed to the listener that he was hearing the beginning of the sentence, that he had missed nothing ahead ofY. T(h)rig, on the other hand, confirmed the presence of the preceding ny to the listener who had heard it and a lerted the listener who had not to the fact he had missed something. Tricid v. **ni thrigid or **tric v. oi !brig would have been less maximally differentiated and therefore not as easily construed. It is this utility which explains why abs. and cjt persisted vigorously into Middle Irish, the works of the Gogynfeirdd, and to this day in the Scots Gaelic future « aIr. pres.) tense, and why it spread to simplified compound verbs, e.g. Archaic W cysgogit (CA 387[A]), MIr. reilgid. As a functional morphosyntactic feature, the abs. ending may be analysed as an agreement marker which reconfirms the initia l position of V in a word-order sensitive language. Of course, such reinforcements for the position of the S-

3 1 E.g., ys deupo car kyrd kY"OOI I y ~'Iat nef 'may the friend of poetry gain appoi ntment in the land of heaven' (proleptic pron.: CA 33 1 (A)); ys gwyr Talyessin 'T. knows it' (54 1 (A)); ys deupo gwaeanat gwerth na.,!hechul 'mayest thou get the land of revelat ion beca use thou d idst nOI fl ee' (225[A)); alh ulHli gwas nym gwerth na thechut 'mayesl lho u have heaven's land .,.' (233(8]); an rothwy y-Trindawl trugared dyd"brawt "may the Trinity give us mercy on judgement day' (BT 36.20-1); alh ueodicco-de egluis a chagell 'may church a nd chancel bless Thee' (HGC 1.2); ath uolaf, uaur ri ' I praise Thee, grea l king' (11.4); an duch i'r gulet 'may He lead us to the feast' (111 .9); an gonel iecbid 'may He make salvation for us' (HI .II; co ntrast 1II .8 guledic deduit an gunel in rit 'may the blessed Lord make us free' [IrI.8]); as am!!Odwy Duw y dewr orchordon 'may God protect his bold hosts' (Molianl Cadll'ollon 14; pro leptic pron .); ~'s attebwys Q"'ein dwyrein «ossawt '0 .. scourge of the East, answered this:' (CTI PT V1.9; proleptic pron.). The o rder is found also in C: e.g. ys gruk haual. ". thotho 'he made them like him" (OrdinaJia 2830): see H. Lewis, UUI""ly/r Cernyll'eg Canol §46.

II E.g .• gwyr Argoet eiryoel am portbes ' the men of A. always supported me' (CUH H IC) . JJ Of late, a tendency has a risen to positively deny any such functional role. Warren Cowgill,

though not unique in these views, has been most vocal. terming abs. a nd cjt ' a useless morphologic complication' and of no 'communicative function' ('Origins of the insular Celtic cjt. a nd abs. verbal endings', 41 - 2).


boundary were redundant, but languages do commonly multiply redundant agreement markers, such as gender, case inflexion in addition to stereotyped word order, pI. dependent adjectives, concord of V and expressed subj., etc. Such quasi-universals are at least partly explicable by the fact that utterances are often not perfectly spoken or heard. No language known to me comes close to a theorist's ideal of maximum economy. Our species may not be innately suited to extremes of compact expression.

Earlier word-order patterns and absolute verbs

§27. It is clear that at the early literary period the predominance of the VSO pattern in Old Irish and Old Welsh prose was, relatively speaking, a recent occurrence. In Continental Celtic, VSO examples are rare to non-existent. As reflected in its remains, the favourite order of Gaulish was V-medial, specifically V-second. In the Cynfeirdd poetry, V-medial and -final orders comprise a sizeable proportion of the total. Sentences with abs. initial verbs-like the gripping seinnyessyt e gledyf ym penn mameu ' his sword resounded in the heads of mothers' (CA 325[A]) or heessit waywawr y glyw 'that chieftain sewed (i.e. scattered) spears' (320[A]}-are sufficiently infrequent to be regarded as sti ll carrying special emotive force. In Old Breton prose, V-medial sentences are quite prevalent and are the norm in later Cornish and Breton. A case can be made out, as I hope to do in a publication in the near future, for the premise that British had been a V-second language- with patterns much like those directly observable in Gaulish.

With regard to Archaic Irish, Indo-Europeanists have naturally given most attention to the V-final examples of ' Bergin's Law' and tmesis- for which comparanda in, e.g. , Hittite and Vedic are ready to hand- thus downplaying the significance of the well-attested V-medial subtypes of both constructions (cf. the remarks of Greene, SC vi 8- 9). In 'Aspects of archaic Irish' (Eigse xvii (4) 430- 1), James Carney has forcefully criticized the formulation in GOI §5 13 (,Simple and compound verbs may be placed at the end of their clause; the former then have conjunct flexion ... the latter proto tonic forms') as a 'drastic revision ' (and an inaccurate one) of Bergin's principle originally set forth in Eriu xii : 'When a verb does not stand at the head of its clause, particularly when it follows its subject or object, it takes the dependent form , that is, a simple verb has the conjunct ending and a compound verb is proto tonic. '

Especially in the Leinster genealogical poems (for which priority has been claimed by Meyer and recently by Carney"), V-second 'Bergin's Law' orders

34 These are if!cJ~ded in O'Brie~, C.orpus genealogiar.um Hiberniae (CG H) 1- 72, though not all the poetry therem I ~ or equal antiquity. See Meyer, All. fr . Diehl .; J. Carney, ',Three Old Irish accentual poems', Eriu xxii (1971) 6Sff el passim; 'Aspects o(Archaic Irish', Eigse xvii (1979) 41 7- 35. The first two Ir. exx on thi s page belong to the poems Enna Labraid Iliad eaieh and Moen be" ° ba "oed respectively. Parallels ror some or the unusual constructions or the Cynreirdd can also be round in the roscada or the sagas and laws, Amra ChoJuimb Cllille. etc., but the Leinster poems come closest in both the high proportion or V·medial orders and the subj . matter.

170 JOHNT. KOCH

closely parallel to constructions in Hengerdd (most particularly in CAl and Gaulish inscriptions appea r wi th striking frequency: compare, e.g., Lugaid Luath loise trebthu tren tuath ' L., the Swift, burned the dwellings of strong peoples' (CGH 5; All. ir. Diclll. I 27; Carney, Eigse xvii (4) 432f.); laithe Gaileoin gabsat inna lamaib laigne ' the Galeoin warriors took spears in their hands' (CG H I; All. ir. Dichl. II 10); mac rTg fallnarfor tiiathaib 'the son of a king holds sway over tribes' (CGH 98); and the foll owing examples from Hengerdd : tyrch torrynt toruoed taleu ' boars (i.e. warriors) broke brows of multitudes' (RT 77.4-5); Alexander Magidawn hewys hayarndawn c1edyfal anwogawn 'A lexander of Macedon sewed an iron gift of most glorious sword strokes' (52.20- 1);" Alexander keffei lIawer nifer y wyr 'Alexander was wont to get great numbers of his men' (53. 19-20); Kymry pedeir ieith symudant eU'hareith 'the Cymry of four tongues shall change their speech' (75.5- 6); brein ac eryron gollychant wyar 'crows and eagles esteem gore' (76. 19- 20; or, reading g(w)olchant, ' ... wash in gore'); Eglwysseu Bassa collassant eu breint ' the Churches of Bassa lost their privilege' (CLIH XI.49'); gwr dewr diachar diarhedawg I cyrchai drais tra Thren tir trahawg 'the brave unyielding merciless hero used to attack violently across Tren (haughty land)' (CLIH XIII.2 1-22, Marwnad Cynddylan); beird byt barnant wyr (read gwr?) 0 gaDon ' the bards of the world will judge men of heart' (CA 285[A]); byssed brych briwant barr ' the finge rs of the freckled one smash head(s)' (6 1 I [A]); guir gormant aethant cennin 'excellent men went with us' (439[B]); peleidyr pwys preiglyn (read periglyn) benn periglawr 'heavy spears endangered the chief enda ngerer' (96 I [A]); colovyn glyw Reithvyw rodi arwar 'Rheithfyw, pillar of ba ttle, was wont to give delight ' (67[A]); gwanecawr gollychynt (read glwlolchynt) rawn eu kaffon 'waves washed the manes of their horses' (CTjPT 11.22). This type is not confined to Archaic Welsh and Irish, but occurs a lso in Cornish, e.g. an prysners galsons yn weth ' the prisoners have gone a lso', Ihesu dasserghys an heth 'Jesus reascended from the grave' ; see H. Lewis, LlalVlyfr CernYlVeg Canol §46.nod 2, with furt her exx. In The senlence in Welsh, Henry Lewis related this construction to the well-attested SVO type of Gaul. : MARTIALIS DANNOTALI IEVRV VCVETE SOSIN CELICNON 'M. D . bestowed on Ucuetis this chalice'.>6 PI. V with pI. subj. seems to be the rule in the Welsh construction. Alliteration between subj . and V is a recurrent feature but apparently not obligatory. Such orders may well derive from the

B MS Magidawr. I am indebted to Marged Haycock for the emendation. which is proved by rhyme.

]6 H . Lewis. 18; aRCS xiii (4) 185: insc. from Alisc·Saintc-Reine: J. Rhys, The Celtic inscriplions of France and Italy (1906) 4-10; The Celtic inscriptions of Gaul: additions and corrections (19 11) 30-6; G . Do!tin , La langue gauloise (Pa ris 1920) no. 33; Whatmough , no. 169; M. Lejeune and R. Maricha1 , EC xv ( I) 152- 3; T. A. Watkins, 'Trefn y Frawddeg Gymraeg', SC xii/xi ii 368. For the meaning or IEVRV adopted here, see P.-Y. Lambert , 'Gaulois IEVRV: irlandais (ro)-ir "dicauit"', ZCP xxxvii 207- 13; his gloss is independently supporta ble on pragmatic and semantic grounds, but his etymology, *pepor- > *iior- > *ejor- > *jeor- > *jewr, is tricky anp uncerta in. On CELICNON, see L. Fleuriot , 'Un graffile gau lois sur ccramique de Banassac', EC xiv (2) 443--50.


common proto-language or at least harken back to the La Tene Sprachbund of Gaul, Britain and Ireland."

For the present topic, it is important to recognize that in Old Celtic an S like Brit. # "Iranclli lV%ulon ( . .. ) # (> trenglhlid golud ... (MA 859» was sti ll a stylistically marked alternative to a neutral syntagm # "w%U/on Irancll ( ... ) #, in the same way that Vedic # bharali vlra~ . .. # 'a man carries' was a marked alternative to neutral # ( .. . ) vlra~ ( ... ) bharali #. Synchronically in Early Welsh, the order V,"'SO may be neutral in examples like Early OW rodesit Elcu guetig Ires uache . .. 'afterwards E. gave three cows' (Chad 2). But in the proverbs of the trenglhlid ... ; ni threingk ... type (see GMW §129.d. l) the abs. fonn still acts to throw the V into relief, so that the sense is not the purely neutral 'wealth perishes', or sUbj .-emphatic ' it is wealth that perishes', but more on the order of 'perishing is what wealth does' , Mod.W trengi a wna golud. The abs. V also carries such a force in the famous passage pan ladawd Owein Fflamdwyn I nyt oed uwy nocet kysceit I kyscit Lloegyr llydan nifer I a leuuer yn eu Uygeit 'when O. slew Flame-bearer, it was no more than sleeping; (now) sleeping is what Eng/and's vast host does, with light in their eyes' (CTfPTX.II - 14). The Celtic abs. fonn like the earlier tonic form of V was part of the vehicle for this effect. It is also important to bear in mind that , in Indo- European and Old Celtic, sentences with initial simplex verbs preceding NP subjects were sufficiently rare and contrary to the prevailing configurations that they were especially liable to be mISconstrued had there been no auxiliary marker for such constructions.

Old Irish prot%nic I'erbs

§28. In modern scholarship, Old Irish compound verbs receive their primary classification on the basis of the synchronic position of the stress. This diagnostic criterion has proved quite useful for work within Old Irish itself. However, when we move on to comparative and historical questions, the terms ' prototonic' and 'deuterotonic ' become misleading and have led to certain persistent bogus notions. It must be remembered that the Old Irish stress pattern does not continue the Indo-European accent and there is no evidence for its ever being shared by any other Celtic language outside NeoGoidelic. Scholars have, for example, referred to a Welsh verb like gochel "avoids' as deulerolonic, because it corresponds in its compositional sandhi to that seen in the Old Irish type of fo·cel. Accordingly, gogel 'to beware' would

11.The subscquen~ divergence of Olr. and WeB syntax- whereby If. eliminated the N-first/Vmedial type and BntL developed, the 'abno':fllal.' order, (and its CB ana logue}-can be seen as natural responses to the orders With pronomlnahzed objects, Arch , W had , e.g., pronominalized tyrch ae torrynt 'boars br~ak them' (cf. Uoegnv}'s ae gwydant ' the Englishmen know itfhim' (CTI PT,I1I ,9» cor,respondlng t~ tyreh lorryn •• oruoed taleu with N obj . Olf. had no such thing; so ~ugald lu~lh 100sc Irebthu tren !uat~ had to be pronominalized loiscsius Lugaid hiath or nos'IOIsc Lugald L. These pronommallzed structures favoured the rise of loiseid Lugaid L. trebthu, '"' no-lioise Lugaid L. .rebthu ,. '. and 'abnonnal' tyreh a dorryn. taleu toruoed as neutral nominal-obj . formations.

172 JOHNT. KOCH

be prototonic. The problem with this usage is that accentual terms are being applied to a phenomenon which had nothing to do with the position of the stress at any stage in the attested history of Welsh. In MW gochel and gogel both had penultimate stress, and in the earliest Neo-Brittonic they both had ultimate stress. In Indo-European a PVB + V combination standing at the head of a main clause was accented as *pro bhereti 'he carries forward'. On the basis of the position of the accent we could call this prototonic, but, from the point of view of historical comparison, it is this syntagm which corresponds to the Ir. deuterotonic do·beir. Conversely, an Indo-European compounded PVB + V standing internally in a reI. c1auso---<:.g. ·jod probhereti 'which he carries forward '---<:o uld be termed deuterotonic for the placement of its accent, but a clause-internal compound V in Old Irish is prototonic. Scholars have at various times speculated that Irish prototonic verbs of the tabair type might directly continue those of the ·pro bilereti type. Such an equation runs completely' counter to the distributional patterns seen in the parent and daughter languages and has in its favour only the very gross equivalence of the accent position. It should be remembered that where IndoEuropean had had two PVBs in a main clause both were accented- which is of course never the case in Old Irish- and that Indo-European polysyllabic PVBs often had other than initial accent: 'e.g. Olr. im(m)'beir, 'imbeir 'carries around, operates, etc.' would go back to IE ·trIhhi bhereti and has thus actually lost the old tonic syllable. When an Indo-European daughter language has completely levelled the original free , musical accent in favour of a rigidly initial stress accent, it is obviously absurd to say that the daughter language has preserved the accent of those words which had had initial udiitta in Indo-European.

For the purposes of historical comparison and reconstruction we had better call proto tonic closely compounded or simplified and deuterotonic loosely compounded (cf. L & P §§99, 400), compounded semantically but not phonologically , or the like. Put most simply, we have one formal manifesta tion of a compound verb which behaves in most important respects like one word and another which behaves like two. Such definitions can be used to generalize across the kindred languages. So, Olr. dO'beir, Archaic W gO'chel, and IE ·pro bilereti are loosely compounded; tabair, gogel, and ·probhereli are closely compounded. That this, and not accent position, is in fact the valid historical principle is suggested by the partial agreement of distribution between the parent and daughter languages. # PVB + Vi .. . ) # in main clauses is a loose compound in Indo-European and Old Irish; in subordinate clauses # ... PVB + Vi .. . ) # is a close compound in both languages.

Beyond this limited but important nucleus of syntagmata, the correspondence breaks down glaringly. Old Irish has close compounds of compound verbs wherever it has conjunct forms of simple verbs, including Vmedial and -final ' Bergin 's Law' types in archaic material: e.g., gabul asta


echrranda 'an outside branch holds fast ' .'· Secondly, as just mentioned, in Indo-European main-clause compound verbs with more than one PVB, all the PVBs were loosely compounded; in Old Irish it was only the first , the remainder forming a close compound with V. It seems likely that Early Brittonic had agreed with Irish on these points, but the Archaic Welsh evidence is less than conclusive; e.g. CT/PTXII.l - 2 gorchordyon ry-chanani rY'chwynanl Y dragon 'hosts sing, lament their chieftains', AP 21 meiryon eu Irelheu dY'chynnullyn 'stewards shall collect their taxes' , show non-initial verbs with the spirant mutation characteristic of loose composition . Such examples may have dislocated word order or show that spirant mutation v. lenition in compound verbs ended its life as a marker of non-relative v. relative, or one could merely emend the mutation out of existence in such cases. But it could a lso be that Brittonic main-clause compound verbs had loose composition in internal and final position as in Indo-European.

Following on the discussion in the previous section, the use of closely compounded verbs in medial and final position in main clauses can be readily explained on the theory that Primitive Irish, like Gaulish and British, had been a predominantly V-second language . Let us consider again the likelihood that an order like tyrch torrynt toruoed laleu ' boars broke brows of multitudes' had been completely neutral and unmarked ' in these three languages in late antiquity, or more probably tyrch lorryniialeu loruoed with the gen. following its head noun. What then was the corresponding negatived structure? Assuming a predominant SVO tendency, we would expect ny(l) tyrch lorryniialeu loruoed or tyrch ny Ihorryniialeu loruoed. But assuming a stronger V-second tendency, we expect the neg. ptc. to dislocate the subj. as in CA I 173(B) ny phortbassan warth wyr ny tbechyn 'the men who would not flee bore no disgrace', with our type sentence, ny Ihorryniialeu loruoed tyrch . In both the SVO original and the PVB-VOS derivative, one constituent precedes V. Now, how might we say 'boars avoided brows of multitudes'? Originally in main clauses, go- < *wo- < *(s) upo in gochel had been as much a separate word as was the neg. ptc. As PVB, it could hardly (in British and Primitive Irish) go anywhere but ahead of V, either immediately or in tmesis. With a leading V-second pattern, tmesis would be a marked alternative, so that in the unmarked sentence go- would again trigger subject inversion, thus gO'chelynl taleu loruoed tyrch. How, then, do we negative that? The pte. ny counts as another constituent, so just to add it to the front of the sentence would put V in third position. In Vedic, PVBs in main clauses could follow V, but there is no evidence to suggest that such ' a possibility survived in Celt ic. The answer, I believe, was this. Beside loosely compounded gO'cheI- = Proto-Celt. *[wo k.ke.I-] , the language had in its inherited inventory the fully compound gogeI- = Proto-Celt. *[wo.ke.I-],

111 Ed. M. Dillo n. "The relationship of mother and son. of father and daughter. and the law of inheritance with regard to women ', in Studies in early Irish law ( 1936) 144.

174 JOHNT. KOCH

*[wo.ke.l:] which had originally occurred in subordinate clauses and as a non-finite form. That full compound had always counted as a single word, both phonologically and semantically. Using the fully compounded forms in main clauses made it possible to retain V in second position in a ll situations: thus ny gogelynt taleu toruoed tyrch. Once fully compounded verbs became possible as a surrogate for simple verbs in main clauses, 'Bergin's Law' constructions with compound verbs became possible, i.e. tyrch gogelynt taleu torooed, cf. AP 45 Kymry a Saesson kyferoydyn ' the Cymry and English will meet'. Generally speaking, loosely and closely compounded versions of compound verbs could at that point come to be used exactly like abs. and cjt forms of simple verbs. And this is the situation we find in effect in Old Irish. The fact that in CA (and I would say also, tho ugh tentatively, the Leinster genealogical poems) ' Bergin 's Law' constructions favour simple verbs is significant and may indicate that the innovation discussed presently was not a long-standing one and had not fully overwhelmed older patterns a t the time of our earliest Insular literature.

ApPENDIX: SOME OBJECTIONS TO EARLIER EXPLANATIONS

While variants of the pte. theory have been made to explain a widening range of phonological and syntactic a nomalies, the thoroughness and intellectual honesty of its proponents have brought to ligh t a host of counter-examples which demanded a series of ad hoc solutions that were to accumulate into a severe detraction to a theory whose attractiveness rested largely on its appa rent ability to account strikingly for the phonological irregularities of the verbal complex in their entirety. in spite of implying a rather bizarre-looking proto-language. The most serious general difficulty with thc theory is that in those positions where an encl itic particle of any conceivable original phonetic shape would be expected to reveal itself in the Old Irish as something more than mere non-lenition- namely where it had stood in Proto-Irish in hiatus between vowels-it simply disappears: e.g. OIr. da'mbeir ' brings him' < *{o (PTe?) em beret, beirthi 'bears it ' < *bereri (PTe?) ed. As McCone (,Pretonic preverbs and the absolute verbal endings in Old Irish', Eriu xxx 4ft) has shown in detail , eighth-century clause-initial prototonic verbs of the type tadbat 'he shows' (deuterotonie dooadbat) and taiecera ' he shall answer' (deuterotonic dO'aiccera) contrasting with seventhcentury unelided forms like tU'ercomlassat ' they have put together' (Wb 7a7- prima manus), tU'asibliu ' I set forth' (Thesaurus I, 3, 8- Palatine no. 68) strongly suggest that pretonic non-reI. preverbs which had ended in vowels in Indo-European did not in Early Old Irish prefix h- to verbs commencing in vowels. Rather, it would seem that the 11- arose in the later course of the Old Irish period as an analogical regularization of a non-lenition mutation, falling into the pattern of proclitics which had actuall y ended in a consonant or cluster in Primitive Irish (e.g. Olr a 'out or < *ess). This is pa rticularly undermining as it was the assumption that ro and do « seventh-century to, tu, di, de) had prefixed h- to vowels in Old Irish which had led Thurneysen to the pte. theory in the first place.

Two further major flaws of the theory may be cited. (i) The reflex of an old geminate in the non-syllabic pron. in syntagmata like dy-m'gwares, dy-m'kyueirch ' he greets me' (LIHen 30. 15), ry-th'welas 'he has seen thee' (LlDu 36.3) can hardly be of an origin differing from that of the geminate initials of the gen. pronouns in phrases like MW y'm gwaret ' to help me', o'm kyuarch ' from bidding mc' , y'th welet ' to see thee', o r


from those in PPs with obj. nouns like y'm kaT ' to my kinsman '. While it might be thought that finite verbal phrases, like the first three examples, could somehow contain an embedded enclitic nom . pron., sentence connective, or reduced fonn of the copula, and this element be reflected in the gemination of the following pron., it is inconceivable thai any such element could ever have been part of a prepositional phrase with a verbal noun or simple noun for its obj . It does not seem likely that PPs were analogically remodelled after preverbal phrases in both branches of Neo-Celtic and thereby inherited the effects of the hypothetical enclitic if not indeed the enclitic itself. (i i) No trace of anything like the obligatory sentential pte. has ye t come to light in the remains of Continental Celtic, not even in those relatively long texts which have recently come to light from Botorrita, Chamalieres and L' Hospi talet du Larzac. Since the effects of the ptc. have been invoked to explain features of both Goidelic and Brittonic, it has been regarded as a genetic inheritance from their common ancestor. The present writer believes in a genetic Gallo-Brittonic, a proposition implying that any proto-language common to Goidelic and Briuonic would have to be the ancestor of Gaulish as well. Rejecting a genetic Insular Celtic as a bogus concept, the only rcmaining possibilities are thatthc ptc. is merely a fallacy or that Brittonic and Irish somehow camc up with the ptc. independently (after Brittonic had split from Gaulish near the opening of the Roman period) in such a way as to mimic a gcnetic inheritance. Thc la tter is obviously far-fe tched.

A different idca concerning the origins of de uterotonic gemination/non-lenition is that of C. Watkins (,Preliminaries to a historical and comparative analysis of the syntax of the Old Irish verb', Celtica vi (\963) 40), whcreby a relatively late prehisto ric recombination of elements within the Celtic sentence may be thought of as somehow short-circuiting the normal development of Neo-Celtic mutations out of Old Celt ic sandhi . Boling (Eriu x)(ii i 77) demonstrated that Watkins's original formulation was unworkable. McCone has since presented a revised version (triu x)()( 1611), in which PVB and V in thc deuterotonic syntagm undergo a late (in the Christian era!) juxtaposition by means of an analogical ' infix deletion' operating upon the ' univerbated ' combination with an enclitic. This would again involve the difficulty of Brittonic and Irish sharing sweeping analogical dcvelopments at a period when the two were already separate languages. One must also wonder about Gaulish, if the gcmination shown in the V de-uuor-buet-id is not just capricious spelling; see L. Fleuriot, EC xvii (1980) I 28ff. ' Infix deletion ' can also do nothing to explain the gemination of thc initial consonant of the infixed pronouns themselves and would seem, then, to fall short of McConc's own dcmand for an 'integrated blanket solut ion' (Eriuxxx I ).

Calvert Watkins's ' unive rbation' (Ce/tica vi 30fI) cannot be objected to as an unparallelcd or otherwise unattested developmcnt. It is a common tendency of the Indo-European daughter languages. However, it is not necessary to think of #P, (E) ... (P, .)V # > # P,(E)(P,.)V ... # as a reformation of the S having taken place at a specific point in prehistoric Ccltic. It was more probably a gradual replacement of a relatively common inherited syntagm by a relatively rare inherited one. As noted above, taking univerbation as a cataclysmic event is now known to have no c)(planatory powcr with regard to the phonology of the Old Irish and Archaic Welsh verbal complex.

On the other hand, an absencc of parallels may be raised as a scrious objection to the enclitic pa rticle theory and McCone's 'cncl itic deletion' (Eriu X)(X 28ff; since heartily endorsed by P. Sims-Williams, 'The double system of verbal inflexion in Old Irish', TPS ( 1984) 146). McCone derives thc abs. cndings from an analogical 'suffix deletion ' (completely symmetrical to the 'infix deletion' whereby hc gets the deutcro tonic V less infix) applied to syntagmata likc Pr.lr. # *bereti-E(nclitic) ... # . In

176 JOHN T . KOCH

other contexts the original-i of the Indo-European primary endings had already been lost by an early apocope. In later Celtic, we can actually find numerous examples o f clitic prons. interacting with phonetica ll y decaying verbal endings to which they are habitually affixed, yet the developments provoked by such combinations arc contrary 10 what McCone has reconstructed . What happens is that the verbal ending breaks o fT, fuses with the o ld pron., and thus fo rms a new pron.; cf. Mod . Ir. muid, Mod. C anzhei 'they, them', avee 'me' < Me -8RS-Y, -av-yy. Mod. spoken W nhw < MW -nt wy, and the contemporary Irish dialect fo rm dar ' they, them' < O Ir. -tar as described 10 me by Kenneth Nilsen. The pron. does not act to restore the old ending and certainly not to transfer that old epding to new contexts and then cleanly delete itself, as McCone envisages encl itics transferring primary -i to examples like Pr.I r. prel. # *berst . .. # to give # *ber(s) t-; ... # ( > OIr. abs. birt). What we would rea lly expect to get would be a new series of pronouns, i.e. Pr.l r. *ime(d), *itu, *;sin, * ;S0 5, etc., no t the original primary endings back again after they had d ied in pausa. In spoken Welsh we still hear -af in the responsive, a marked isolate form. T his is not because encl itic prons. have protected the Middle Welsh endings, but because they were never there to interfere with them in the first place.

Prosody and the Old Celtic Verbal Complex

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