Reconstruction talk:Proto-Celtic/albiyū

Welsh

The Welsh forms are borrowings. Proto-Celtic *Albiū, whether realized as *Albiyū or *Albyū, would be expected to give Elfydd or **Elf. If it were an inherited word, there is no way phonologically for i-affection and lenition not to have occurred. Anglom (talk) 21:07, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I realised that too. We have a separate page for the Brythonic outcome. I'm about to rework this whole page. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:39, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

Done. What do you think? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:53, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

It looks good. Thank you for your work. Anglom (talk) 13:50, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

My pleasure! To be honest, I intended to do this for quite some time because I keep being annoyed by the hypothetical "Pre-Indo-European" (or sometimes "Proto-Indo-European") "root" (or whatever) *alb- or *alp- for "mountain" that commonly used etymological dictionaries hypothesise in order to explain Latin Alpes, German Alpen (and the common noun Alpe for "alpine pasture"), Albania etc., dismissing the traditional connection to Latin albus as merely folk-etymological. I don't think the assumption of such a root is well-founded and I think the hypothesis of a Celtic origin of these words makes a lot more sense.

Granted, the assumed semantic development is surprising, but Delamarre's suggestion that *dubno- refers to the underworld, *bitu- to the world of the living and *albiyo(n)- to the "world above" neatly explains the naming motive: "upper world" is kind of ambiguous; in Brythonic the referent is clearly the surface of the earth, but my understanding is that it is originally the world above the clouds, the light-flooded world of the heavens. Celtic-speakers (who may well have lived at the foot of the Alps from the Proto-Celtic period on, or in any case not far away) might have identified the snow-capped mountains with their mythological "high world", like the Greeks identified Mt. Olympus as the seat of their own gods.

Maybe the Celtic "Otherworld" – later identified with islands in the west – was originally the same thing. This might explain why *albiyū came to be identified with Britain early on, as early as the 6th century BC (when Celtic speakers may or may not have immigrated to Britain yet, but should have known about it), though was apparently already poetic by the time of Pytheas of Massalia (or maybe it has always been a poetic metaphor identifying Britain with the Otherworld and the "islands of the blessed"), and it just occurs me that Hyperborea – thought by some to refer to Britain – remarkably resembles the mytheme: an island in the north with an unexpectedly mild and temperate climate, fertile, an earthly or semi-mythical paradise. I'm not sure if and how the Germanic elves (*albi-, heh, like the apparent source of Latin alpis), possibly a non-Indo-European population in origin, fit into here, but Jörg Rhiemeyer (a hobby linguist, who, however, prefers to interpret *alp- as a pre-Indo-European root, and has based a whole Tolkien-inspired legendarium on the idea of elves as a Pre-Indo-European population in the prehistoric British Isles) might find the idea attractive! I might ask Alaric Hall for comment too. Sorry for letting my speculative, associative tendency run wild. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:39, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Deletions

@CodeCat, are you moving that information elsewhere? Seems a bit excessive just to remove it all. —JohnC5 20:23, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

There's so much there that you can't even easily find the actual Celtic descendants among them. And some of it is downright wrong; Latin Albania from Irish? Alpes contradicts it as well. —CodeCat 20:33, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Fair enough. —JohnC5 20:43, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

@CodeCat In Medieval Latin, Albania also refers to Scotland, which clearly comes from Old Irish Albu (ultimately). I had added a comment explaining that. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:45, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

You should add it to Albania too. —CodeCat 20:05, 14 January 2017 (UTC)

I've tried, but I'm not sure if I did it correctly. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:25, 14 January 2017 (UTC)