Reconstruction talk:Proto-Celtic/biggos

*Biggos

Whilst I am aware that Stifter and Hayden have opinions on the matter, unilaterally declaring them to be 'the most popular reconstruction' is not acceptable given that other Celticists evidently do not agree. I am also unconvinced of this reconstruction as it does nothing to explain how a Common Brythonic /x/ magically appeared from a geminate /gg/ terminally, when this would be completely unprecedented in Welsh or Breton phonology. *buggos in Breton renders terminal /-g/. Reminder: just because something looks a particular way in Irish does not mean it applies to the Celtic languages on the whole, particularly when the Goidelic languages have numerous phonological idiosyncrasies unique to that branch. Italian 'piccolo' also makes Proto-Celtic /-gg-/ highly unlikely unless we are proposing that Gaulish and Brythonic in this one case somehow spontaneously devoiced a geminate consonant in this one spot only. Andecombogios (talk) 17:39, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

The Breton word is actually bouk by the way. Anyhow Goidelic very consistently reflects *kk as /k/ (non-exhaustive list):

• *akkiyā > aice,
• *mokkus > muc
• *sukkos > soc
• *brokkos > broc
• *īkkā ~ *yekkā > íoc

Given this mountain of kk to Goidelic /k/, -kk- cannot be reconstructed for "small". There is no way to get Old Irish bec with a /g/ from -kk-. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 18:32, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

I will point you to the fact that becc or bec is spelled as such in Old Irish, and brocc in Middle Irish was presumably spelled as such in Old Irish, suggesting that if a /k/ to /g/ change exists in Old Irish and did not occur in Middle Irish or later, that it is not so present as to be represented in spelling yet, and did not occur in all places equally. I will repeat, the Brythonic and Gaulish-via-Latin-via-Italian evidence is very clear that a geminate */-gg-/ is unlikely. Plus, this is a controversial subject among Celticists: Matasovic with the aid of other scholars concluded *bekkos. Unless for some reason you think that Stifter is right in all things and Matasovic is wrong in all things, or that Proto-Celtic is in fact Proto-Irish and the other Celtic languages can go take a hike, *biggos is a very recent reconstruction from a single Irish linguistic department that does not represent global scholarship on Proto-Celtic, and *bikkos is a much better 'compromise form' between Matasovic, Stifter, and other reconstructions. If you want further Brythonic evidence, broc in all stages of Breton is broc'h vis a vis Middle Irish brocc, so why suddenly in Middle Breton would *biggos render bihan, with a medial fricative (there is an added ending, true, but Middle Welsh bych and bychan show this does not impact the fricative), rather than a /g/ as is the case in boug. Your reasoning is purely confined to Goidelic languages and does not represent the evidence from Celtic languages on the whole. If you are going to overturn consensus, strong evidence is needed. Andecombogios (talk) 20:33, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Edit on myself, I was able to confirm that bouk, boug are both acceptable pronunciations in Breton from a Breton-French Dictionary. Please provide a source next time. Andecombogios (talk) 21:01, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

To summarise evidence for readers unfamiliar: Proto-Celtic *-kk- generally renders /-k/ in Goidelic languages, *-kk- in Gaulish, and /-x/ in Brythonic languages. This word is a conflicting example where in modern Goidelic languages the terminal consonant is /-g/ but in Brythonic the terminal consonant is /-x/ and in Gaulish the consonant seems to have been *-kk- from evidence in Italian from a loan into Latin. *-gg- is rare in Proto-Celtic, but the one example *buggos seems to render [-g] or [-k] in Breton and /-g/ in Irish, but is not present in any language other than these, making it hard to tell what it would render in other languages. The Goidelic evidence favours this word having a *-gg- middle consonant, but the Brythonic and Gaulish evidence favours the opposite. There is also controversy among reconstructions in the literature as to whether the medial consonant is *-kk- or *-gg- and as to whether the emphasised vowel is *-i- or *-e-, so I would propose either *bikkos or *beggos as compromise forms due to the controversy and lack of surety, as these are midway between the reconstructions provided by the citations in the article, and because we are meant to be representing scholarly consensus on wiktionary and not personal opinions. Andecombogios (talk) 21:39, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Such a /k/ to /g/ change never existed in the history of Old Irish. You may have gotten a false impression since /g/ can be spelled as cc on occasion in Old Irish (icc compounds have such spellings everywhere, even though it is well-known that that root had a /g/ < Proto-Celtic -nk-); the spelling "cc" is not indicative of a word having a /k/ at any pre-modern stage of Irish!

On the other hand, Matasovic already reconstructs a *wrigants (“vermin”), with a by-form *wriggants specifically to account for the fricative in Breton gwrec'h. In other words, Matasovic implicitly accepts the Brythonic -gg- > -x- that Stifter posited!

As to explain the stop in Breton boug/bouk, let's look at the following examples of apparent secondary Brythonic gemination (cited from Matasovic again)

• *genetā > Welsh geneth (as if < *genettā)
• *lokus > Welsh llwch, Breton loc'h (as if < *lokkus)
• *wesākos > Welsh gwyach (as if < *wesākkos)

Multiple times Matasovic attributes these results (except in the case of Welsh geneth) to Goidelic influence (single intervocalic stops in Old Irish regularly turn to fricatives). Thus this opens up another explanation to how boug ended up with a stop and not the usual fricative; it spread from Goidelic, again.

I see no reason to dismiss perfectly regular behaviour of kk > /k/ in Goidelic as a factor to rule out -kk- in "small", and plenty of reason to put the burden of irregularity on Brythonic.

As for the Romance words, they are too unreliable (note also the devoicing of the initial consonant in the alleged Romance relatives, in addition to tt/cc variation not known in Celtic) to draw any conclusions. Note also that Matasovic does not connect the Romance words to the Celtic words. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 22:52, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

In addition, it was actually Holger Pedersen who came up with the gg > x in Brythonic, not Stifter. I just found an article by Anders Jorgensen about this topic; he says the following (boldings mine):

The Proto-Celtic voiced geminate stops appear to have been devoiced in Brittonic (cf. Pedersen 1909: 159–61) and subsequently fricativized regularly, just like the Proto-Celtic voiceless geminates (cf. spirantization below). This is borne out by e.g. PCelt. *biggo- (OIr. bec /b’eg/) > *bikko- > PBrit. *bɪx-an (dimin. suff. *-an; Welsh bychan, Breton bihan (“little”)), PCelt. *kloggā (OIr. cloc, clog /klog/) > *klokkā > PBrit. *klox (W cloch, Bret. kloc’h ‘bell’), PCelt. *u̯raggā (Ir. frac, frag /frag/?) > *u̯rakkā > PBrit. *u̯rax (W gwrach, Bret. gwrac’h ‘hag’), PCelt. *buggo- (OIr. bog ‘gentle, tender’) > *bukko- > Brit. *bux (ModBret. bouc’h ‘blunt’; Bret. bouk ‘soft’ must instead be a borrowing from Irish). This change also accounts for the development of PCelt. *zd (*ðd?) in Brittonic, which appears to have gone through *dd (OIr. /d/) to *tt and ultimately to PBrit. *θ. This may be exemplified by e.g. PCelt. *nizdo- > *niddo- (OMIr. net, ned /N’ed/) > *nitto- > PBrit. *nɪθ (W nyth, Bret. neizh ‘nest’). The change must predate the creation of geminate stops by assimilation of preverbs and verbs and the univerbation of verbal compounds such as PCelt. *kred-dī- ‘believes’ (MW credu, MBret. cridiff, OIr. creitem ‘to believe’).

— Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 23:28, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

This is all very well and good but perfectly irrelevant to the topic. Jorgensen, et. al, reconstruct *biggos, Matasovic reconstructs *bekkos, and another linguist reconstructed *beggos. Our job on this website is not to promote our pet theories, it is to represent the state of affairs in the literature. If there is genuine discord as to what the state of a reconstruction is, then we should not take sides in that debate until the debate is resolved, particularly as the forms from Matasovic and Jorgensen, et al. are so different. Even if we think that this linguist or that is being inconsistent. If you are so insistent on a medial *-gg-, then I will move the page to *beggos, as the initial vowel has not been touched in this entire discussion, even though I agree that it should be *-i- from the evidence in both Old Irish and Middle Welsh.

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But to discuss evidence: even if Jorgensen is correct that Brythonic always devoices medial geminates, and to be honest he is completely copping out for bouk because a loan from Irish into Breton is unprecendented and a complete stretch, his data is still explicable if Old Irish underwent a lenition in terminal /k/ to /g/ as is represented by the spelling confusion of Old Irish writers between c and g in such positions in every single possible example that Jorgensen uses. Except *buggo-, where I think Jorgensen is also misattributing the etymology of bouc’h, because semantically 'blunt' from 'gentle' is doubtful. You also have provided no evidence that Old Irish orthographic cc can represent only and solely a /g/ sound in becc other than 'trust me', particularly as everywhere else in Old Irish orthography, cc only represents /k(k)/. (macc, aicce, Beccán (per the Old Norse), mucc, reicc, peccad, mescc, etc, etc.) Becc is an exception in later languages where the terminal consonant became /g/, that is not reflected in Old Irish.

I know everyone simply takes early 1900s linguists (Thurneysen, Pedersen, Pokorny, etc.) at their word when they posited essentially that Mediaeval Irish scribes for some reason radically misspelled all their plosives when 'really' they 'should' be pronounced a certain way. But those linguists were taking the word at face value of Early Modern Irish grammaticians writing hundreds of years later tell us that the earlier writers were misspelling, when in reality those grammaticians were substituting their own, lenited pronunciation onto earlier eras and the evidence for this claim directly from Old and Middle Irish is thin to none, except in certain specific conjugal forms of verbs (due to the verbal anarchy of Old and Middle Irish) where you see occasional alternations between the likes of intervocalic g and ch for a possible [x ~ ɣ ~ g], c, g, and ng for [k ~ g ~ ŋ] and d and th for a possible [d ~ ð ~ θ]. But this is completely exclusive to verbs, and does not occur elsewhere. In terminal plosives, you actually get devoicing of original voiced consonants (Per Thurneysen's A Grammar of Old Irish: ort, ord, ordd from Latin ordo, with terminal devoicing in Old Irish allophonically. Thurneysen claims the gemination is genuine, but I think this is unlikely. I think the additional geminate form is still the ungeminated consonant, and the scribe was attempting to overcorrect due to the devoicing tendency, to emphasise /d/ as the correct pronunciation in light of allophonic /t/). You also say 'it is well known' that icc proceeded from Proto-Celtic *nk (actually *nnk, if we believe Schrijver), which may well be true, but that does not inherently imply its phonological value is /g/, and descendant languages are split on the terminal consonant of roicc: in conventional Irish orthography the descendant is righ which implies [gʲ] > [ɟ], but in Gaelic it is ruig, which implies terminal [kʲ] > [gʲ] (> [kʲ]), and in Manx it is raink which implies terminal [kk] > [k(ʲ)]. Which of these am I supposed to trust over the others for the actual value of the Old Irish roicc? Because if you try to take the Thurneysen approach and just slap the modern form onto the Old Irish, there isn't one phoneme there, there's three. Even if we assume that the Irish form has lenited relative to the other two, the Manx and Gaelic forms are still irreconcilable. (Incidentally, my suspicion on the Manx forms other than the preterite is that they have been regrammaticalised from the verb-noun, as one form of the Gaelic verb-noun is ruigsinn, so all you need is assimilation and metathesis to get roshtyn, and then regrammaticalise from there. That's just my hunch though.)

I also do not particularly care if Matasovic thinks that there is gemination of unvoiced consonants elsewhere in Brythonic. That is irrelevant to whether or not Brythonic would devoice a geminate. *Wriggants is also irrelevant, as Matasovic notes it would be exclusive to Breton, because the Irish and Welsh both agree on an ungeminated voiced plosive, and notes he ultimately cannot explain why the form in Breton is gwrec'h, which is reasonable. He is not agreeing with Stifter or Pedersen, rather trying to shoehorn in a Proto-Celtic explanation for a likely Mediaeval phenomenon. Andecombogios (talk) 01:23, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

August update

We're back here again. I did not notice the other citation for *beggos (so excuse that misinformation in my edit summary) but I still object to using it because there is no way to get to Welsh bychan from there. — Ceso femmuin mbolgaig mbung, mellohi! (投稿) 08:05, 1 August 2023 (UTC)