Reconstruction talk:Proto-Celtic/ulkos

Wolf?

Do we have to include every wacko, implausible flight of fancy just because the person who published it is named McCone? Is there any evidence this word meant 'wolf' in Proto-Celtic? Or that the Lepontic personal name Ulkos is even related to the Old Irish word for 'bad'? Doesn't *wlikʷos (“wet”) show pretty effectively that kʷ doesn't delabialize to k at a distance from w? Also, *wlikʷos is what we would expect *wĺ̥kʷos to become in Proto-Celtic; if it syllabified the initial w in a way parallel to *wlanā, the result would be *ulikʷos, not *ulk(ʷ)os. It's true the u makes a derivation from *h₁elḱ- difficult, but at least the semantics work. A derivation from *wĺ̥kʷos fails both phonologically and semantically (wolves being called "bad ones" makes sense; the noun "wolf" turning into an adjective "bad" does not); the proposal would probably never have been taken seriously if the person who published it hadn't been named Kim McCone. —Mahāgaja · talk 11:44, 1 February 2025 (UTC)