Leiden University Student Repository

Swanenvleugel, Cid (2021)

Reconstructing Proto-Italo-Celtic: On the common origins of the phonemic systems and verbal TAM categories of Italic and Celtic

Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)

The question of the genealogical proximity of Italic and Celtic has been an issue in Indo-European linguistics for a long time. Whereas most previous studies have looked at the innovations possibly shared by Italic and Celtic from a Proto-Indo-European perspective, this work takes a more bottom-up approach by attempting to reconstruct (parts of) the Proto-Italo-Celtic language on the basis of the attested linguistic data in both branches’ daughter languages. The areas under focus are Italo-Celtic phonology and verbal morphology. As the Italo-Celtic reconstructions of both of these sub-systems of the language are substantially different for the systems traditionally reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, I will argue that there is good reason to posit Italo-Celtic as a genetic unit that must have lasted for a substantial amount of time.

Italic

Celtic

Indo-European

verbal morphology

historical phonology

Author

Swanenvleugel, Cid

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Comparative Indo-European Linguistics

Supervisors

Tijmen Pronk

ECTS Credits

30

Language

en