Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
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...Show moreThe 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.Show less