L’accent indo-européen et le verbe celtique

Abstract

Selon une hypothèse récente de John T. Koch (1987) un certain nombre des traits particuliers caractérisant le verbe composé du vieil-irlandais et du britannique s’expliqueraient en supposant que l’accent ‘dynamique’ du proto-celtique ait remplacé un accent plus ancien, pré-celtique, du type ‘musical’ plus ou moins identique à celui que nous atteste le védique. L’auteur discute des problèmes de méthode que posent les diverses suppositions qui constituent la base de cette hypothèse ‘prosodique’.

Reconstructing the rise of Verb Second in Welsh

“…In addition, Koch's reconstruction of V2 order in Gaulish and Brythonic all the way back to Proto-Indo-European has met substantial criticism from various scholars (cf. Lindeman (1992) and Russell (1995)). I will leave the question of Gaulish for future research and start from the Insular Celtic languages (Goidelic > Irish and British) that all had verb-initial word order in their earliest stages.…”

“…Koch (1983) in particular argues that the regular unmarked word order in Gaulish is SVO and that V2 orders go all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. MacCana (1991), Lindeman (1992), Russell (1995) and Schrijver (1997) raise many objections to this point of view, however, arguing that verb-initial order is more likely to have arisen in Insular Celtic and strict V2 in British Celtic only at a later stage (see also section 2.3 below). The amount of data we have in Gaulish is limited to various gravestones and some bronze inscriptions, however, and we find a wide variety of word orders in this small dataset:…”