Insular Brythonic Lingo

[Pascal C]

As I've heard the common Brythonic language went from the Celtic V to W, which seems easily understandable. Meanwhile, the Goidelic went to F which again is easy to see how it would come from a V. Somewhere along the W sound in Brythonic went to Gw which seems harder to grasp. So it raises a couple questions.

Has anyone suggested that the shift to W among the Britannia folk may have had to do with their centuries long exposure to Latin under the Romans?

What explanations are given for the shift to Gw?

[Ebizur]

I think it does not need any explanation. Such a sound shift is both intuitively plausible and empirically common.

There is a comitative case marker in the Korean language (used to express meanings similar to English "(together/along) with" or "and") that actually exhibits morphophonemic variation, with one allomorph (/-wa/) occurring after any stem that ends in a vowel and another allomorph (/-gwa/) occurring after any stem that ends in a consonant. (In Late Middle Korean, the /-gwa/ variant would merge with the final /-h/ of a stem to produce /kwa/, but postvocalic /h/ has been eliminated in the meantime. Modern Korean has regularized the paradigm, so it has /nara-wa/ "[the] country and ~, (along) with [the] country" where Late Middle Korean had narakwa.)

Anyway, neither */gwa/ > /wa/ nor */wa/ > /gwa/ is a particularly unusual sound change.

[Pascal C]

Interesting. butI'm not a Korean speaker although I'vs been give'n the very basics when working with them . I really don't care about Hanguoren wrt to what I asked.

How does Brythonic Gw pronunciation work into Hanguo kimchee?

Apparently you believe there is some link?

[Pascal C]

I think it does not need any explanation. Such a sound shift is both intuitively plausible and empirically common.

There is a comitative case marker in the Korean language (used to express meanings similar to English "(together/along) with" or "and") that actually exhibits morphophonemic variation, with one allomorph (/-wa/) occurring after any stem that ends in a vowel and another allomorph (/-gwa/) occurring after any stem that ends in a consonant. (In Late Middle Korean, the /-gwa/ variant would merge with the final /-h/ of a stem to produce /kwa/, but postvocalic /h/ has been eliminated in the meantime. Modern Korean has regularized the paradigm, so it has /nara-wa/ "[the] country and ~, (along) with [the] country" where Late Middle Korean had narakwa.)

Anyway, neither */gwa/ > /wa/ nor */wa/ > /gwa/ is a particularly unusual sound change.

Okay but you're saying this happened during atime where w to gw might be common?

[Ebizur]

Okay but you're saying this happened during atime where w to gw might be common?

I am saying that no one should be surprised by an apparent sound shift */wa/ > /gwa/ or */gwa/ > /wa/. Both [w] and [g] share a common component to their place of articulation ([+velar]) as well as voicing status ([+voiced]). Since speakers of many languages do not phonemically distinguish a glottal stop [ɂ], it is eminently plausible that some speakers might fortify a sequence of */wa/ (originally pronounced as [wa] or as [ɂwa] without phonemic distinction) to /gwa/ (cf. the historical relationship between English ward and French garde > English guard, from a Germanic root that should have sounded quite similar to Modern English ward), or, conversely, that some speakers might lenite an original */gwa/ > /wa/.

Or do you claim to have found some evidence according to which one should discard a hypothesis of a particular */w/ > /gw/ sound change in the evolution of Brythonic?

[Pascal C]

No I didn't find any evidence whatsoever. I only asked. I don't have a strong background in the subject as I spent most of college "crunching" numbers on engineering problems and had very few human language classes, never mind any linguistics. In fact I've had as many programming language courses as human ones. So I'm just trying to learn. The W to Gw shift just didn't seem as intuitive as V to W, but your example of ward & guard illustrates it pretty well. Thanks.

[moesan]

I'm not sure brittonic underwent a IE *V- evolution to W-; I suppose rather that some other languages underwent an evolution IE *W- to V-;
the evolution W- to GW- is linked in Europe to some human groups having covered the most of Britain, the most of France and a part of Iberia (I don't know which one because the reconquista changed a lot of thing, with the expansion of Aragonese, Catalan and Castillan southward. For Belgium I don't know but it seems the maintaining of W- could be linked to West Germanics (see in France Northern Normandy, Flanders/Artois/PIcardy and Lorraine AND WAALOONIA where W- stayed W- or became V-, but not GW-;
I recall that some Flemish dialects have kept the /w/ sound and that in some Dutch pronounciations we hear a bilabial /v/, not the labiodental sound /v/ sound so common in a lot of modern IE languages in Europe (other Germanics, South or North the Baltic sea, Slavics, Italics; this tendancy of W>>GW (before reduction to G by some "satemism" in French) was very deeply rooted in Western pops (French applied it to W- germanic words when they had adopted the latin V-from W- and Iberians applied it to Arabic words (Oued-el-Kebir >> Guadalquivir); it seems that the welsh 'gwillt' = 'gwydd' is from a Germanic (Saxon) *'wild', and we have Welsh Gwalder = Walter, Gwylym = William - so it seems some phonetic tendancies perdure longer time than believed, and without any link to structure ("all constraining structure": old dogma) when languages are oral the most of the time and not teached in school;
th gaelic F- result implies (for me) a previous evolution of W- to V-; but here I 've no specific clue; all the way the two later evolution (V>F, W>GW) reflect a reinforcing of a spirant, not allowed by Celtic languages, perhaps to complete a system of mutations unvoiced/voiced/spirantised?

[moesan]

In Celtic it seems the spirants were not allowed at the initial position - in ancient loanwords, V- words were adopted as B- or M- words and considered feminine, allowing a lenition in some between-words positions only - in these words, the first genuine form of the "giver" language was considered as a mutated one:
Fr vélo(cipède), 'byke', breton 'belo' (F.), 'ar velo' ('the byke')
Fr- voiture, 'car', breton 'gwetur' (F.), 'ar wetur'
Fr- wagon /vago~/, breton 'bagon' (F.), 'ar vagon'
this system of mutations is not without instability and errors, even concerning genuine Celtic words, when mutated forms are returned to supposed original forms:
Welsh 'bawd' (F.), Breton 'meud' ('thumb'), 'y fawd' /vaud/, 'ar veud' ('the thumb') -
it seems w- has been partly assimilated to v- ..., formerly bilabial spirant, so submitted to a reinforcement -
just to be clearer, I hope at least -