The Common Thread

As the academic field of Celtic studies inevitably grows ever more details, we tend to lose sight of the common threads. For the linguist, this problem is particularly troubling with respect to one of the most prominent aspects held in common by the Celtic languages C the systems of initial mutations. Examining the Welsh and the Irish systems, we are first struck by the similarities: Both systems consist of two major types of mutation: (1) Lenition, the Aweakening @ of the consonant originally in intervocalic position (between vowels), and (2) eclipsis, a change in the consonant originally due to a preceding nasal consonant (and in Welsh of an aspirate). Moreover, both systems developed from the same phonetic pressures, and both emerged at around the same time in history. Further accentuating the similarities in the systems are the facts that the two languages were in contact at the time of these developments and that the speakers were apparently aware of correspondences between them. For example, when British missionaries introduced the root pask->Easter = (from Latin pascha), the Irish changed it to casc- in order to conform to the correspondence between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic established by sound changes that had been completed centuries before (compare Thurneysen 1980: 570-72 on the phenomenon; also Schmidt 1993 on the relative dating). If, however, we look more closely, we tend to forget such common threads, for in some crucial details, the Welsh and Irish mutation systems are very different indeed. In fact, at the phonetic level they differ so profoundly and fundamentally as to appear totally unrelated