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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Italo-Celtic
In-Reply-To: Colin Fine's message of Thu, 22 Feb 1996 17:28:18 
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Date: Fri, 23 Feb 1996 20:30:12 GMT
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In article <360660231wnr@kindness.demon.co.uk> Colin Fine
<colin@kindness.demon.co.uk> writes:

>What made me think about that again was noticing the apparent Latin-Celtic
>isogloss in the number '5':

>I-E *penkwe, Gk pente, Sans. pa~c, but Latin quinque, Irish coic (Welsh Pump,
>but that's secondary labialisation, regular in Brythonic)

>What's the current received opinion on this isogloss? Common innovation, 
>borrowing, or coincidence? 

To start with, that would be a Latin-Irish isogloss vs. Osco-Umbrian-Brythonic.
*That* is "Italo-Celtic":  q-Celtic and q-Italic vs. p-Celtic and p-Italic
"must" mean that Italic and Celtic share a branching point.

Current received opinion is that this is coincidence; cf. the p-Celtic-like
development of *penk{^w}e in Germanic:  Gothic fimf, German f{\"u}nf, English
five...
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
