Insular Celtic As A Language Area
In order to show that shared innovations are from a common descent it is necessary that they do not arise because of language contact after initial separation. A language area can result from widespread bilingualism, perhaps because of exogamy, and absence of sharp sociolinguistic division. In Post-Roman Britain Goidelic and Brythonic seem to have been of roughly equal status, with several Goidelic loan words in Brythonic and several Brythonic loan words in Old Irish. There is historical evidence of Irish in what are now Wales and England, as well as of Brythonic in Ireland, during this period. There is also archaeological evidence of substantial contact between Britain and Ireland in the Pre-Roman period and of Roman period contact.
Ranko Matasović has provided a list of changes which affected both branches of Insular Celtic but for which there is no evidence that they should be dated to a putative Proto-Insular Celtic period. These are:
- Phonological Changes
- The lenition of voiceless stops
- Raising/i-Affection
- Lowering/a-Affection
- Apocope
- Syncope
- Morphological Changes
- Creation of conjugated prepositions
- Loss of case inflection of personal pronouns
- Creation of the equative degree
- Creation of the imperfect
- Creation of the conditional mood
- Morphosyntactic and Syntactic
- Rigidisation of VSO order
- Creation of preposed definite articles
- Creation of particles expressing sentence affirmation and negation
- Creation of periphrastic construction
- Creation of object markers
- Use of ordinal numbers in the sense of "one of".
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