Joseph Eska

Virginia Tech, English: Language, Literature, and Culture, Faculty Member

Followers

392

Following

173

Co-authors

Public Views

InterestsView All (26)

Uploads

Papers by Joseph Eska

Script transfer and Laryngeal Realism, and script reform On plosive phonology in ancient Celtic northern Italy

Zeitschrift fuer celtische Philologie 71, 2024

Sommario: Questo articolo sostiene che, come è normale quando una scrittura viene trasferita da p... more Sommario: Questo articolo sostiene che, come è normale quando una scrittura viene trasferita da parlanti di una lingua a un'altra senza l'intervento di un adattatore principale prima del suo utilizzo, i Celti Cisalpini impiegarono l'alfabeto con valori fonemici etruschi quando lo adottarono per la prima volta. L'esame di queste iscrizioni più antiche porta alla conclusione che il celtico cisalpino contrapponeva la sua serie esplosiva attraverso la caratteristica laringea [glottide allargata], cioè il contrasto era /ɸ t h k h / vs. /p t k/. Per un motivo ancora sconosciuto, l'Alfabeto di Lugano neutralizzò graficamente la distinzione tra le serie esplosive, e le lettere ⟨φ θ χ⟩ decaderono dall'uso, ma furono ricaratterizzati come allografi di ⟨P T K⟩ e furono occasionalmente impiegati dagli incisori in variazione con queste ultime lettere. Prelude § 1. This paper considers the transfer of the Etruscan alphabet to the Cisalpine Celts for writing their language in the Alphabet of Lugano and its subsequent reform, and the implications of what we know about script transfer has for Cisalpine Celtic plosive phonology. In ESKA 2017, I propose that the Cisalpine Celts received writing from the Veneti. Closer scrutiny of the evidence and known patterns of script transfer lead me now to disavow that view. Instead, there is every reason to believe that the Cisalpine Celts received writing directly from the Etruscans. 1 1 Epigraphic symbols: Square brackets [ ] indicate characters which have been restored; round brackets () indicate characters left out by the engraver; curly brackets { } indicate characters which were erroneously incised by the engraver; the underdot ̣ indicates characters which are damaged and/or no longer clearly legible; × indicates a character which cannot be read; the tie-bar ͡ indicates characters which are engraved as a ligature; the pipe | indicates line breaks; ← and → indicate the direction of the ductus.

Download

The Continetal Celtic dialect continuum

The method works. Studies in language change in honor of Don Ringe, ed. Joseph F. Eska, Olav Hackstein, Ronald I. Kim, & Jean-François Mondon. London: Palgrave Macmillan., 2024

While it appears clear that the Hispano-Celtic linguistic complex was the first departure from th... more While it appears clear that the Hispano-Celtic linguistic complex was the first departure from the (proto-)Celtic speech continuum, there is not much consensus about the topology of the remainder of the Continental Celtic languages. Various configurations of ‘Lepontic’, ‘Cisalpine Gaulish’, ‘Cisalpine Celtic’, ‘Transalpine Celtic’, etc. have been proposed. It has also been proposed that convergence has played a substantial role in the formation of the Celtic languages. This paper proposes, instead, that linguistic features such as the loss of proto-IE */p/ and the raising of proto-IE */oː/ > /uː/ in final syllables arose only after the proto-Celtic period had concluded, with some subsequent innovations spreading throughout the post-proto-Celtic speech continuum and some ceasing to propagate before doing so, leading to dialect areas within the speech continuum.

Download

Digamma and Prestino and related matters

Zeitschrift fuer celtische Philologie 71, 2024

In questo articolo viene esaminata la sequenza ortografica ⟨uv⟩ attestata nelle forme nom. sg. uv... more In questo articolo viene esaminata la sequenza ortografica ⟨uv⟩ attestata nelle forme nom. sg. uvamoKozis e dat. pl. uvlTiauioPos nell'iscrizione celtica cisalpina sulla pietra di Prestino (LexLep CO․48), ancora controversa dopo decenni di ricerche. Si sostiene che rappresenti /uɸ/ basandosi sulla lettura di quest'ultimo come uvl⟨iT⟩auioPos e sulla sua analisi come composto preposizionale governante 'situato sotto la terra' /uɸlit h awjopos/ < */uɸo-ɸlit h awjopos/ per aplologia. Attenzione viene posta anche all'analisi di dat. pl. ariuonePos, con la quale si costruisce sintatticamente uvl⟨iT⟩auioPos.

format_quoteAnalysis confirms digamma ⟨v⟩ represents /ɸ/ in the stone inscription, contributing to understanding ancient scripts.format_quote

Download

Celtic in Greek characters and implications for Greek and Celtic phonology

Indogermanische Forschung 129, 2024

This paper examines the use of the characters t h eta ⟨θ⟩ and k h i ⟨χ⟩ in Transalpine Celtic ins... more This paper examines the use of the characters t h eta ⟨θ⟩ and k h i ⟨χ⟩ in Transalpine Celtic inscriptions engraved in Greek characters. Since /t h / and /k h /, respectively, were not needed for Celtic, it is conventionally presumed that these characters were repurposed in these inscriptions, t h eta ⟨θ⟩ as the tau Gallicum phoneme and k h i ⟨χ⟩ as the allophone [x] of the phoneme /k/ before /t/. It is argued that, in fact, the aspirated voiceless plosives of ancient Greek had become fricatives in southern Transalpine Gaul before the Celts of the region started employing Greek characters to engrave inscriptions in their language, and thus that t h eta ⟨θ⟩ and k h i ⟨χ⟩ in Transalpine Celtic inscriptions were employed with their proximate phonemic values in Greek. We thus can determine a proximate terminus ante quem for the frication of the ancient Greek aspirated voiceless plosives in southern Transalpine Gaul, which leads to the prospect for Transalpine Celtic having contrasted its plosive series not via the Laryngeal feature [voice], but via [spread glottis].

format_quoteCisalpine Celtic shows that the plosive opposition evolved into /p h t h k h / vs. /p t k/, marking phonetic shifts.format_quote

Download

Eska Grounding Celtic diachronic phonology II

Die Sprache, 2022

This paper continues a series of treatments of sound changes in the Celtic languages that have no... more This paper continues a series of treatments of sound changes in the Celtic languages that have not been satisfactorily or fully explained to date. Sound changes that occurred in proto-Brittonic and early Welsh are treated: (3) the shift of */j/ > /ð/ / ˈVr_V in proto-Brittonic; (4) the shift of the group *-/nthL/- > -/θL/- in Old Welsh; (5) the evolution of the group */lthr/ in Welsh.

format_quoteScottish Gaelic dialects exhibited palatalised voiced interdental fricatives, illustrating dialectal variations in rhotic articulation.format_quote

Download

Observations on the Carona (Bergamo) inscriptions

Cisalpine Celtic literary. Proceedings of the international symposium (Maynooth 23–24 June 2022), 2024

This paper reviews the inscriptions engraved in the Alphabet of Lugano discovered at the apparent... more This paper reviews the inscriptions engraved in the Alphabet of Lugano
discovered at the apparently votive site of Carona (Bergamo), which
probably date to the third through first centuries bc. Though they have
been known about for over a decade, they have not been intensively
investigated, nor have their linguistic features been integrated into what
is known about Cisalpine Celtic. This paper takes some first steps in
those directions based upon the inscriptions published through 2014.

Download

Epigraphic and linguistic observations on the inscription at the so-called Mur d’Hannibal (Liddes, Valais)

Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, Nov 22, 2022

This paper argues that the inscription engraved in the Alphabet of Lugano in sinistrograde ductus... more This paper argues that the inscription engraved in the Alphabet of Lugano in sinistrograde ductus at the so-called Mur d’Hannibal (Liddes, Valais, Switzerland) should be read as Poenino | ieur{e}u ‘he dedicated to P.’ The first form is a thematic dative singular. The desinence may well be Latin, but a case is made that it could be a Celtic desinence that displays a regional phonological development. The fourth character of the second form is a reversed Roman open Я, well attested in Cisalpine and Transalpine Celtic epigraphy. This form also displays a token of dittography, a phenomenon attested elsewhere in the Continental Celtic epigraphic corpus.

Download

Problems of phonetic transcription: The case of the Hiberno-English slit-t

Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 1997

Acoustic and electropalatographic data on the so-called Hiberno-English ‘slit-t’ are reported, an... more Acoustic and electropalatographic data on the so-called Hiberno-English ‘slit-t’ are reported, and the implications these data have for an adequate transcription are discussed. Previous transcription suggestions highlight the difficulty posed by the lack of an IPA diacritic for tongue shape. We conclude that the adoption of an alveolar diacritic (as used in the extensions to the IPA for transcribing disordered speech) could get round these difficulties.

Download

Epigraphic and linguistic observations on the inscription at the so-called Mur d’Hannibal (Liddes, Valais)

Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie

Remarks on the left periphery in the medieval Brittonic languages

Univerzita Karlova, Filozofická fakulta, 2020

This paper proposes that the clausal configuration of affirmative root clauses in the medieval Br... more This paper proposes that the clausal configuration of affirmative root clauses in the medieval Brittonic languages is best characterised as a token of a relaxed verb-second (V2) language, in which the verb can appear as late as sixth position in the clause, but can be preceded by no more than a single argument. The absolute restriction to only a single argument occurring before the verb is related to the evolution of medieval Brittonic V2 from a cleft structure. There are, in fact, tokens of two arguments appearing before the verb in all of the medieval Brittonic languages, but these are exclusively the result of poetic overdetermination.

Download

The emergence of the Celtic languages

Routledge, Sep 10, 2009

Historical Linguistics: Preface

Symptoms of nasal effacement in Hispano-celtic

Palaeohispanica. Revista sobre lenguas y culturas de la Hispania Antigua, 2019

While etymological nasals in inherited /VN.T/ sequences are normally noted in Hispano-Celtic homo... more While etymological nasals in inherited /VN.T/ sequences are normally noted in Hispano-Celtic homoörganically to the heterosyllabic plosive, two other orthographic practices are attested in the corpus: (a) the nasal is not noted at all; (b) the nasal is noted heteroörganically to the plosive. These practices have always been treated as discrete phe- nomena. In this paper, all three practices are united as symptoms of a single phonological process whose varying outcomes are the product of differences in the timing of the gesture which articulates the place of the nasal.

format_quoteThe study proposes nasal effacement as a unified explanation for divergent orthographic practices in Hispano-Celtic inscriptions.format_quote

Download

Where have all the object pronouns gone? The growth of object agreement in earlier Celtic

Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 2010

This paper seeks to demonstrate that the grammatical entities traditionally known as the infixed ... more This paper seeks to demonstrate that the grammatical entities traditionally known as the infixed and suffixed pronouns of the early Insular Celtic languages were synchronically no such thing, but had evolved to become object agreement affixes. Verbs which bore such affixes were polypersonal, inflected for both subject and object agreement, a circumstance that is common in human languages in all parts of the world save for Eurasia, though it is hardly unknown there, too. This paper makes use of extensive cross-linguistic data to demonstrate what object agreement can look like and how it can manifest itself in the languages of the world. Current theoretical models of syntax are employed to illustrate the growth of object agreement from Continental Celtic and its continuing expansion throughout the early history of Irish, in particular, until the advent of the regular use of independent object pronouns in Middle Irish caused the phenomenon of object agreement to cease to exist. Introductory matters §1. Students of the early Insular Celtic languages, particularly Old Irish, have to come to terms with a number of features that are exotic within the Indo-European family, among which are the conjugated prepositions and the so-called infixed and suffixed pronouns. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the latter were not synchronically referential and had evolved to become object agreement morphemes. The verbs to which these morphemes are affixed, in fact, are polypersonal, inflected for both subject and object agreement. Although quite exotic – though hardly otherwise unknown – within the * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Twenty-seventh Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 5–7 October 2007. I should like to thank the members of that audience, and especially Jürgen Uhlich and an anonymous referee, for their helpful comments. All usual disclaimers apply. 1 I am not the first to make this claim. WAGNER 1959: 152–182 passim and GENSLER 1993: 213–215 = 2007: 183–184 attribute the growth of object agreement to contact with a substratal, probably Hamito-Semitic, language. SCHMIDT 1972: 91–92 makes a typological comparison of the structure of the early Insular Celtic verb with that of Adyghe, a member of the Circassian branch of the Abkhaz-Adyghe languages spoken in the Adygea Republic in southwestern Russia and the surrounding region in which object agreement is coded on the verb. DOI10.1515/zcph.2010.004

The genitive plural desinence in Celtic and dialect geography

Die Sprache, 2006

Observations on verbal art in ancient Vergiate

Early Celtic clausal configuration § 1. There is now consensus that the unmarked clausal configur... more Early Celtic clausal configuration § 1. There is now consensus that the unmarked clausal configuration of proto-Celtic was SOV with pro-drop of the loose type, ie, non-core arguments could surface post-verbally and various constituents (or their components, in certain instances) could move leftwards for various discourse purposes. This is the situation in Hispano-Celtic (e. gg., Schmidt 1976; Eska 1994: 17-18; Gorrochategui 1994: 308; Meid 1996: 257-258= 1997: 400; 1997: 397-398), e. gg.: 1 (1) a. Unmarked configuration(MLH ...

The linguistic milieu of *Oderzo 7

Patrick Sims-Williams. 2006. Ancient Celtic place-names in Europe and Asia Minor

Folia Linguistica Historica, 2007

This densely packed volume examines the toponymy recorded by ancient authors and geographers in a... more This densely packed volume examines the toponymy recorded by ancient authors and geographers in an effort to bring to light the geographic extent of those place-names of Celtic origin in the ancient world. The introductory Chapter 1 (pp. 1-15) summarises previous work on ancient Celtic toponymy and sets out the criteria via which Sims-Williams identifies names as Celtic, the most important of which are the presence of regular Celtic sound changes and cognation with ancient, medieval, or modern Celtic etyma. Chapter 2, 'A database approach' (pp. 16-26), describes how the author has made use of the database of The Barrington atlas of the Greek and Roman world (Talbert 2000) in the form of a shortened version-restricted to ancient names-of the CD-ROM which accompanies the atlas (p. 19). Of course, since the atlas is confined to the borders of the classical world, Ireland is poorly covered, as is the area to the northeast of the Rhine-Danube boundary, though, as Sims-Williams notes (p. 21), the coverage of Ireland can be repaired thanks to Ptolemy. The existence of the database in electronic format allowed him to search for strings of graphemes, and to make an early decision concerning which etyma to include in the volume, some being left out owing to their rarity in Celtic toponymy and other strings owing to their great frequency, most tokens of which would ultimately not be relevant. Sims-Williams closes this chapter with a discussion of how he determined which tokens of the search results are 'admissible' and which 'inadmissible', e.g., the string ABAL in Abala in southern Italy could be a token of Celt. abal-'apple' despite its location, but not in the ethnonym Gabali in Transalpine Gaul, for the segmentation Gabali does not make morphological sense (p. 25). Chapter 3, 'The long arm of coincidence' (pp. 27-37), then helpfully addresses the matter of chance resemblance of Celtic-looking strings in what are unlikely to have been Celtic speech areas.

Download

Syntactic Change in Welsh: A Study of the Loss of Verb-Second (review)

Language, 2001

Recent Work in Computational Linguistic Phylogeny

Language, 2004

and the late Larry Trask-to whose memory we dedicate this discussion note-for helpful discussion ... more

Download

Joseph Eska

Uploads

Papers by Joseph Eska

Log In