- Strutture e documenti di lingue indoeuropee occidentali 1: Il latino; Le lingue celtiche by Riccardo Ambrosini
This volume by Riccardo Ambrosini seeks to provide a description and analysis of the principal linguistic structures of Latin and the Celtic languages from a historical-comparative perspective. It concentrates, in particular, on language change as a continuous process in its analysis of the evolution of individual features across succeeding linguistic phases.
Latin takes up the bulk of the volume (1–266). As in many traditional grammatical analyses from the diachronic perspective, phonology and morphology are treated in considerable detail, but syntax is not dealt with at all. I found the sections dealing with phonology to be the most illuminating in that they go into the phonetics of sound change and discuss aspects of linguistic variation leading to change as they are pertinent, subjects that one often does not find in traditional historical grammars. A makes very good use of changes in Latin orthography, particularly from the pre-Classical period, in these sections. The grammatical discussion is followed by seventy-three pages of texts ranging from the pre-Classical period to the first half of the seventh century ad. Each is accompanied by a short commentary on important linguistic features.
Many fewer pages are devoted to the Celtic languages (267–329), which were composed in collaboration with Filippo Motta. In a volume that adopts a fairly traditional historical-comparative perspective, it is somewhat surprising that only the Insular Celtic languages, which are attested from the early medieval period onwards, are treated, for considerable information can be obtained from the much earlier—though fragmentarily—attested Celtic languages of continental Europe. This part of the volume treats the complex morphophonological patterns of the Insular Celtic mutational system, word-order patterns, the inflectional morphology of nominals, and some aspects of the verbal system, including the well-known dual inflectional system attested especially in Old Irish. As in the first part of the volume, the grammatical discussion is followed by twenty-seven pages of texts from Old Irish and the modern Celtic languages. Twenty of these pages consist of a useful word-by-word gloss of some sections of the Old Irish tale Scéla mucce meic Dathó.
Scholars seeking information on the phonological and morphological structures of Latin can consult this volume to good use. The Celtic section is, unfortunately, far too brief to serve as more than an outline of the general structures of these languages.