Celtica, vol. 24 (review)

After a long interval of near inactivity in the nineties, Dublin’s School of Celtic Studies has recently resumed the regular publication of its journal Celtica. Most of the contributions in this volume are dedicated to Irish philology and literature. Only articles of linguistic interest are discussed here.

Joseph Eska, in ‘On syntax and semantics in Alise-Sainte-Reine (Côte-D’Or), again’ (101–20), reviews recent scholarship devoted to one of the beststudied Gaulish texts (RIG L-13); yet uncertainties remain in its analysis. A bone of contention is whether the syntagma etic gobedbi is to be interpreted as a dative plural ‘and to the smiths’, or as a comitative instrumental ‘and with the smiths’, an analysis in vogue in recent years (105–7). Eska’s aim in this well-argued article is ‘to address these new arguments in defence of the traditional interpretation’ (103). To this end he first demonstrates that the syntagma ‘connector + comitative instrumental’ would be exceptional in Indo-European syntax (105–7) and that attempts at interpreting etic as the 3rd singular of the copula ‘is’ + connective -c, used as a relative marker, meet with syntactic objections (108–10). He then proceeds to show that the discontinuity between the two constituents of the main verb’s dative argument (Ucuete ‘to Ucuetis’ and etic gobedbi dugijontijo Ucuetin in Alisija ‘and to the smiths who honor Ucuetis in Alisia’, separated by the accusative sosin celicnon ‘this edifice’) may be explained by a rightward shift of ‘heavy’ constituents to sentence-final position (113–15). But although the discontinuity can be justified in the suggested grammatical way, it can also be ascribed to metrical requirements: Pace Eska (107–8), the inscription is divided into two halves. The high amount of parallelism between them (equal number of stressed words, nearly equal number of syllables in (half)lines, correspondence in constituent positions) suggests a conscious stylistic design. As to Eska’s suggestion that -bi is a dative plural ending, cp. the inscription Ic <duφniφanuaφi> on helmet A from Ženjak-Negau, possibly a dative plural (Heiner Eichner apud Robert Nedoma, Die Inschrift auf dem Helm B von Negau, Vienna: Fassbaender, 1995, p. 20).

In a traditionally short contribution, Eric P. Hamp, in ‘Gaulish ci, -c, Old Irish cé, Ogam KOI’ (129), explains the demonstrative particles mentioned in the title as diachronically and morphologically different locative formations of the PIE demonstrative stem *ќo-/ќe-. Kim McCone, in ‘Old Irish na nní: A case of quid pro quo?’ (168–81), starts with a review of Peter Schrijver’s Studies in the history of Celtic pronouns and particles (Maynooth, 1997), rightly rejecting Schrijver’s claim that the PIE nom/acc singular neuter demonstrative pronoun was *tid; the Celtic evidence ties in perfectly with the communis opinio of PIE *tod (168–72). McCone then discusses the PIE interrogative/indefinite pronominal stems *k^u̯o-/ k ^u̯i-, for which a suppletion of the type suggested by Schrijver for the demonstrative can be posited with more confidence. From a PIE pre-form *nek^u̯id, the Old Irish neuter indefinite pronouns ní (stressed) and na^H (unstressed) can be derived directly by the application, in this order, of two uncontroversial Insular Celtic sound laws: (i) loss of final *d /ð/, and (ii) loss of absolute word final short *i (174–78). This derivation allows a similar explanation for another irregular pronominal neuter aill ‘(an)other’ (178).

Malachy Mckenna’s aim in ‘Grammatical gender in a nineteenth-century Ulster text’ (182–204) is ‘to discuss what the evidence is for determining the gender in [the modern Irish text] The spiritual rose’. He sets up a list of twenty-seven grammatical criteria that can help to determine noun gender (184–97) and then applies them to his text. A number of...