Isaac, Graham R., “The chronology of the development of Brittonic stops and the spirant mutation”, Journal of Celtic Linguistics 8 (2004): 49–85.
- journal article
The 'standard' account of the development of the Neo-Brittonic fricatives which are written in Welsh as ff, ph, th, ch, is that of Jackson's Language and History in Early Britain, which traces these sounds historically to geminates *pp, *tt, *kk, in Brittonic and Celtic, and Latin pp, tt, cc in loans (with phonological adjustments, these comments apply equally to Cornish and Breton). However, this 'standard' account has been a minority view for some decades. It was challenged early by David Greene, who was followed at various intervals by Anthony Harvey, Peter Wynn Thomas and Patrick Sims-Williams. Although these scholars have presented analyses which differ to a greater or lesser extent from one another, they nevertheless have in common the rejection of the LHEB account, in particular, the tracing of the Welsh spirants directly to old geminates. They see instead various separate changes in relative chronology, including the simplification of the geminates to the corresponding simple stops. I have upheld an LHEB-type analysis in previous work, and in the present paper will show in greater detail, 1) why the revisionist view is false (false predictions of how the attested forms should turn out), and 2) elaborate on the actual mechanisms involved in the development of Neo-Brittonic consonants, emphasizing the nature of phonology as a cognitive system of knowledge, rather than a physical system of sounds and articulations.
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