Lucht, Martina, “Grundwortschatz des Altirischen”, Ph. D. thesis, Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 2007.
- Ph. D. thesis
With certain methodological restrictions, this doctoral thesis will seek to apply a list of 100 basic terms (the so-called "basic core vocabulary"), created by Morris SWADESH in 1955 (International Journal of American Linguistics 21, p. 212 ff.) for the purposes of lexicostatistics/glottochronology and claiming to be universally applicable, to Classical Old Irish, i.e. the language of the Biblical Glosses of the 8th to 9th centuries A.D. The aim is to provide an overview of the words employed to designate the terms in question and to review their etymology.
The diachronic investigation is carried out in accordance with the principles of the historical-comparative method, with particular emphasis on the question of whether cognates in other Celtic and/or Indo-European languages can be found. Consideration is also given to the opposite end of the temporal axis by the examination of equivalent designations as found in Modern Irish.
The historical dimension also necessitates an investigation of less frequently employed synonyms together with etymological cognates with different meanings, as either may have been used as the respective “basic” term during different linguistic stages. The overview of lexical items and their etymology is arranged in alphabetical order (and therefore referred to as an "index") and constitutes the major portion of the thesis.
In a final chapter, the results of the investigations are considered from various aspects and compared with the results obtained by Robert ELSIE 1979 ("The Position of Brittonic. A Synchronic and Diachronic Analysis of Genetic Relationships in the Basic Vocabulary of Brittonic Celtic." Phil. Diss., Bonn) applying a similar method to Brythonic languages. As can be anticipated, the basic vocabulary of these two branches of the Celtic language family, i.e. Irish (Goidelic) on the one hand and Brythonic on the other, exhibits numerous correspondences. Nevertheless, these correspondences cannot be simply accepted as proof of a common development of those two branches within a linguistic unity referred to as "(Proto-) Insular Celtic", as has been postulated by many recent scholars. Rather, these correspondences must be viewed within the context of Common Celtic as a whole - at least as long as corresponding evidence from Continental Celtic is lacking. In fact, some minor similarities seem to indicate a closer relationship between Brythonic and Gaulish.
Within the larger context of Indo-European languages as a whole, lexical correspondences between the basic vocabularies of Old Irish on the one hand and other Indo-European, non-Celtic languages on the other may also be taken as evidence for the degree of genetic relationship between Celtic and other Indo-European branches. It has been found that the greatest number of lexical correspondences is with Germanic, followed by Italic. Identical results were obtained by ELSIE (1979) so that all available evidence points towards a closer relationship between the branches of Celtic, Germanic and Italic. This might corroborate the so-called "Western Indo-European" thesis which has been postulated for some time by certain scholars (e.g. Antoine MEILLET, "Les dialectes indo-européennes", Paris 1908, p. 131).
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