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trae Chonnlai V-XVI¹¹, Scéla Mucce Meic Dathó (II)¹². Außer Textproben und aus dem frühen Irischen ins Russische zu übersetzenden Übungssätzen (vgl. e.g. II) werden dem Lernenden auch andere Aufgaben gestellt, darunter die Übersetzung russischer Sätze ins Altirische (vgl. e.g. IV).

Im Ganzen vermittelt die Einführung dem Lernenden einen ausgezeichneten Ein­blick in die Grammatik, Literatur und Kultur des frühen Irischen.¹³

Meckenheim Karl Horst SCHMIDT

NEDOMA, ROBERT & STIFTER, DAVID (Hrsg.): * h2nr. Festschrift für Heiner Eichner.

Wien: Wiener Sprachgesellschaft, Harrasowitz Verlag, 2010 (Die Sprache. Zeit­schrift für Sprachwissenschaft, Bd. 48 [2009]; ISSN 0376-401X). xvi + 292 S., ISBN 978-3-447-06226-8. € 69.

This special issue of “Die Sprache” is a Festschrift for Heiner Eichner, containing thirty-three articles on a wide variety of topics concerned with Indo-European and the Indo-European languages. In addition to the articles it includes an introduction by the editors, a tabula gratulatoria, and a list of linguistic publications by Professor Eichner u p t o 2009.

I will discuss first the following articles, which are likely to be of particular interest to Celticists.

Albert BOCK and Benjamin BRUCH, “Nucleus length and vocalic alternation in Cornish diphthongs” (34-43), discuss the “vocalic alternation” seen in Middle Cornish whereby British stressed *ī > early Middle Cornish [i] and *i > [ ] seem to show different reflexes in polysyllabic and monosyllabic words, e.g. MC. bethaf beside byth. In particular, they focus on this variation when found in diphthongs originally containing these front vowels.

Bock and Bruch’s position is largely based on philological evidence from Cornish texts. They conclude that there is very little evidence for “vocalic alternation” in the reflex of early stressed *iu > [ ], while variation is found for *īu > [i ]. They posit a neutralisation of vowel length in half-long stressed open penultimate syllables pre-ceded by a sound-change [ ] > [e] in all environments, both of which occurred in the course of the Middle Cornish period. This resulted in a difference of quantity, but not quality between the nuclei of stressed diphthongs in polysyllables and monosyllables. The result of these sound changes was the orthographic differences attested in the texts, along with influence from contemporary English spelling.

11 Verf. weist S. 18 hin auf die russische Übersetzung des Textes durch A. SMIRNOV (1929: Ir-landskiye sagi. Leningrad: Academia) und auf K. MCCONE (2000: Echtrae Chonnlai and the Beginnings ofVernacular Writing in Ireland. Maynooth: NUI).

12 Vgl. die klassische Edition des Textes durch THURNEYSEN 1935 (Dublin: The Stationery Office, reprinted 1951).

13 Zu den Schwächen des Übungsbuches gehören die sparsame Zitierung der Sekundärliteratur sowie gelegentliche Fehler in der Sprachgeschichte und Druckfehler; vgl. z.B. auf S. VIII: *patēr anstelle von *p tēr; ebenda ist zu korrigieren, daß der Initialakzent nicht inselkeltisch, sondern nur goidelisch bezeugt ist.

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294 Besprechungen

This explanation is intended to replace that of Nicholas Williams, who has ex-plained “vocalic alternation” as due to two separate processes, the first involving the reduction of originally pretonic high front vowels to schwa in the Old Cornish period, with subsequent restoration to [e] when the accent shifted to the penultimate syllable. Ihe second is the result of the “prosodic shift”, which reduced half-long and long vow­els by one mora, resulting in laxing and lowering of [i] to [ ] and then to [e]. These changes occurred prior to the earliest Middle Cornish texts, but were concealed by conservatismofscribalpractice.

Bock and Bruch’s theory has the advantage that it does not require the positing of two very similar sound changes at different times; the appearance of both of these changes being concealed by long periods of scribal conservatism. However, neither of these phenomena is unknown in the history of other languages. Whether or not their argument is accepted, their focus on textual evidence is admirable. The article itself is exceedingly concise. No doubt this is due to the pressures of word-limits in a Festschrift, but the effect is quite disconcerting; this reader found it almost impossible to comprehend from the article itself what Bock and Bruch were arguing against.

Kim MCCONE, ‘‘Kochen’’ (107-111) considers the Celtic reflexes of the verb root *bheru ‘kochen, sieden’. He argues that Welsh 3 sg. pres. beirw ‘boils, seethes’ should be compared with Latin feruēre ‘to be boiling hot, boil’, both deriving from a stative *bhrueH1. The vocalism of feruēre was influenced by feruĕre < *bherue/o, to which he also traces Old Irish berbaid, berba ‘cooks’. Although all Old Irish forms point to a weak verb *bheruā, strong verbs ending in a labial regularly adopted the weak ā subjunctive and s preterite, and thef future is productive in Middle Irish. McCone finds a single Middle Irish form which suggests *bherue/o, and points to the parallel of erbaid, erbai ‘entrusts’, which he has reconstructed as * h1erbhe/o and which inflects as a weak ī stem already in Old Irish.

Since so much of the paradigm of berbaid, berba can be secondary, the equation with Lat. feruĕre < *bherue/o is plausible. But there is at least a minor quibble with Mc-Cone’s picture of its analogical development. In the case of erbaid, erbai, the adoption of weak suffixes everywhere else in the paradigm led to a change in the present too, where the 3 sg. conjunct was altered from *eirb to erbai (weak ī stem). It would be interesting to know why berbaid, the only other verb to have switched into a weak conjugation in this way, chose a 3 sg. conjunct berba (weak ā-stem) instead.

Aaron GRIFFITH, “A note on pronominal coordination in Old Irish” (66-70), draws attention to methods of co-ordinating a pronoun with a noun. The usual way to do this is for the verb or preposition in the clause to be marked as plural, with the omission of a singular pronoun that represents an element which is already known, e.g. con·ráncatar ocus Dubthach ‘he (lit. ‘they’) and Dubthach met’. Griffith observes that there is another type of co-ordination, well-established in Old Irish, in which agreement is with only the singular pronoun, e.g. téit ocus a máthair ‘he and his mother go’, thorom-sa ocus Chonchobar ‘across me and Conchobar’. It should be noted that when the pronoun is the subject of the verb it can also be omitted, as in the first example; this is not explicitly stated by Griffith, though it is of course less surprising than when the verb is plural, since Irish is a pro-drop language.

A similar pattern pertains when two nouns are co-ordinated: the verb agrees only with the first, e.g. in·coissegar deacht ocus doinacht críst ‘the Godhead and Manhood

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of Christ are indicated’. It is remarkable that the types of co-ordination identified by Griffith have not been previously noticed in the literature. Uns description of his observation is therefore very valuable, and will no doubt be the basis for future work on the development of these different types of co-ordination in Old Irish.

Iheresa-Susannah ILLES, “Modern Irish nominal declension: standard and applica-tion” (71-79), provides an overview of the way that a selection of grammars, diction-aries and textbooks for second-language learners represent the Irish nominal system. She finds that the grammars are concerned only with the modern standard system and consequently follow the standard method of categorising nouns into five declensions. Textbooks, however, tend to move away from this system, and in particular to include dialectal variation. Dictionaries occupy a mid-point. Nonetheless, Illés concludes that the standard system of five declensions is well-established in the teaching of Irish as a second language, and is unlikely to be replaced. The article includes as an appendix a table summarising the different systems of the works surveyed.

Karin STÜBER’s article is “Zur Subjektskodierung mit do ‘zu, für’ beim altirischen Verbalnomen” (241-246). The usual way to mark the subject of a verbal noun in Old Irish is by means of a prepositional phrase using do, for example ingnad lesom cutuim doib ‘Es scheint ihm seltsam, dass sie fallen’. This is very unusual from a typological perspective, since the subject of a verbal noun is usually marked by means of an adnominal genitive, or in the same way that the agent is marked in the passive, which is itself usually by means of an instrumental or ablative preposition phrase. However, Old Irish uses the prepositions la or ó for the agent in a passive construction.

Stüber compares the Old Irish state of affairs with the “double dative” construction in Vedic, where both the subject and the object of a verbal abstract are marked by means of a dative noun phrase. She suggests that the explanation of the Old Irish subject marking with do may be the same as that of the Vedic double dative; that is, that the dative noun/prepositional phrase was originally a complement of the verb in the matrix clause rather than of the verbal noun, and was then misinterpreted as marking the subject of the verbal noun. Stüber provides convincing examples taken from the Old Irish glosses which allow for the possibility of this misinterpretation, and her argument seems extremely plausible.

Paul WIDMER writes on “Die präverbale Partikel *haiV des Brittanischen als kom­plexer Konjunktor” (255-262). His discussion focusses on the etymology of this pre-verbal particle/relative pronoun, which appears as Old Welsh hai, Middle Welsh ae, ai and a and must come from British *haiV. Widmer suggests that we should recon-struct *soio, i.e. a combination of the inherited demonstrative pronoun *so/to used as a resumptive pronoun at the beginning of a relative clause, and the relative pronoun *io. He finds parallels in the Germanic languages and in Old Persian.

The attractive feature of Widmer’s reconstruction *soio is that it explains the len-ition of the initial of the following verb characteristic of a, by comparison with the etymology of Schrijver from a pronominal antecedent *sosim which is seen in Gaulish sosin ‘that’ andperhaps OIr. a N, aní ‘that (which)’.

However, there is a serious omission in Widmer’s account, which is an explanation of how the use of his proposed complex of resumptive pronoun plus relative pronoun *soio fits in with the rest of what we know about how relative clauses work in the Celtic languages. The details of the history and formation of relatives in Celtic are

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extremely convoluted and somewhat controversial, but the basic facts are as follows: relative clauses were originally marked in British, as in Irish and Gaulish, by a particle *io which was attached either to a simple verb or the first preverb of a compound verb. Evidence for this in British can be found in the lenition of the post-preverbal verb stem in relative clauses in early Middle Welsh (equivalent to the Irish leniting relative clause), in the Old Welsh preverb emmi < *ambiio, and in MW. yssyd ‘who/which is’ < *estiio.

We therefore have evidence from British that it originally formed relative clauses by attaching *io to the verb, a trait shared by Gaulish and Irish. Consequently, it is hard to accept that it formed them with an resumptive pronoun *so to which *io was attached. Without further explanation of how Widmer’s *soio can be made to fit into the known system, his explanation seems unlikely.

Other articles: Katsiaryna ACKERMAN, “Zum slavischen asigmatischen Aorist” (1-10), argues the Slavic asigmatic aorist is derived from the Indo-European root-aorist. Ina ARAPI, “Die Lokution do me thanë und andere synonyme Wortgefüge im Al­banischen” (11-19) collects evidence for this phrase in Old Gheg authors with regard to the Albanian infinitive. Irene BALLES, “Lang, rund und krumm: zu einigen indoger­manischen Zusammenbildungen” (20-26), discusses the derivation of nouns and ad-jectives from original syntagms involving a verb and one of its arguments, e.g. Proto-Celtic *krundi/o from *korum dheh1 ‘Horn machen’. Alfred BAMMESBERGER, “Gotisch swesa (Skeireins II, 25-26). Mit Anmerkungen zum Dual beim Adjektiv” (27-33), iden-tifies reflexes of the original dual in Gothic and Old English. Birgit CHRISTIANSEN, “Typen von Sanktionsformeln in den lykischen Grabinschriften und ihre Funktionen” (44-54), discusses the use of curse- and penalty-formulas in Lycian grave-inscriptions. Anna Helene FEULNER, “Kuhns Gesetze im Beowulf” (55-65), concludes that finite verbs in Germanic were not affected by Kuhn’s Law of proclitic placement. Michael JANDA, “Eine mykenische Muse gratuliert Henier Eichner” (80-86), argues that the Mycenaean word manasa should be understood as Mnāsa, a deified abstract noun ‘Denken, Gedenken, Erinnerung’ < *mneh2tih2.

Gert KLINGENSCHMITT, “Zur Etymologie des Lateinischen: discere” (86-91), pro-poses a new etymology of discere < *disdeke/o ‘ich nehme (geistig) auseinander’. Rose­marie LÜHR, “Das Formans la tā in Nomen und Verb” (92-97), identifies a class of prefixed verbs formed with this suffix. Joachim MATZINGER, “Illyrisch und Albanisch - Erkenntnisse und Desiderata” (98-106) argues for a greater focus on toponyms as evidence for the relationship between Illyrian and Albanian. H. Craig MELCHERT, “The animate nominative plural in Luvian and Lycian” (112- 117), argues that the anim-ate nominative plural *-Vnsi in Luvian, Lycian and Carian is due to reciprocal influ-ence between demonstrative and noun endings. Robert NEDOMA, “Matronae Aviait-inehae” (118-126), derives Aviaitinehae from Proto-Germanic *auiaihtīn ‘Glück, Hilfe, Schutzbesitz’. Norbert OETTINGER, “Die Derivationsbasis von idg. *daiuér (* sh2aiuér) ‘Bruder des Ehemannes’” (127-131), unconvincingly traces *daiuér back to *sh2eiuér (root *sh2ei‘to bind’) and discusses its derivational history.

Johannes REINHART, “Zur westslawischen Lehnwortkunde: westslawisch *c lo ‘Zoll’” (132-138), finds that OHG. zol was borrowed into the other West Slavic lan-guages via Old Czech. Ulla REMMER, “Νι βη und die Navagas. Eine Dialektform in der griechischen Epik” (139-144), argues that Νι βη is a dialectal form coming

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from *neuogwuo/eh2 ‘junge Kühe, Jungvieh habend’ or *(h1)neungwuo/eh2 neun Kühe habend’. Elisabeth RIEKEN, “Zur Entwicklung der neutralen a Stämme im Hethit-ischen” (145-155), shows how a combination of phonological and morphological factors led to a great reduction in the number of neuter a stems (< *o stems) in Hittite. Velizar SADOVSKI, “Ritual formulae and ritual pragmatics in Veda and Avesta” (156-166), compares rituals for protection in war and prediction of the result of battle in Vedic and Avestan texts. Corinna SALOMON, “Das Phonem als Entdeckung der Griechen” (167-174), discusses the development of writing systems with regards to the question of the recognition of the concept of the phoneme.

Stefan SCHAFFNER, “Althochdeutsch foraharo m. n-St. ‘Verkündiger, Herold’ und harēn sw Vb. III ‘rufen, anrufen’” (175-181), derives these OHG. forms from a root kehxs. Klaus T. SCHMIDT, “Zu den konsonantischen Fernwirkungen im Tocharischen” (182-191), collects evidence for dissimilatory changes in Tocharian involving labi-als. Rüdiger SCHMITT, “Nabarzanes und sein Anhang. Ein iranistisch-onomastisches Lehrstück” (192-200), attempts to identify the original Persian form of the name Ναβαρζ νης. Stefan SCHUMACHER, “Eine neue venetische Inschrift aus Ampass bei Hall in Tirol” (201-208), describes a Venetic inscription found on an offering in a Rhaetic temple, and discusses how it came to be there. Günter SCHWEIGER, “Frag­ment einer weiteren neuen altpersischen Inschrift aus Susa” (209-216), provides a reading and attempted reconstruction and translation of a badly damaged Old Per­sian inscription. Martin SEYER and Recai TEKOGLU, “Das Felsgrab des Stamaha in Ostlykien - ein Zeugnis für die Ostpolitik des Perikle von Limyra?” (217-226), de-scribe a rock-cave with a Lycian inscription, providing a reading and translation, and discussing its possible historical connections. Wojciech SOWA, “Lesbisch στιοπ μων” (227-232), concludes that this hapax legomenon comes from the Lesbian poetic dialect. David STIFTER, “Neue Inschriften in norditalischer Schrift aus Österreich” (233-240), describes and discusses two brief inscriptions, one written in Rhaetic and Latin let­ters, one in Venetic script; the latter, consisting of the two letters ]a.u. may perhaps be Celtic. Xavier TREMBLAY, “Urindogermanisch *n#” (247-254) appealingly (but specu-latively) proposes a PIE rule *n# > *r#, and that this is the origin of the Indo-European r/n-heteroclites and the 3 pl. perfect ending *-r.

Cambridge NicholasZAiR

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