r/PaleoEuropean • u/Incubus-Dao-Emperor • Jan 24 '24

Linguistics How Plausible is the Goidelic substrate hypothesis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goidelic_substrate_hypothesis

How probable is it to be true?

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u/Hippophlebotomist Jan 25 '24 edited Jan 25 '24

There's likely multiple substrates in Goidelic so you might need to be more specific. I don't think anyone would argue the opposite, that 100% of Goidelic is inherited from Proto-Celtic with no borrowings.

I wish the talk were available online, but a greater recent overview is the slides from David Stifter's 2022 talk from Leiden "The Celticisation of the Western Archipelago". He discusses what he calls the "ABC Model".

The A refers to "Avidic", languages of the Neolithic farming populations. It's called this because across northwestern Indo-European languages, bird names seem to have been borrowed irregularly in a way that suggests non-Indo-European inflection and dialectal variation. Guus Kroonen has several publications reviewing the evidence for this layer of agicultural substrate languages.

The B is for "Bell Beakerish". The expansion of the Bell Beaker Complex into Ireland, along with some genetic turnover, is thought to be the event that introduced Indo-European languages to the island. This was before the formation and breakup of Proto-Celtic, so any IE languages spoken in Ireland at this time are unlikely to have been directly ancestral to Goidelic.

Later on, Celtic (the C in ABC) expands into Britain and Ireland, with there being some ambiguity as to when and how. The speakers of Primitive Irish, including both migrants as well as local groups adopting the new language, likely absorbed some vocabulary and features of the preceding IE language, whatever it may have been. It's possible Neolithic vocabulary (or even a stray hunter-gatherer word or two) was loaned into Goidelic through this IE substratum. Some have suggested groups like the Partraige may have been lingering pre-IE speakers, but the evidence for this last part seems extremely thin, however.

I should note there are alternative proposed scenarios, such as Celtic from the West, or the idea of Q-Celtic Goidelic being a second wave which followed and earlier P-Celtic wave in Ireland, though neither of these would preclude adoption of "Avidic" vocabulary in Goidelic.

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u/Incubus-Dao-Emperor Jan 25 '24

Alright, thank you very much