Remus Iosifescu

MA Comparative IE Libguistics 2016-2017

SUMMARY ON COWGILL (1970)

In the beginning, Cowgill states his claim. While on one hand he agrees with Watkins
that Italic and Celtic are not to be put together into an unitary branch of IE languages on the
bases of phonology (here the shared innovations are trivial), on the other hand he reopens the
discussion on morphological innovations. In opposition with Watkins, he believes that a
relative chronology can be established for them, and that these should be very old, while the
significant differences between the two morghological systems can be proved to be younger.
Thus, Italo-Celtic was a branch which had enough time to commonly innovate the
morphological system, but split relatively early.
The core of the article is a detailed discussion on superlatives in Italic and Celtic, with
numerous examples from other IE or non-IE languages. At first Cowgill talks about the
suffixes which have arrived to the comparative and superlative meaning in most IE languages
who have created such grammatical categories: *-yes and *-(t)ero- for comparatives and
superlatives alike and *tmmo- and *(m)mo only for superlatives. A common innovation of
Italo-Celtic is the usage of *yes- only to mark the comparative, while *-(t)ero- preserved its
original function. The discussion proceeds with the origins of these suffixes. While *-yesand *-(t)ero- originally functioned as normal suffixes in different ways and *-tmmo- derives
from *-(m)mo-, the main question is the origin of the latter. In this respect, he is in opposition
with most Indo-Europeanists before him who postulate an origin in the field of ordinal
numerals, other that the one for "first". Analysing different arguments such as the lack of such
transfers in most languages and the semantics, he concludes that its origin is in the
aforementioned numeral for "first" which is itself a superlative in meaning, formed with an
otherwise common suffix *-mo-.
While he states that there is nothing exciting about the usage of *-tmmo- in ItaloCeltic, its further addition after the zero grade of *-yes-, *-is- to form *-ismmo-, regularly
used as a suffix to form superlatives in both Italic and Celtic besides similar formations, but
with *to- in other languages (forming *-is-to-), is a remarkable common morphological
innovation of the two. He proceeds by analysing problematic forms like brma (arguably, a
superlative in *-ismmo- from brevis), the false superlative ipsimus or the mystery of minor,
minimus, and at least the origin of productive issimo- in Latin through emphatic gemination.
Then Cowgill gives a very long talk about the existance of a separate *-smmo- in Iatlic and
Celtic. Here, while there are in Latin examples like maximus which can be explained through
a syncope of i from the suffix issimo-, most forms which might point to such a suffix lie in
Celtic. He concludes that there never was a suffix *-smmo-.
Other morphological innovations briefly taken into consideration are: the common
usage of a mysterious - suffix to form the thematic optative (instead of oy- used by other
languages) and the use of r- as a medio-passive marker.
In conclusion, he proposes a likely chain of events in the migration of Italic, Celtic
and Germanic from the mother land which might explain the actual state of the facts in these
IE branches.