Watkins Calvert. Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb: Volume I: The sigmatic aorist

Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1969. — 209 p.The etymological groundwork in the Celtic languages has already been done ; the laws of phonological correspondences between Indo-European and the several Celtic languages can be stated with a high degree of precision, indeed a fair measure of historical certainty. Yet a brief inspection of the relevant portions of the classical works of Thurneysen, Pedersen, or Lewis-Pedersen is sufficient to convince one that the historical morphology of the Celtic languages remains strikingly obscure ; with the exception of the nominal declension, the inflexional categories have never been systematically accounted for in comparative Celtic grammar. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the verb. This formal obscurity, coupled with certain peculiar syntactical traits of the Celtic verb, have led certain scholars, such as J. Pokorny, E. Lewy, H. Hartmann, and H. Wagner, to a variety of hypotheses of the presence of sundry ill-defined non-Indo-European substrata in Celtic, particularly on the shadowy elfin-populated Emerald Isle.