Review of P de Bernardo Stempel: The Accents of Celtic, ZcP 72 (2025), 449-466 This is a preprint copy of my review of The Accents of Celtic, which appeared in ZcP 72.

Just to follow up:
www.academia.edu/145169689/Re...

I will soon have a preprint available on Academia & ResearchGate for those without ZcP access.

Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel: The accents of Celtic. New light on the older and oldest Article Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel: The accents of Celtic. New light on the older and oldest was published on November 1, 2025 in the journal Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie (volume 72, issue 1...

www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

I wrote a review of a book. It was not a very good book.

I did suspect as much, alas. Sorry, I should have used an emoji to indicate a more tongue-in-cheek tone. Aberystwyth certainly isn't the easiest place to get to: I'm having to fly (sadly) to Manchester, whence a very long train ride..!

That's a real shame! There isn't a ferry you can hop on for a quick jaunt over the Irish Sea?

Very much looking forward to attending and speaking at this event this coming Saturday.

It's certainly my plan to offer more Old Irish! At the moment, it can only be offered as an "additional Western Indo-European language," so it has to compete a bit for attention. This semester, I offered Continental Celtic, but with a healthy splash of Old Irish in the historical grammar classes. 🙂

Review of DE BERNARDO STEMPEL, PATRIZIA: Muttergöttinnen und ihre Votivformulare. Eine sprachhistorische Studie. (Preprint) This is a preprint version of my review of Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel's book Muttergöttinnen und ihre Votivformulare, which appeared in Kratylos 67 (2022), 105-130. Pagination here does not reflect ...

Just to return to this, here you go: www.academia.edu/127846170/Re...

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No worries at all: it's not even that old 🙂 I'll ask the editors of Kratylos whether I'm allowed to upload a preprint to Academia.edu, etc. I'd really hope that book doesn't become influential: at least linguistically, it's pretty much nonsensical.

This seems insufficiently ambitious as an etymology, if those are the rules of play. I will rather take *poppycock as my starting point.

To be fair, there are no books out there that collect etymologies to which one might refer for an etymology of Latin annus. Maybe we should write a series of them, one for each major branch of Indo-European. We could call them the Maynooth-Würzburg Lexica of Indo-European Etymologies.

It really is best not to read this stuff unless you have to... neat that, within the space of a paragraph, the <e> in Ataecia goes from denoting "Continental Celtic palatalisation" (*facepalm*) to being part of an actual diphthong /ai/ that can be monophthongised to /e(:)/. What a load of......

Sadly, I committed to doing so some time ago, and the editors of a particular Zeitschrift have been very patient, given my recent major life changes. My current notes/draft contain things I probably should not put into print, so moderating that will be most of the work.

I'm flattered! (Still summoning the fortitude to review this particular tome...)

"...a blend of signs and symbols"... so, a script...?
Also, weird to cite Etruscan as a "script whose language is unknown"!

For me, "but I got sick and couldn't go that one time" feels like it requires "gone" rather than "been". "Been IN London" allows all three concessives.
One might (whimsically) argue that "I am to London bound" is be + locative with "to" + adverbial "bound". But that is silly.

Ooh, I need to see these!

I'm certainly inclined to agree that it's probably also to be found in Gaulish, e.g. rinoti. I hadn't even thought about marcosior in that respect, but of course, that makes sense as a denominal formation!
I'd love to hear any other thoughts you might have on the paper, of course. 🙂

Celtic influence in the Latin of the curse tablet from Ratcliffe-on-Soar (Nottinghamshire) Article Celtic influence in the Latin of the curse tablet from Ratcliffe-on-Soar (Nottinghamshire) was published on December 1, 2024 in the journal Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie (volume 71, iss...

Nice to end the year with the publication of a paper, especially when it's one I've been trying to get done on and off for years. If you're interested in language contact in Roman Britain, here's a link.
degruyter.com/document/doi...

Oh, and merry Christmas to all. 🙂