English is the new Latin

Photograph taken in a public park in Tehran in March 2017:

The bird's name is given in three versions - Farsi Tuti touġdār, Scientific Psittacula krameri, and in what is labelled "Latin", but what is clearly English: Rose-ringe parakeet. (And let's just let it slide that there's a typo and the name ought to be written "Rose-ringed parakeet").

Gaulish Stress

This is a re-posting of a comment on Languagehat's blog. In a discussion that somehow moved from a discussion of register differences in Japanese to initial mutations and stress in Celtic (one of the many charms of discussions on that blog), I posted some half-remembered information from Pierre-Yves Lambert, "La Langue Gauloise", Éditions Errance, Paris, 2003 and promised to check and post what I found. So here are (1) the relevant paragraphs in French (from p. 48), (2) an English translation (did it myself, so please point out any mistakes), and (3) a few comments.


(1) L’accent en gaulois
Nous n’avons pas beaucoup d’indices sur l’accent gaulois; quelques formes du latin de Gaule ont un comportement spécial. On a depuis longtemps relevé les deux traitements que présentent les noms des cités gauloises, un accent antépénultième donne Rennes, Bourges, et l’accent pénultième donne Redon, Berry.
Bitúriges > Bourges
Bituríges > Berry
Ainsi Nemausus donne (accent pénultième) Nemours, mais avec accent sur l’antépénultième, Nîmes; Condate donne Condes où Condé, Arelate donee Arles ou Arlet.
Autres exemples de formes accentuées sur l’antépénultième: Caturiges > Chorges, Cambo-ritum (« le gué courbé ») Chambord, Eburovices Evreux, Durocasses Dreux, Bodiocasses Bayeux…    
En fait, les formes avec accent antépénultième ne sont pas celles qui posent problème : on en avait aussi en latin et même en latin tardif (ex. : hóminem > homme). Le problème est de savoir pourquoi certains de ces mots sont devenus accentués sur la pénultième, avec allongement de la voyelle pénultième (Cóndate > Condáte > Condāte > Condé). Il n’est pas sûr que le phénomène remonte vraiment au gaulois : cela peut être dû à des disparités socio-linguistiques dans la société gallo-romaine.

(2) Stress in Gaulish
We don’t have many clues about Gaulish stress; some forms of the Latin of Gaul have a special behavior. One has long noted the two treatments that the names of Gaulish cities present, an antepenultimate stress gives Rennes, Bourges, and the penultimate stress gives Redon, Berry.
Bitúriges > Bourges
Bituríges > Berry
Thus Nemausus gives (penultimate stress) Nemours, but with stress on the antepenultimate, Nîmes; Condate gives Condes or Condé, Arelate gives Arles or Arlet.
Other examples of forms stressed on the antepenultimate: Caturiges > Chorges, Cambo-ritum (“the curved ford”) Chambord, Eburovices Evreux, Durocasses Dreux, Bodiocasses Bayeux…    
Actually, the forms with antepenultimate accent are not those that pose a problem: those were there also in Latin and even in Late Latin (e.g.: hóminem > homme). The problem is to know why some of these words have become accented on the penultimate, with lengthening of the penultimate vowel (Cóndate > Condáte > Condāte > Condé). It is not certain that the phenomenon really goes back to Gaulish: this may be due to socio-linguistic disparities in Gallo-Roman society

(3) Comments:
While it is certainly true that Latin knew stress on the antepenultimate, this was only true for words where the penultimate was short. As length was not normally indicated in Latin writing, we partially have to rely on the stress indicated by the modern forms of the names or on etymology to establish Gaulish vowel length; in this case, relying on the modern stress can become a circular argument. But there ought to be no doubt that names like Nemausus or the names in –casses ought to have penultimate stress in accordance with Latin rules, so the antepenultimate stress indicated by some of the modern French names needs to be explained. I’ve also generally seen the “i” in –riges described as long; again, that would demand penultimate accent according to Latin rules. Of course, as the authors state, the indicated stress may not be the Gaulish stress but due to some differences between Gallo-Roman and Standard Latin; that we’ll probably never know.
I originally posted to respond to the statement that Celtic had word-initial stress - an opinion that has a good pedigree but is supported by surprisingly little evidence - the only Celtic branch that clearly has initial stress is Goidelic. Brythonic had penultimate stress and for Continental  Celtic we only have the clues for Gaulish quoted above, which point to antepenultimate stress. Forms like Némausus and Cóndate could also indicate word-initial stress, but most of the forms with more than three syllables rule that out. The only exception is Arelate, where forms like Arles actually don’t indicate antepenultimate stress, but initial (or ante-antepenultimate) stress, something that Lambert seems not to notice. So perhaps Gaulish didn’t have a fixed stress, or prefixed nouns (prefix are-) behaved differently? 

Beech Reading

NIL 2-4 treats the PIE Etymon *b^hah₂g-ó- "beech". They mention that some scholars reconstruct long /a:/ and some (not always the same) scholars link it to the previously discussed *b^hag-. In general I don't see any reasonable link between a tree name and a root meaning "share" etc. But there is a possible connection for the Germanic cognates meaning "book, letter".
NIL also mentions (FN 2 on p.3) that there are doubts about the relationship between the words meaning "book, letter" and the continuants of this root meaning "beech". The main formal problem is that the words meaning "letter / rune" seem to go back to a root noun, that actually is attested in Old English, while the beech words are eh₂ stems (or n-stems derived from them). So we have derived morphology for what is supposed to be the original meaning ("beech") and a root noun for what is supposed to be the derived meaning ("book, letter").
Elmar Seebold, addressing this issue in his "Etymologie: eine Einführung am Beispiel der deutschen Sprache", (München : Beck 1981, quoted herafter as "Et."), also mentions that the proposed writing on beech tables that is supposed to be behind the change of the meaning from "beech" to "letter" is actually not attested, neither archaeologically, nor in written sources; Germanic runes are attested only on bark, stone, and various household objects (Et., pp. 290-291). It is also clear that the original meaning was "letter", not "book" - the oldest attestations mean "letter" in the singular and "document, book" in the plural, an obvious calque from Latin (littera - litterae) and Greek (gramma - grammata) (Et. p. 290). Seebold argues that the meaning "letter" is derived from the compound Norse bókstafr, Old Saxon bōkstaf, OHG. buohstap, whose second member means "staff". The writing of runes on staffs is widely attested (here Seebold is undermining his previous argument somewhat, as these staffs could of course have been made of beech wood, but the written source he quotes actually mentions ash wood).  
He then adduces a parallel from Welsh, coelbren "sign-wood, lot-wood", composed of coel "sign, omen" and bren "wood", designing a piece of wood covered with signs used to throw lots, a custom also attested for the Germanic people. He takes this parallel as an indication that the first element of bókstafr etc. originally meant "sign, omen, lot", and links it with our old acquaintance, the root *b^hag-, reconstructing a root noun Proto-Germanic *bōk-s "lot, portion" (Et. pp. 291-292). That would mean that the word family of "book" is not related to "beech", but that the purported writing on beech tablets is only a folk etymology. (A shorter version of these arguments can also be found in Kluge(-Seebold), "Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache", s.v. Buch).
In general, I find this argumentation attractive. A formal problem is that the proposed root noun is attested only in Vedic, as a second part of compounds, with an active meaning "enjoying" (NIL p.1), but not as an independent word with a resultative meaning "allotment, lot", and that it would be the only continuation of *b^hag- in Germanic. The same problems woud also arise if, as I proposed,  we eliminate the root b^hag- and take its purported continuations as derived from the root b^heg- "break"; that root also is not continued in Germanic (at least according to LIV p. 66/67 and NIL, p. 6; the forms with nasal infix mentioned in IEW p.115 look onomatopoetic, for which reason Pokorny himself states that they don't belong to *b^heg- ). There is also no root noun formed from *b^heg- attested in NIL (p. 6); if we eliminate *b^hag-, we would have at least the Vedic root noun mentioned above, but still with the same problems. On the other hand, an isolated root noun from a root that otherwise doesn't have any cognates in Germanic is a perfect candidate for the kind of folk etymology discussed.