The History of English: An Introduction 2nd Edition by Stephan Gramley

Exercise 12

Substrate influence of Celtic on Old English is a hotly debated topic. One of the basic assumptions is that Celtic speakers shifted relatively rapidly to Old English thereby carrying into OE their Celtic speech habits (see Poussa 1990; Lutz 2009; Filppula and Klemola 2009; Schrijver 2012). You might look more closely either at pronunciation or at grammar.
2a. Pronunciation habits prominently involved what is known as i-umlaut,¹ which refers to the fronting of back vowels in the first syllable when followed by front *i or *j in the second syllable. Schrijver (2012) sees this as phonetically similar to Irish palatalization in which a back consonant palatalizes (or fronts) when the second syllable contains a front vowel. The fronting is focused on the vowel in OE but on the consonant in Celtic (Schrijver 2012: 88). This still leaves the problem of accounting for i-umlaut in other West Germanic languages. Collect arguments for and against the two ways of understanding i-umlaut.
1 Also a/u umlaut, which will not be treated here (cf. Schrijver 2012: 63ff).
2b. The Celtic grammatical substrate is seen as the basis for the adoption of the double paradigm of the verb be in OE (Filppula, Klemola, and Paulasto 2008; Lutz 2009; Schrijver 2012). Find out where the wesan forms and the bēon forms show up in other Germanic languages and how this differs from OE. How might this have come about? What are the arguments pro and con in regard to the possible Celtic origins of the double paradigm?