Finian

Finian
Created by	–
Era	attested 4th–2nd century BCE
Language family	Indo-European Lúsanic Finio-Dhannic Peleio-Finian Finian
Early form	Finian(?)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	qfn

Finian was a Lúsanic language spoken in northern Europe from the fourth century until the second century BCE when remains of it disappear. It was apparently recognised by Dhannic speakers as a related language albeit very different. Attested by fifty or so inscriptions, mostly of a votive kind, the known corpus of the language remains small.

General characteristics

While quite similar to the Dhannic languages in many aspects, there are some striking differences. One of the most noticeable is the shifting of several inherited stops from Finio-Dhannic. In Finian, this development first described by Indo-European linguist Berthold von Walden manifests in its earliest stages as a fricativization of the unvoiced stops, while the voiced stops series devoice thus taking their places. Cf. the reconstructed Proto-Lúsanic *pen-ja-r-os with Finian finyarar ('that which is of the bog', 'bog-y') and its Dhannuán cognate penniaros which does not display the consonant shift (retaining p).

This can be summarised as the following set of changes (note that each phoneme takes a step right)

*b → p → f (through intermediary ɸ)

*d → t → s (through intermediary θ?)

*g → k → h (through intermediary x)

Finian also has no breathy-voiced consonants; “aspiration” appears to have been lost producing new voiced stops; a development which seems to have appeared after von Walden's law.

*bʰ → b

*dʰ → d

*gʰ → g

Many of the idiosyncrasies of Finian have to do with the resulting development of these newly produced stops. Generally, these stops undergo fricativization resulting in the voiced fricatives /β/ and /ɣ/. Some dialects though, appear to have replaced /β/ with /v/ as in /'valor/, attested from inscriptions as uualor.

One relatively strange change is the change of this /d/ to /l/ in the beginning of words. Although seemingly strange, it is not unparalleled with a similar development in Latin, cf. Finian lanag, Latin lingua, Dhannuá dhannuá, Irish teanga and reconstructed Proto-Indo-European *dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s.