Celtic Evidence Supporting Saussure's Iconicity Hypothesis

Ferdinand de Saussure recognized that in Latin (and Greek) adjectives containing tautosyllabic a-diphthongs that have meanings associated with deviations from a norm are over-represented. ² He called these deviations infirmités, ³ and said that in general, they represented crooked versus straight ('ópθóς ouδεξιóς', Rec. 595). I should make it clear from the outset that Saussure's approach was purely synchronic (to use his own term): he inspected the Latin and Greek lexica and identified those words that fit his categories. He did not perform even a rudimentary statistical analysis, so 'overrepresented' was his subjective impression. Saussure made the bold suggestion that the marginal status of a-diphthongs was iconic to the marginalized status of infirmités : his leading example was L. caecus 'blind'. In the current study, I will offer evidence from Celtic that supports Saussure's hypothesis, and finally, I will identify six inherited words that probably constitute the nucleus around which Saussure's infirmités were formed. Saussure's 'first principle' was that the linguistic sign is arbitrary. However, in the last article that Saussure himself (rather than his students) published, 'Indo-European Adjectives of the Type caecus "blind" ' in 1912, the year before his death, ⁴ he claimed that the comparative rarity of a-diphthongs gave words like caecus an iconic value. In such words son and sens did come together. Caecus finds exact formal cognates in OIr. cáech, W. coegddall, OCorn. cuic gl. luscus vel monop[h]t[h]almus 'with one eye closed or one-eyed'; ⁵ Goth. haihs (GOI 43): all mean specifically 'blind in one eye'. The remarkable consistency of meaning shared by these words led Watkins to project *kaikos 'blind in one eye' back to Common Insular Celtic (and one could go beyond that given the Gothic). ⁶ Saussure started from the fact that there is a group of Latin words referring to physical or behavioural differences (Saussure used the term infirmités because he saw in these words 'une nuance "pathologique" ' (Rec. 598)) ⁷ which share the structure #(C)C₁ -aU/aR-C₂ - (in modern terms, #H- can be #C₁ -). Saussure (Rec. 595) was generous in his inclusion criteria: 'gauche, courbe, contrefait, rabougri, placé de travers, etc.' ('left-handed, bent, feigned/ deformed, stunted, put the wrong way, etc.').