Palaeohispanica 7, (2007), pp. 71-81 71 PHONOLOGICAL ANSWERS TO ORTHOGRAPHIC PROBLEMS. ON THE TREATMENT OF NON-SIBILANT OBSTRUENT + LIQUID GROUPS IN HISPANO-CELTIC Joseph F. Eska Preliminary matters §1. The large majority of the corpus of Hispano-Celtic linguistic records is engraved in an adaptation of the Iberian script, which has segmental characters for vowels, sonorants, and sibilants, and moraic characters — which do not code voicing 1 — for non-sibilant obstruents. The typical character shapes of the eastern school of writing and their transcriptions are as in (1): 2 (1) a = ! Pa = B Ta = T Ca = K m = M n = N e = E Pe = V Te = ” Ce = J l = L ŕ = R i = I Pi = Í Ti = ™ Ci = H ś = S s = Z o = Ÿ Po = X To = ¯ Co = G u = U Pu = D Tu = W Cu = F §2. As has long been recognised, one of the principal difficulties that arises in the script is that it is not possible to spell /TL/ groups straightforwardly. 3 The orthographic convention which was developed to spell such groups is to write a moraic character whose vocalic colour copies that of the following etymological vowel, i.e., to spell a so-called ‘dead’ vowel, a system familiar from the Linear B script (see Woodard 1994 and Bartoněk 2003: 109–110), e.gg.: ———— 1 At least, not usually. Jordán Cólera 2005 makes an interesting case that five inscriptions have introduced a voicing distinction into some of the moraic characters 2 I employ the traditional transcriptions of the sibilant characters, whereby S = ‹ś› and Z = ‹s›. Since the mid-1990s, two other systems have become common: That of the Spanish school transcribes S as ‹s› and Z as ‹z› (roughly since Villar 1995); that of the German school transcribes them as ‹s› and ‹đ›, respectively (roughly since Untermann 1997). My reasons for maintaining the traditional transcriptional system are set out in Eska 2002: 141 2 . 3 L = any liquid; T = any non-sibilant obstruent; V = any vowel.