and . Otherwise: the nasal is retained before a vowel, i̯, w, m, and a liquid: "woman" (< ) "he/she is born" (< ) "ignorant" (< ) the nasal passes to en before another n: "peak" (< ) (vs. Welsh ) "finds a place" (< ) (vs. Welsh ) the nasal passes to in, im before a voiced stop "butter" (vs. Breton , Cornish ) "nail" (vs. Old Welsh ) "tongue" (vs. Welsh ) "strait" (vs. Middle Welsh "wide") Insular Celtic as a language area In order to show that shared innovations are from a common descent it is necessary that they do not arise because of language contact after initial separation. A language area can result from widespread bilingualism, perhaps because of exogamy, and absence of sharp sociolinguistic division. Ranko Matasović has provided a list of changes which affected both branches of Insular Celtic but for which there is no evidence that they should be dated to a putative Proto-Insular Celtic period. These are: Phonological Changes The lenition of voiceless stops Raising/i-affection Lowering/a-affection Apocope Syncope Morphological Changes Creation of conjugated prepositions Loss of case inflection of personal pronouns (historical case-inflected forms) Creation of the equative degree Creation of the imperfect Creation of the conditional mood Morphosyntactic and Syntactic Rigidisation of VSO order Creation of preposed definite articles Creation of particles expressing sentence affirmation and negation Creation of periphrastic construction Creation of object markers Use of ordinal numbers in the sense of "one of". Absolute and dependent verb The Insular Celtic verb shows a peculiar feature unknown in any other attested Indo-European language: verbs have different conjugational forms depending on whether they appear in absolute initial position in the sentence (Insular Celtic having verb–subject–object or VSO word order) or whether they are preceded by a preverbal particle. The situation is most robustly attested in Old Irish, but it has remained to some extent in Scottish Gaelic and traces of it are present in Middle Welsh as well. Forms that appear in sentence-initial position are called absolute, those that appear after a particle are called conjunct (see Dependent and independent verb forms for details). The paradigm of the present active indicative of the Old Irish verb "carry" is as follows; the conjunct forms are illustrated with the particle "not". In Scottish Gaelic this distinction is still found in certain verb-forms across almost all verbs (except for a very few). This is