Welsh is not as distant as Basque, Maltese, or Apache

[Joel S. Berson]

At 3/19/2012 08:33 PM, Ronald Butters wrote:
>In Europe, Basque probably wins that prize, but Maltese would be a
>close second.

Hawaiian is probably further away than even Apache.  About as far as
one can get from GMT.

As for Welsh, a native Welsh speaker told me some decades ago that
when he worked in Italy for a while he discovered that what was
important in Italian was the vowels, whereas what was important in
Welsh was the consonants.  So much for w.

Joel


>On Mar 19, 2012, at 8:29 PM, Eric Nielsen wrote:
>
> >> I've always thought the Welsh is, to a unilingual, as far away from
> >> English as it is possible to get and still use the Roman Alphabet.  It
> >> is a miracle that it lives on the same island,
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org