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

[Eric Nielsen]

I'm curious and sincere: How does one measures how distant one language is
from another? We have language families grouping together similar
languages. I'm just an amateur, but I would guess families share common
word roots and grammatical structures.

English, however, while sharing common word roots with its inflected
Indo-European cousins is now mostly uninflected. How does one measure
dissimilarity? Is there any standard way of measuring this in Linguistics?

Eric

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 9:00 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Welsh is not as distant as Basque, Maltese, or Apache
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> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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,
> >
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