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

[Paul Johnston]

All I can say is Llanfairpwllgwyngogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch....

Paul
On Mar 20, 2012, at 1:00 AM, Larry Sheldon wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Larry Sheldon <LarrySheldon at COX.NET>
> Organization: Maybe tomorrow
> Subject:      Re: Welsh is not as distant as Basque, Maltese, or Apache
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>
> On 3/19/2012 8:39 PM, Eric Nielsen wrote:
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>> Poster:       Eric Nielsen<ericbarnak at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Welsh is not as distant as Basque, Maltese, or Apache
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> 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?
>
> A bit of background here--I believe that if you learn a lot of roots and
> fragments and what they mean, you can often figure out what unfamiliar
> words might mean.  Since English has an boatload of imports from other
> languages this means collecting bits and pieces that turn out to be from
> foreign languages (some of which contribute a lot to English and are
> "close" in my terminology; some of which contribute little that I
> recognize and are "distant" in my estimation.
>
> When I said Welsh was distant, I should have been more forceful in the
> "in my experience". And some, like Lakota and I think Hawaiian, were
> only recently forced in a a Roman Alphabet so I didn't even think about
> them.
>
> But I think when I watch SCOLA or in my travels to places that speak a
> foreign language (like Pennsylvania, Daneborg, Boston, the
> European-heritage parts of Minnesota and the Dakotas, and some
> University lecture halls, I can pick out bits of meanings, where I could
> not in Wales.  Or Scotland, come to think of it.
>
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