Early Celtic/Sanscrit Mutual Comprehensibility

[Isaac Bonewits]

I hope some of you will forgive an interested amateur for asking what
may be simple questions with obvious answers "everyone" should know.

On 11/11/00, Robert Orr wrote:

>"MacBain's Gaelic Etymological Dictionary" is not the best source for early
>Celtic in any case.  Apparently it is best for providing a corpus of
>Inverness-shire Gaelic for the last century.

And the best source for early Celtic etymology now is?

I ask because many years ago my Irish teacher (who had his Ph.D. in
Linguistics) told me that "at one time" Old Irish and Sanscrit were
similar enough that a speaker of one would have been able, with
effort, to understand a speaker of the other. He also said that this
was probably due to the "fossilization at the extremes" principle.

I've gathered from the discussion of "Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate,"
that southern Russia/"Scythia" as *the* homeland of PIE from whence
all IE languages completely originated is no longer the only
academically respectable opinion. I know that some Indian linguists,
archeologists, and historians insist that all the IE tongues (and
related cultural paradigms) originated in India, which would make
India no longer an extreme reach of linguistic migration from a
center and make Ireland even more of an extreme one (from India).

If there were "Pre-Proto-IE" languages whose speakers migrated into
new territories and/or whose vocabulary traveled with specific
technological innovations, can a correlation be made between
PPIE/neolithic, PIE/bronze age, and IE/iron age cultures -- or with
anything else observable? At what historical or archeological point
(if any) can major nodes like Proto-Germanic or Proto-Celtic be
distinguished from Proto-Indo-European?

How would these alternatives to the traditional "origination from a
center" theory of PIE-to-IE language travel explain the similarities
in motifs and characters between the mythologies of the various IE
Paleopaganisms, as (IMHO) amply demonstrated by Dumezil and his
followers -- which also seem to show the "fossilization at the
extremes" (Vedic/Irish/Baltic) principle in action?

I would truly appreciate pointers to appropriate urls and/or
reference texts, preferably in English (my Gaeilge isn't good enough
yet for academic materials).

Isaac Bonewits <===(returning to lurk mode)
--
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