LL-L: "Celtic connections" LOWLANDS-L, 26.OCT.1999 (06) [E]

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From: Ian James Parsley [parsley at highbury.fsnet.co.uk]
Subject: LL-L: "Celtic connections" LOWLANDS-L, 26.OCT.1999 (03) [E]

Ronald and Ron,

Attempting a potted history is tricky enough, attempting it by e-mail is
even trickier!

Ronald: It's more than possible both our dates are right - the question
essentially is when do you define a dialect as being unintelligible and also
you are correct to point out that the rate of unintelligibility would have
varied from dialect/language to dialect/language.

Ron: It's *definitely* my wording, couldn't possibly be my thinking :-)
I didn't mean to say that Germanic and Romance were ever one branch, and
there is no reason to suppose that. It was simply that for the aid of
simplicity I was using Germanic and Romance as examples - I could easily
have used Germanic and Celtic or Germanic and Hellenic.

I should confirm to all members that there is absolutely no evidence
whatsoever to suppose that Indo-European split into an Indo and a European.
None at all. For the sake of simplicity we assume at present that Celtic,
Slavic, Baltic, Hellenic, Romance, Germanic etc. all split off at the same
time. This is, of course, decidedly unlikely but I would suggest that trying
to be more exact would be a thankless task given that the groups have all
been in some contact with at least some of the other groups (or branches)
since.

There are, to follow on from what Ron said, some major splits within the IE
languages. If we take English "hound", German "Hund" we find Irish "cu",
Latin "canis", I believe a similar Greek word, and the Sanskrit begins with
's' if I am not mistaken. The same applies to "hundred", German "hundert",
Irish "cead", Latin "centum", Greek similar and Sanskrit with initial 's' (I
forget the exact form). This indicates a three-way split between Indian
languages, Germanic and Romance/Hellenic/Italic, which would appear to show
that the split between Romance, Hellenic and Italic occurred after those two
split from Germanic and various Indian branches. However, there's a whole
pile of evidence to support and contradict such hypotheses (terms of
regality have striking parallels in Indian and Celtic languages, for
example), and they go well beyond the scope of my knowledge and the subject
of this list. I would add that, for the record, I think the Italo-Celtic
theory (i.e. that Romance and Celtic languages split from each other rather
later than from the other branches) is a particularly sound one.

The point I was trying to get across - and again I would add that this is
certainly much more easily understood with the aid of a diagram of the
Indo-European language family tree to be found in most good general
encyclopedias - is that Scots is from the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Insular
branch of the Western branch of the Germanic branch of Indo-European
languages. It is therefore extremely close to English, which is also
Anglo-Saxon; very close to Frisian, which is also Insular; close to German
and Dutch among others which are West Germanic; quite close to Scandinavian
and Gothic which are also Germanic; and distantly related to all other IE
languages, such as Irish, French, Greek, Serbo-Croat etc. I did also mention
that these branches have all been in contact with some others (most notably
in recent times Germanic in the form of English), which can cloud the
distinction.

BTW, I didn't think anybody was nit-picking, you are all quite right to
bring up things about what I said, remembering of course that I am trying to
simplify a very complicated system for those new to it.

Regards,
-------------------------------
Ian James Parsley
http://www.gcty.com/parsleyij
"JOY - Jesus, Others, You"

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