OT: Celtic Language Origins

Whistle
1

Extinct Language Reveals Celtic Origins
By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

Rare Example of Gaulish

July 2, 2003 — Although the Roman conquest led to the extinction of the Gaulish language 2,000 years ago, a half dozen rare, surviving Gaulish/Latin bilingual inscriptions have enabled scholars to trace the origins of the Celtic language and many other European languages.

According to the study, Celtic branched in two directions from an Indo-European mother language around 3200 B.C. One version, Gaulish, which is also called Continental Celtic, stayed within the European mainland. A second, British version, referred to as Insular Celtic, moved in a single wave to Britain.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20030630/celtic.html

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Very cool indeed. I wonder at the inclusion of Basque in the study, though. It’s not an Indo-European language at all, and possibly the only surviving aboriginal European language left in the wake of the Indo-European “flood”, or at least that is my understanding. But, no linguist, me…

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Basque is reputed to us Frenchmen an unsolved mystery. So this is a puzzling inclusion, as is puzzling the exclusion of Sanskrit in such an approach.
However, using computers to compare the roots of essential vocabulary may be a good hunch. As for the “genetic” rap, it may be just the right wording to grab some sponsors: it’s so difficult to finance research these days professors have to get in marketing hype…

Me no linguini either, solo tutti-frutti yacking dilettante…

4

I’ve seen Basque included on some language trees as having some cousin languages. To wit:

“Owing to some similarities with the Georgian language, some linguists think it could be related to languages from the Caucasus. Others relate the language to non-Arabic languages from the north of Africa.”

It is clear that it isn’t an Indo-European language so Basque might have been used as a “control” language to measure “up-take” of the IE lexicon?

PC

5

You can add Finnish and Lapp as aboriginal Euro languages as well. They’re also related to rare Arctic tribal languages like Samoyed and Karelian and don’t seem to have PIE (Proto Indo-European) roots.

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I forgot about that. The Finno-Ugric languages appear to have quite a distribution, though, and are less isolated by comparison to Basque, which led to my omission. I have a real admiration and fascination for any people who successfully hold on to something and keep it alive and well (language in particular) in the face of such overwhelming odds. I also omitted Hungarian as it is not aboriginal to its location.

7

Interesting, I suppose, but please forgive my skepticism at the rather large leap to the conclusion that malleable words can be treated as if they were much less malleable and much more measurable amino acid sequences.

Until I see alot more, and more prominent, researchers embracing what seems to me to be a rather far-fetched theory, I think that the findings of generations of archeologists and more traditional linguists are rather more reliable than this particular construct.

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I find it just as interesting in what they have left out of the study. For instance I would have included Portuguese, Catalan, perhaps Rumanian. Certainly all of the modern languages are influenced by many other languages especially from the language of invaders. Language origins is a fascinating study.

I once took part in a joint UK-US test program at Suffield Experimental Station in Alberta. We spoke just about every dialect of English. At times communication was nearly impossible. I remember a fellow from Scotland and a fellow from Mississippi playing Snooker. One was teaching the other the game. It was hilarious.
Ron

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Aye! Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, Samoyed and Hungarian are closely related. I’m half Finn myself.

Suomi on hyvää. Se on moro.

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Did you know that Finnish is also related to Korean?

“The Ural-Altaic language comprises a wide range. Ural includes present-day Finnish and Hungarian. Altaic indicates Turkish, Mongolian, Samoyed, Tungus and Korean.”

PC

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OK, so even though I have SUCH limited internet access these days this linguistic stuff makes me want to POST, being one of the few linguists (albeit former linguist) on the board.

The Ural-Altaic connection with Korean . . . VERY controversial. Most people accept the connections between Saami (Lappish), Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Turkish, but when you start adding in Korean, watch out. They’re trying to figure out where to stick Korean since it doesn’t seem to fit with Japanese or Chinese (two different families themselves).

I might offer an opinion as to the inclusion of Basque in the article mentioned above. Basque was probably included in that hodgepodge of languages just for proximity, to see how much of an influence the known local languages had on it. Meaning, sure, we theorize that Basque was there first (and was probably there when Pictish was in Britain before the Celtic folks drove them out), then Celtic stuff, then Romance . . . but these techniques would be useful if only to elucidate what parts of what languages are native and what are borrowed.

So, they could have included Basque to try to find any Basquish things in Gaulish. Why they didn’t include Portuguese . . . well, it wasn’t my study. You could make better geographical arguments for including Catalan; they did, you note, include Occitan (which is like the old form of the language spoken in Provence, and Languedoc).

Speaking of which . . . there’s a part of France called “Languedoc,” which means “langue d’oc,” or “language of ‘oc’” since in Occitan “yes” was “oc.” In the language which took over as French, we had “langue d’oil,” imagine an umlaut on the i, since in that language “yes” was “oil” which became “oui.”

The other thing is that you have to have some limits, I guess. Why they didn’t include anything Germanic is also kind of weird, since Gaulish (from the article) seems to have quasi-Germanic words like “duxtir” for “daughter,” which is a lot closer to the English or German (“Tochter”) or Icelandic (“dottir”) than to Latinic stuff (fille, hija, etc.).

Oh, well! Cool, though! Thanks for bringing the post to our attention.

This is the first time I’ve seen these techniques used on language. It’s been common practice to study the DNA sequences of native speakers (ethnic natives) of languages to prove connections . . . that’s how Finnish got lumped with Hungarian and Turkish. They share lots of intron data.

Eh. :wink:

Stuart

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Stuart, I was hoping a linguist would chime in. Thanks!

I’m just an armchair observer (won’t call it linguist) but languages fascinate me. English fascinates me, fer cryin’ out loud! :laughing:

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Here is another site that has a bit on the origins of Gaelic languages, and some other interesting stuff as well:

http://www.firepowr.com/TRAD/language.html

Says much the same as the post that started this thread…

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You would’nt need a DNA test to see that Finnish and Hungarian are related, would you? They actually sound quite similar. But Turkish is a bit harder for me to accept.
The funny thing with Hungarian to me is that when they start to speak, it might sound very similar to Finnish one time and the next time they start it might sound like russian, really eastern-like. And it’s all the same language, I asked a couple of Hungarian trad. dancers I’ve meet at various folk festivals…

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Actually, you might need DNA for Hungarian and Finnish. They might sometimes sound similar, but phonology is only one part of the picture. Phonetically the three languages have the same idea of vowel harmony, in that only certain groups of vowels go together. Grammatically, the three are quite distinctive.

By “three” I don’t mean to leave out Estonian; it’s just so similar to Finnish it’s hard to treat as a special case. It’s somewhat mutually intelligible, maybe like Italian and Spanish.

ANYWAY . . . :wink:

Stuart

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I hope people don’t mind my bouncing this thread to the current page, but a very interesting and moderately technical response by noted University of Sussex linguist Larry Trask was just posted to the Linguist list. See:

http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-1876.html#1

Even more off-topic, if you like Larry Trask, his web site’s homepage is here:

http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/larryt/

and a few weeks ago the Guardian posted a fun article about him:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/interview/story/0,12982,984721,00.html

John

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(from Larry Trask’s website: “please
note: I do not want to hear about the following: Your
latest proof that Basque is related to
Iberian/Etruscan/Pictish/Sumerian/
Minoan/Tibetan/Isthmus Zapotec/ Martian. Your discovery
that Basque is the secret key to understanding the Ogam
inscriptions/the Phaistos disc/ the Easter Island
carvings/the Egyptian Book of the Dead/the Qabbala/the
prophecies of Nostradamus/your PC manual/the
movements of the New York Stock Exchange. Your belief
that Basque is the ancestral language of all humankind/a remnant of the speech of lost Atlantis/the language of the
vanished civilization of Antarctica/ evidence of visitors from
Proxima Centauri. I definitely do not want to hear about
these scholarly breakthroughs.”

Yeah? Wait till he reads my book. That’ll straighten him out. I channeled the info right from the guides on Proxima Centauri.
Tony

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Whew! Larry Trask just chewed the thing up and spit it out!

It all comes back to the idea that you’ve got to read the primary source. Our conversation might have been different had we all had ready access to the PNAS article itself rather than the media coverage of said article.

I think it’s probably exceedingly difficult to be a journalist. Especially one who’s expected to report on very specialized topics. I bet that’s why CNN et al. have MDs report on medical stuff, CourtTV uses JDs to report on legal points, etc.

We need a control: some random reporter writing an article about whistlemaking or flutemaking or the use of cocus in woodwinds. Heh!

Stuart