What makes Irish(Celtic languages) Indo-European?
What makes Irish(Gaelige) and other Celtic languages(e.g. Scottish Gaelic) Indo-European language?
From my understanding, its basic vocabulary is so different from other European languages.
They don't share common words with other European languages that much!
Also, Irish grammar(syntax, morphology...) is very different from other European languages.
Considering all these facts, shouldn't Celtic languages be classified as "language isolate" like Basque?
Or at least as non Indo-European languages like Finnish or Hungarian?
Firstly, you should ask yourself what's an Indo-European language and why is it called that way (origins).
Searching "Indo-European" on wikipedia should do the trick:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages
I'm almost sure that, after reading this, you won't feel the need to ask those questions anymore.
From the Indo-European Centum languages Greek, Italic, Celtic and Germanic, Celtic is the only one that has almost completely disappeared . It seems to have vanished like the pre-IE-languages and not to have been as vital as most IE-languages like e.g. Greek. The phenomenon that Ibero-Celtic and Gallic were completely exterminated within a few centuries after the Roman invasion is rather singular and still not really understood. Possibly Celtic language was linked with a Celtic culture characterized by a particularly low evolutionary level of development and quickly abondoned therefore.
Herbist,
It is also important to include the fact that of all the languages you mentioned...only the Celtic languages had a group of people who spoke a majority language take active steps to exterminate their usage.
I don't say this to start a fight on this thread, but it is an important difference. No one took over France, Greece, or Germany and said from this point forward you can't speak French, Greek, or German....and if you are caught you will be fined, beaten, imprisoned, or deported...or as it usually happened a healthy combination of all of these.
Language families answer the question "Where did this language come from?", not "What languages are or were similar to this one?" If Celtic languages evolved from Indo-European, they must be classified as Indo-European even if they are very different from other Indo-European languages.
- Kef
Josh...
I am not trying to be stupid...I honestly don't know who you are talking about? Are you saying they were taken over? Or are you saying they did this to another language, or a group of language speakers?
I know that most languages have experienced some conflict at some point and time...but I never heard of any official attempts to gid rid of them?
Really? Interesting...I didn't know this...
Fair enough...with the execption of Greek my comment stands...LOL
Actually...if anything, it only cements what I was saying about languages being hurt to the point of extinction because of aggressive efforts.
">I was referring to the situation of Greek. The Ottoman Empire covered much of the former Greek-speaking areas of Asia Minor and Greek is nearly extinct in Turkey. This is also partly due to the population trade between Greece and Turkey after WWI. Greek was spoken over most of the Near East in the early centuries AD by at least some of the population, but now it is confined to Greece itself and some of the surrounding islands.<"
Griko can be considered an independant branch from Modern-Greek, because Griko's roots go as back in history as the time of the ancient Greek colonisation of Southern Italy and Sicily, in the 8th century BC. In that respect, this Southern Italian dialect is the last living trace of the Greek elements that once formed Magna Graecia. This theory is backed by evidence regarding the multitude of Doric words and other ancient Greek items of vocabulary in Griko. Griko, just like Tsakonian (a Southern Greek dialect), hails from the Doric branch of the Ancient Greek language and has evolved independently from Hellenistic Koine (from where Modern Greek Koine stems). However Griko and Common Modern Greek are mutually intelligible to some extent.
Griko
Evo panta se sena pensèo,
yiatì sena fsihi mou ghapò,
Tse pou pao, pou syrno, pou steo
stin kardià mou panta sena bastò.
Modern Greek
Ego panta esena skeftome,
yiatì esena psihi mou aghapò,
ke opou pao, opou sernome, opou stekome
stin kardià mou panta esena bastò.
What makes German Indo-European? I heard that 30% of German words don't come from protoIE.
I highly doubt it since pIE is reconstructed from cognates shared by many languages, not the sintax or phonetics.
What do you exactly mean with genetic affiliation? Researchers took words from many languages which looked similar and from that resemblance they arrived to the conclusion that there was a protoIE language. If a language have 0 words with pIE roots, there is no way to say that it derives from pIE.
That doesn't answer the question of how we know that Celtic languages are IE, though. True, a language doesn't have to have IE words to be an IE language, but the question is, *how do we know* it's an IE language? Somebody didn't randomly come along and say, "Oh, this feels like an Indo-European language"; that hypothesis had to come from somewhere. What Guest is asking is, where?
- Kef
"Vocabulary is only one element of language, and the one that is most easily borrowed between unrelated languages. Japanese and Korean, for example, have a huge proportion of Chinese borrowings: 40-60%, I think. Clearly, if 100% of the vocabulary in Language X was IE, people would suspect that it was IE, and might even try to trace its descent from PIE. But that still doesn't change the fact that it doesn't descend from PIE. It might be very difficult or even impossible to trace its true descent, but changes in vocabulary can't change a language's past"
I agree that vocabulary is only one aspect of languages, but the fact that creole languages have words with IE roots, does not refute that languages with 0 words related to pIE can't be considered Indo-European, because the pIE language itself is reconstructed from words whose roots are shared by many languages. Suppose than the X language had an IE vocabulary, but it lost it and now we ONLY know that 100% of its vocabulary is non IE, but we don't know well how that process took place. How do you know that it was an IE language? In other terms, the past which makes our X language one language belonging to the IE branch, is not known. Just consider that nobody knowed the past of the German or Slavic languages until they found similarities on their PRESENT vocabulary, which leadedd to the reconstruction of the pIE language, and then linguists said that it was the ancestor of German , Slavic and other families of languages, from where many languages derived.
<<From my understanding, its basic vocabulary is so different from other European languages.
They don't share common words with other European languages that much! >>
Not entirely true. Here are some cognates between English and Welsh I found in the swadesh list. one/un, two/dau, three/tri, mother/mam, adder/neidr (snake), bloom/blodyn (flower), egg/wy, horn/corn, tooth/dant, tongue/tafod, breast/bron, heart/craidd, suck/sugno, know/gwybod, throw/taraw (to strike), star/seren, mere/mor (sea),
red/rhudd, night/nos, new/newydh, in/yn.
Often, sound shifts and semantic drift can obscure relationships between words in different languages. Those words listed above were cognates between English and Welsh only. There were other words which are possible cognates with Latin e.g. ci/canis, lloer/luna.