Re: Germanic and Celtic (was Re: Verb-second ... verb-penultimate languages?)
| From: | Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, April 25, 2006, 13:27 |
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On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 04:21:39 -0400, Peter Bleackley
<Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:
> staving Paul Bennett:
>> I think it's beyond reasonable doubt that Celtic, Italic and Germanic
>> are
>> more closely related to eachother than any are to the other branches of
>> IE, but I tend to agree with the majority opinion that groups Celtic and
>> Italic more closely, and then adds Germanic as sister to Italo-Celtic.
>
> Well, that really puts the cat amongst the pigeons for word order
> considerations, since the best known Italic language is SOV!
Possibly. VSO word order is only consistent in Insular Celtic, though.
Also, despite Latin being SOV, its descendents are (mostly?) SVO. Word
order seems a less stable indicator of relatedness than regular lexical
and morphological correspondences.
Paul