[relay] Germanic and Celtic (was Re: Verb-second ... verb-penultimate languages?)

staving Jörg Rhiemeier:
>Hallo!
>
>On Tue, 25 Apr 2006 08:10:19 +0100, R A Brown wrote:
>
> > Is there any evidence that ancient Gaulish was VSO? Or is the
> > characteristic VSO order an innovation (like, e.g. conjugated
> > prepositions) of later insular Celtic?
>
>It is definitely an Insular Celtic innovation.  If my memory serves me right,
>Gaulish vacillated between SOV and SVO, and Celtiberian was plainly SOV.
So, word order can vary too rapidly to be a good comparator between
language groups. I have to say that comparing the Old English and Welsh
Babel texts on Langmaker, I found very few cognates, and came to the
conclusion that Germanic and Celtic couldn't be particularly closely related.

This raises a further question. What factors drive or influence word order
changes?

Pete