Re: Celtic and Afro-Asiatic?

Heya,

The points you describe later are the main points in support of an Italo-Celtic
family. I know that support for the family is spotty, but all my professors
seemed to be in agreement about it. Why? I don't know - they never gave
specific reasons, that I can remember, other than the points you provide below.

Personally, I think language change is not so clean-cut. Families are the best
approximations / generalizations of linguistic "genetics" we can provide. Even
modern dialectology is not so clear cut - I know of some studies that show a
continuum of change from one area to another, with no clear boundaries. What
can you do with such fuzzy lizes, milennia after the fact and faced with only
spotty written records? Families! So, I can see the validiity of language
families, but when we start getting into details of who broke of from whom,
it's gets a little fuzzy, by necessity, in my mind. I don't worry too much
about that.

Aidan

R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
Aidan Grey wrote:

> That's the one my PIE professor (Dr. Cal Watkins) espoused too, and
> everyone in my dept (Celtic Lang and Lit) seemed to agree with it as well.
Could you explain why. I know there are a set of words common to both
Germanic & insular Celtic. e.g. landa, comba (valley) etc. But these
could be due to independent borrowing from a common non-IE source (in
central Europe, the Alpine region?). And almost certainly there were
loan words exchanged between the two groups.

Are there marked structural similarities between the two groups?

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