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Irish as a semitic language ? | ||
Tags: Gaelic (Irish) | Book | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 9 of 12 30 May 2010 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
And a very similar thing occurs in Hindi. (IIRC) Mera-pas (thing) hein. Thing is close to me. Mera=my, pas=closeness. thing is my-closeness. The Indic tribes and the Celtic tribes are thought to have left the IE homelands at similar times, and are considered the earliest emigrants. There are several parallels between Celtic and Indic grammars that show certain features of other IE languages as innovations that occurred after their migrations. EG no verb to love. The Indic languages have to say "love is near me towards you", very similar to the Goidelic "love is at me on you". The difference in use of prepostions (or postpositions, in the Indic languages) is nothing to worry about -- compare the patterns of prepositions between any two IE language families and you'll find massive differences. There are even massive differences between the Brythonic and Goidelic branches of Celtic in use of prepositions. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 12 30 May 2010 at 10:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The number of parallels between very distant languages mentioned above is already an indication of the possibility that grammatical features can develop independently in several places, just as sounds can. We know that Old Norse and Icelandic have definite articles, but not indefinite. Furthermore it is quite common in Old Norse to put the verb at the beginning of a sentences, - this can also happen in Modern Icelandic, whereas other Scandinavian languages use dummy subjects to fill out the empty spot in front of the verb.
A heteroclite 'to be' verb is also quite common other languages, - take for instance "ich bin, du bist", but "er ist" in German, which also has forms like "ich sei" in the subjunctive (Konjunktiv) and "ich war" in the past tense. That is as weird as the situation in Irish. The lack of a 'to have' verb in Russian illustrates that it isn't a matter of course that every language should have such a verb. And composites of prepositions and articles are found in for instance Italian (where an arab influence would be much more likely, but it has not yet been blamed for contractions likke "all'" or "negli". So you don't need a reference to Arabic to explain these features - especially not in a language like Irish, where it was almost a law of nature that a word would somehow affect the following word. As NativeLanguage I'm inclined to think that the last close contact between Irish and Arabic happened when they were represented by respectively Protoindoeuropean and Protosemitic (if it happened at all). After that there is little evidence for contact, especially if you take into account that the Celtic tribes on the European continent were utterly routed by the Romans. On the other hand there are documented tradelinks between Arabic speaking areas and Scandinavia during the Viking age, so it would be more likely to see influence on the Germanic languages - but they are conspicuously absent. Why then would they pop up in Irish? The real test of a connection between Irish or other Gaelic languages and Arabian and other Semitic language must take into account the written sources. Gaulish is very badly documented (mostly by names in Latin sources), so the first real evidence about Celtic languages are some text in Archaic Irish from the 4. century (written in Ogham), plus a sizeable literature in Old Irish from the 6. century. I don't know whether the traits that were mentioned earlier in this thread where present in Irish from this period, - if so it must have come either through Proto-Indoeuropean or they where developed independently, because any Arab influence was absent when those Old Irish documents were written. The possibility of a later contact can't be ruled out, but it takes more than a few merchants to change the fundamental features of a grammar. Not even the harsh treatment of the Irish by the Englishmen could change these features - the Irishmen abandoned their language rather than change it fundamentally. Edited by Iversen on 23 June 2010 at 11:50pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 11 of 12 31 May 2010 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
Worth noting also that the Anglo-Saxons arrived on Great Britain without any articles whatsoever. The evolution of articles in English parallels that of the Romance languages -- we started using an altered form of the demonstratives (hence why this and that are so similar to the) and we adapted "one" to form an indefinite. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Garoid Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5269 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 12 of 12 23 June 2010 at 8:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The only thing I have to add to this discussion linguistically is in the use of Arabic. Modern Standard (I'm honestly not certain about Classical Arabic, but generally MS follows Classical fairly closely) allows the verb to be put in a number of positons. A VSO word order or a SVO word order are both fairly common, though the VSO is considered more pleasing in general.
الأستاذ تشرب الشاي (The teacher drinks the tea, SVO) تشرب الأستاذ الشاي (The teacher drinks the tea, VSO) Historically the Phoenician connection is becoming the new hot issue. It's not entirely impossible that a trading colony, say in the southwest, had strong enough influence to affect the language of some nearby tribes. Following that line of thought those tribes may have had increased wealth or status, and the dialect could have spread through conquest and/or prestige. Since it would have happened centuries before our first solid evidence of primitive Irish it's hard to tell. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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