posted
I've heard of the link via the Indo-European mother tongue (they always show Indians chanting in Sanskrit to point out that the word deva sounds a lot like divine), but that doesn't explain the similarities in pronunciation. If it's the pre-historic Indo-European language that accounts for the similarities, than all of the other European languages should be just as similar. I think there's probably something more recent to link Hindi and Welsh specifically.
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Noemon, thanks for the linky. I'll finish reading it later when I don't feel like I'm going to fall over snoring on the keyboard.
Edit to add: I didn't mean to imply that this topic is boring or sending me to sleep. It's just that it's way past my bedtime in this time zone, and I'm up way too late, and I'm tired and I need to go to sleep, and . . . Oh, bag it! Goodnight!
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Quid--didn't even occur to me that you were implying that the article was dull. I guess that I find this kind of thing so interesting that it doesn't even occur to me that others might not. Well, other Hatrackers, anyway.
Porter--it could be happenstance, but I doubt it. It just seems like a bit of a stretch, especially when you factor in similarities in vocabulary. I wonder how far those similarities go though? Is it just the two words discussed in the article, or is it as far reaching as the article implies?
quote:If it's the pre-historic Indo-European language that accounts for the similarities, than all of the other European languages should be just as similar.
Annie--I don't know that I agree. I'm not sure what conditions would cause one language to evolve away from its parent tongue more slowly than its siblings, but certainly such conditions must exist, mustn't they? My understanding is that Italian is more closely related to Latin than are the other Romance languages, for example.
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My understanding is that Romanian is even closer than Italian, which is closer than most romanitic langauges.
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So, what kind of factors would serve to slow the evolution of a language? Right now I'm not trying to come up with ones that would explain the apparently slow evolution of Welsh--that would come later in the process, I'd think.
Mothertree, are you out there? Easier to have a linguist spill the details of what research has already been done in the area than try to reinvent the wheel. Too bad Jon Boy doesn't come around here anymore.
Anyway, what factors?
*Geographic isolation, I would assume, since this would lessen contact with speakers of other languages.
*Mass media, both print and anything with an audio component.
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He just might come over. Annie posted this on GC, and he's been talking about maybe starting posting here again.
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I can see Welsh evolving slowly in isolation, but I can't see that with Hindi. There are 400 other languages in immediate proximity - why would it be closer to the original mother tongue than, say, Norwegian?
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Well, I'm sure there are plenty of other things that can retard language evolution. Literacy of the population might be one, having a common script....What else?
As for the ancestors of the Celts being proto-Hindi speaking immigrants or something, it seems like if that were the case there would be a fair amount of evidence supporting this in the archaeological and anthropological record. Construction methods, sculptural styles, artistic motifs, religious ceremony, probably alphabetic evidence, social structures...all should be available, I'd think. And of course, there would be genetic similarities as well.
It would help to really know how close the languages are to each other.
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posted
Don't know about Hindi, but one factor that might contribute to the Welsh language evolving more slowly is the incredible Celitc memory and the oral history tradition that is so strongly regarded; songs and stories were memorized word-for-word by subsequent generations of bards, so that might help the language evolve more slowly.
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Hindi also has a very involved oral tradition. All of the major epics of Hinduism (Ramayana for example), and the "main" religious text, the Veda, were composed at least 2000 years ago, and then written down much later.
More importantly, I think, Hinduism places a huge emphasis on language as a sacred thing. India has had its version of linguistics for a few millenia; the study of language is very important for the understanding of its rites--power over language is power over the universe in some strands of Hinduism thought. Sanskrit is the ancient language of all of these texts, and Hindi is one of its closest descendents (think Latin & Italian as a close analogy).
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posted
I had a brilliant idea, only to discover that kq posted it first.
But yeah -- it seems to me that having either written or oral traditions that are passed down word for word would retard language.
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I'm rather disappointed that the article didn't go into more detail. They really only mention a few things that the accents have in common. They do note that both Hindi and Welsh have penultimate syllable stress, but this isn't a very distinctive feature—Latin also (mostly) had penultimate stress. Stress patterns are not a very accurate way of determining genetic relationship between languages.
One of the major problems with the comparison is that they're not actually comparing Hindi and Welsh; they're comparing Hindi-accented British English with Welsh-accented British English.
There's one glaring error—saying that Proto-Indo-European is the mother of all tongues when it's really only the mother of one language family—and the cognate examples are unremarkable and unreliable (at least by themselves). Two examples are not enough to draw any sort of conclusions, especially considering that all Indo-European numbers are cognates. When you look at the rest of the numbers in Hindi and Welsh, you realize that they aren't that similar.
Hindi: ek do teen chaar paanch chhuh saat aath nau dus
Welsh: un dau tri pedwar pump chwech saith wyth naw deg
Hindi and Welsh are two of the most geographically separated Indo-European languages. From what I understand, they have some significant differences in terms of morphology and syntax, so they probably represent a very early split in the Indo-European family (the different roots for the word "one" also show this).
I'm willing to bet that any similarities are pure happenstance. It's foolish to conclude that there's a "link" between the two languages when there's so little evidence for it and so much evidence against it. And anyway, I've heard Welsh accents and Hindi accents, and I've never thought they sounded at all alike. Some sound clips would be nice.
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I don't know if I'd quite use the word "coincidence", but we are talking about the degree to which speakers of these two languages pronounce English words which are foreign to them. Given the discussion of how "predominantly" is pronounced, I'd say it's a matter of sub-phonetic directionality. You see subphonetic directionality in the difference between (native) Enlish speakers saying "sprain" and Spanish speakers saying "esprain". It seems to occur on a level below sound selection, where tone and stress are determined.
English operates on a sonority gradient, where vowels are high sonority and "hard" consonants are low sonority. If your vowels have a sonority of 5: 4- your liquids (r,l,w) 3.5- nasals m, n, ng 3- voiced stops (d) 2-devoiced stops (t) and voiced continuants (z) 1-devoiced continuants (s, f)
So in a native English accent, the rules seem to allow as many as 5 sounds to be linked together in one syllable as long as the sonority is building toward the center of the syllable (and diminishing as it trails away from the center. (I don't have the know how of funky linguistic symbols so bear with me)
Now in many languages, the -ed would not be contracted as we see. This is part of the sound pattern of English (which was actually a book that I never read :hangs head in shame:.) We prefer to just stick a d on there, or if the d would violate the sonority gradient, we use a t as with walked /walkt/. The only time we pronounce the e is when the verb ends with a d or t, and then because we have inserted another vowel, we might as well use a d whether it is "ended" or "butted".
There seems to be a principle within the sonority gradient that the higher the sonority, the more tolerant the pattern is of holding sounds with close to the same sonority (as in world /werld/). That is, you can have sbr and sbl, and str but not stl. (You can say /stling/, but I don't know of any natural monosyllabic words that start with that. I was saying spr and realized the p gets voiced in the process), even though it follows the general idea of the gradient. This is not true in all languages. Chechoslovakian is very permissive of consonant clusters that do not have a lot of difference between them in the lower sonority grades.
I mainly studied this phenomenon with respect to Arabic. Arabic is generally discribed as being based in the language of the Koran, which is currently known as Modern Standard Arabic. But the dialects of the various Arab countries vary quite a bit. For instance, the word /kelb/ = dog. To make it plural, Arabic in all dialects puts an a between the l and the b. /kelab/= dog in Saudi and Egyptian. But in Iraq, it becomes /iklab/. (It actually becomes /ichlab/ but the palatization of the k is a different process.)
My personal opinion on why Arabic is spoken with such different accents is that it was probably the result of the forced conversion of other populations, who then had to learn Arabic. The dialects of Arabic go far beyond the differences we generally describe as dialects in English.
On the question of Welsh and Hindi, I think it is most probable that the underlying languages share some sound patterns, at least as far as they would be exposed by speaking English as a second language. A second possibility which I would expect to have less impact is that English was introduced in these places at about the same time, during the colonial era. I don't know if that corresponds date wise with the expansion of public eduction in places like Wales. But rather than a preservation of Indo-European, we may be seeing a preservation of mid-19th century "educated" English.
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While we're (somewhat vaguely) on the subject, what are other factors that are known to inhibit the evolution of a tongue?
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Widespread use of writing will preserve a languange's syntax and grammar; however, the pronunciation can change radically. One of the reasons why American and Canadian English is different from British and Australian English is because a large number of North American colonists left during a shift in how vowels were pronounced. It can be difficult sometimes for North American english speakers to tell between some British and Australian accents, though the difference is clear to any Aussie or Brit.
As for Hindi and Welsh, they are distant cousins, but no closer than that. See the article at the wonderfully free and endlessly diverting (and mostly accurate, or close enough) Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_languages. Follow the links to the articles on Indo-European languages. It's fun.
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I'm really not sure exactly what things will speed up or slow down language change. At least, I don't think there is any hard evidence. Languages always change, though sometimes you can point to reasons why some change more than others.
For instance, Icelandic has been very conservative in terms of linguistic change. After the island was settled, it didn't have much contact with the rest of the world, at least in terms of new people and things coming onto the island.
England, on the other hand, was invaded by two different groups within a couple hundred years. The political and educational structure was destroyed and replaced with a new one. English virtually ceased to be a literary language, and it seems that the widespread changes in society also allowed widespread changes in the language, too. Similarly, one of my classmates said that since the fall of communism in Mongolia, the language has changed significantly.
So I guess that literacy, isolation, and a stable, conservative society would all slow language change. I don't know what else would help, though.
mothertree: According to my phonology teacher last semester, voiceless stops following an /s/ don't actually voice, but rather they lose their aspiration (meaning the glottis is not spread). This makes them nearly indistinguishable from voiced stops, but not exactly the same. I guess you could say that it's a phonetic environment that neutralizes the feature [voiced].
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quote: As for the ancestors of the Celts being proto-Hindi speaking immigrants or something, it seems like if that were the case there would be a fair amount of evidence supporting this in the archaeological and anthropological record
There have been genetic studies done in Scotland comparing them to near eastern cultures. Apparently every tenth person or so has identical DNA strands to a large population of Persians (Irani). It definitive proof, that the two groups are linked, but what is unknown is how the Persians got to Scotland.
Migration paterns have been well studied, but trade was so heavy in the area in the third and second millenia that pottery and wares from any and every culture of the area were spread across the Med by the Phonecians, Egyptians and later the Athenians and Carthaginians.
Pottery from Persia/Iran has been found in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, in all of Great Britain actually, but there is no way of knowing if it came with the people or was traded to the area by merchants, strata definitions only tell us so much.
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Consider the tonal phrasing of ancient Celtic music from the Irish Anuna or eg SianJames' TheMaiden'sMelody on the Welsh CelticMusic, etc. If I don't know who the artists are, when I first hear that first portion of a cut of ancient Celtic music, my first thought has usually been toward "Indian music". I find it especially noticible in ancient Celtic instrumental music.
posted
Jon Boy- you're probably right about the spr/spl thing. I guess in the case of -ed, the d is just being de-voiced.
I know the aspiration of devoiced consonants is a common challenge for Hindi speakers. It could be something fairly simple like that that makes the welsh people assume they are Welsh speakers. Also, that was over the phone, and not in person. What would be interesting to see is whether the native welsh (and Indian) speakers identify each other differently on the phone as opposed to in person.
P.S. Re reading the article I notice that the Indians report the Welsh saying the Indians sound Welsh. But the Indians do not say that the Welsh sound Indian to them.
Does Welsh = Celtic? I know Hindi *= Iranian and the Irish thing doesn't really inform us much. How did a persian get to the British Isles? Well since the exposure of Piltdown man, we know that all the Britons were transplanted from somewhere else. Don't forget that "caucasian" includes the inhabitants of the middle east and much of India. Fair haired people are scattered through the world because the potential for those genes are in the caucasian genome. How did the Northern Europeans came to be fair? Through variation and selection.
P.P.S. From what I can see on Wikipedia, "Celtic" does not uniquely describe Welsh out of the tribes on the British Isles. So I don't think that argument bears much weight on the specific question of Welsh and Hindi. And saying a druid is a Celtic Brahmin doesn't really explain a lot.
posted
Lyrhawn: Do you have a source for that? I'd be interested to know if those genes also appear in any other populations.
aspectre, you can also find articles "proving" that the German people are descended from the lost tribes of Israel. However, articles like that are usually motivated by racism and are all examples of appallingly bad scholarship.
mothertree: The Celtic languages today include Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. In ancient times there were also various Celtic languages in central and western Europe, including Gaulish and Celtiberian.
Hindi and Iranian together form a branch in the Indo-European family, so they're fairly closely related.
[ March 16, 2005, 12:44 PM: Message edited by: Jon Boy ]
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My source is my professor of ancient history. I could ask him next week when I have his class again for his source if you really want it that much.
And from what I know, the Scots could just as easily have migrated or moved to Wales or any other of the Isles in the time after when they arrived from Persia. The journey is thought to have happened several different ways, but with no real proof of any one being the truth. The most commonly believed is that Persians traveled through Bactria and then west atop the Black sea and across the center of Europe towards Gaul, and then crossing into Britain from there.
That's just a best guess from historians though, it's too hard to pick out real evidence from the time frame against what was moved around for the next few thousand years.
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Celtic language and culture is pretty well attested to pre-Roman times. I still think that the correlations between Hindi and Welsh are still best explained by the indo-european model. That there are genetic similarities between Scots and Persians is not unexpected either; both are linguisticly Indo-European cultures. The Aryan linguistic group was, after all, that group of people who ended up in Iran (the Land of the Aryans is what Iran means) and the Indus valley.
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I've heard that there was a legend in early Ireland that the Irish had emmigrated from the Iberian penninsula in their pre-history. That could have been a mix of Mediterranean and Celtic cultures.
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That's why I used "claiming" instead of a more forceful assertion, JonBoy.
Didn't wanna wade through all the stuff there. And certainly not familiar enough with the topic matter to skim through the websites trying to distinguish between the more vs the less reliable sources.
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One problem with the supposed Scots-Persian connection is that the Scots and the Welsh are not very genetically similar. The Welsh people mixed with a slightly darker and stockier people who were apparently there before them, and the Scots mixed with the Picts and Viking raiders.
And as far as I know, there wasn't really much contact between the Welsh and the Scots (at least not in terms of language, culture, and genes). Scottish and Welsh are quite different and have distinct accents, so it's not very likely that the Hindi accent moved into Scotland and from there into Wales.
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I'm not challenging you, because I really don't know about it. I just want to read up more about it for the sake of me being a dork and wanting to know.
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I'm just wondering if the scots have persian blood (If I'm even following this right) what does that have to do with Welsh speakers and Hindi speakers pronouncing English (a foreign languge to them) the same? Why don't people assume the Hindis are Scots?
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Well the connection I was assuming was if there is a language connection between Welsh and Hindi, then it would seem likely that there is some effect on that from Persians in Scotland.
This of course assumes you can connect Welsh and Scot, and Persian and Hindi (which I think you can). This suggests that not only are their languages rooted in the same Indo-European language family, but that their speaking styles branched off from a single source, something in the eastern Persian (probably Bactrian/Indus) area.
I just think it functions as a more solid explanation as opposed to saying they are both from the same language family and somehow they happened to develop the same speaking style.
If Persians with the same language and speaking style moved to Scotland (which according to genetic studies, they did), and also influenced nearby Indus valley civilizations, then there is a solid link explaning the fact that they are similar.
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Okay, so I can't manage to find the thing about Scottish and Welsh genes (I could've sworn it was on Wikipedia, but now I don't see it anywhere). However, I managed to find a few other articles that look pretty interesting and link the Celtic people to the Basques.
This seems to imply that the Celts are not genetically related to the Proto-Indo-Europeans, but are rather a separate ethnic group that adopted an Indo-European language and culture. This would mean that the Basques were a holdout against the tide of the Indo-Europeans. (This could also mean that the Picts, who have sometimes been linked to the Basques, were another group that didn't totally assimilate to the new culture). Interesting stuff, but somewhat of a tangent.
The problem with the Celtic–Indo-Iranian connection is that those language branches probably split very early (which makes sense if you look at the geographic separation). This page shows a possible expansion of the Indo-European peoples. Celtic wasn't even recognized as an Indo-European branch until relatively recently (well after it was established that Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and German were related), so it makes it difficult to claim that there's a close tie between Celtic and Hindi.
And furthermore, like I said earlier, accents (especially accents in a non-native language) are not reliable evidence for proposing linguistic relationship. They're simply too unstable and prone to change. If there were some sort of Hindi influence on Welsh, one would expect it to be in the form of loan words. I'd bet money that things like sentence and syllable stress, tone, and pitch are things that are never borrowed from one language to another.
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