Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.gobment.lones
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!nntp.club.cc.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!mistletoe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!goldenapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!cam-news-feed3.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!ix.netcom.com!dasher
From: dasher@netcom.com (Anton Sherwood)
Subject: Re: Looking for the family relationships of Celtic in IE
Message-ID: <dasherECsDxH.10r@netcom.com>
Organization: That would be telling.
References: <Pine.HPP.3.95.970624182253.217B-100000@ccshst07> <22SDEGAqSiuzEwhl@kindness.demon.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 4 Jul 1997 08:51:17 GMT
Lines: 36
Sender: dasher@netcom6.netcom.com

: Griffith A V Morgan <gmorgan@uoguelph.ca> writes
: >       Still looking for guidance/information on where the Celtic group
: >of languages fit into the Indo-European family e.g.does it fall within a
: >broader category such as Italo-Celtic ,or does it have closer affilations
: >with other categories.

Colin Fine  <colin@kindness.demon.co.uk> writes
: The claim of an Italo-Celtic node in the classification of I-E languages
: goes back at least to Schleicher (1860 or so).  [...]
: According to Ruhlen 1987, there is not generally agreed to be any
: particular relationship between Celtic and any other branch of I-E,
: though he says "Cowgill (1970) suggests that Italic and Celtic were
: neighboring dialects of late Proto-I-E that shared parhaps as few as
: five common innovations before going their separate ways."

Here's something interesting from Larry Trask's recent book:
	Recently Ringe and his colleagues have been developing a new
	methodology for determining the family trees of language
	families.  The technique uses linguistic information encoded as
	qualitative characters.  A single character consists of the
	presence or absence of a particular lexical item or of a
	particular phonological or grammatical innovation, and the
	characters used have to be chosen with some care.  A computer 
	program is then used to find the optimal family tree, the one
	that, so far as possible, puts each innovation into a single
	branch of the tree.  ...
The resulting tree for IE has Hittite splitting off first, then Celtic,
then Italic.  That does not mean Celtic and Italic are closely related:
it means that any two IE languages outside Hittite and Celtic are 
closer to each other than either is to any Celtic language.  (And that
Celtic is closer to any non-Hittite IE language than to Hittite.)  In
short, Celtic has no special affinities within IE.
-- 
               Don't blame me; I voted for Rick Tompkins.
Anton Sherwood   **   +1 415 267 0685   **   DASher at netcom point com
"How'd ya like to climb this high WITHOUT no mountain?" --Porky Pine 70.6.19
