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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Farsi vs. Gaelic
In-Reply-To: 's message of 30 Oct 1996 21:03:58 GMT
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Date: Thu, 31 Oct 1996 22:51:27 GMT
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In article <558fru$4ng@dub-news-svc-3.compuserve.com>
<100703.1773@compuserve.com> writes:

>In looking into my rather culturally mixed family, I've come across something
>that I'd like to know about. First, are the Gaelic people of Ireland the Galls
>of northern France

No.

Both are groups who spoke Celtic languages, but the two words are different:
The Galli (English "Gauls") were so named by the Romans; according to one well-
known Roman military historian (C. Julius Caesar), they called *themselves*
Celtae.  (They were also known to the Greeks, as Keltoi.)

The modern Irish word _Gael_ arises in an older _goidhel_, and is a Celtic word
rather than Latin.

>- and in turn, are the Galls related to an almost "extinct" group of Persians
>called the Gilaks (spelling ?) who apparently live(d) along the southwestern
>shore of the Caspian Sea.

In the sense you intend, almost certainly not.

>If this is true, then the similarity in the ancient name of Iran (Arianna) and
>the Gaelic name of Ireland (Eire) are not coincidental, rather they result
>from (my presumption) that these peoples are, however distantly, related.

This particular linguistic chimaera was chased down and put to rest a century
ago.  Be careful of one-word comparisons without a grounding in historical
linguistic methods.

>Secondly, and I guess finally, if all of this is true, then there might be
>some similarity between Farsi and Gaelic -

As it happens, there is not much surface similarity between the two languages,
due to roughly 6000 years independent development.  At that time depth, one
requires a great deal of training as a linguist to see the similarities (which
would not necessarily be perceived as such by the layman).

>my quest in all this long-windedness is, is there any reading material out
>there that any of you all might know about to shed some light on this subject.

For the non-linguist, I would recommend Philip Baldi's _Introduction to the
Indo-European Languages_ (Southern Illinois Univ Press, 1983, ISBN: 0809310910)
as a fair starting place.  A good look at the problem of the archaeology can be
had from J. P. Mallory's _In Search of the Indo-Europeans_ (Thames & Hudson,
1991, ISBN: 0500276161).
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
