> Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic form the Goidelic languages, while Welsh, Cornish and Breton are Brittonic. All of these are Insular Celtic languages,
Yeah though Brythonic and Goidelic both are considered to inherit from Insular Celtic. So it’s not completely off base.
My fiancé is Welsh but only speaks a few words. Despite many Welsh not speaking it now there’s more active Welsh speakers than Irish Gaelic speakers!
I spent some time in North Wales last summer where it’s still commonly spoken. It’s fascinating to hear Welsh. It’s not related to any Germanic or French or others so there’s little vocabulary shared with English aside from some loan words. Even the phonetics are quite strange sounding compared to other European languages.
> It’s fascinating to hear Welsh. It’s not related to any Germanic or French or others so there’s little vocabulary shared with English aside from some loan words.
Celtic is a branch of Indo-European, so the relationship exists. Naively, it's about as closely related to English (Germanic), and to French (Italic), as English is to French.
The closest cognate that comes to mind between English and Welsh is "apple", afal in Welsh.
If you believe the Italo-Celtic hypothesis, Welsh would be more closely related to French than English is.
Welsh enaid (soul) is cognate with Spanish alma (soul).
Welsh asyn is "cognate" with English ass (the animal), in the sense that Celtic and Germanic each separately borrowed the word from Latin asinus and the modern words are inherited independently. For this reason, the word is also "cognate" with French âne.
Welsh benyw (woman) is cognate with English queen (which used to mean "woman").
Welsh blodyn (flower) is cognate with English blossom. (And maybe also bloom.)
Welsh buwch (cow) is cognate with English cow.
(Although buwch really looks like it should be related to bovine, this does not appear to be the case. But we can see that the b- beginning the Welsh word here matches the b- beginning benyw, corresponding to kw- in English. This is also what happened in cow -- Celtic reduced gw- to b-. In this case, Germanic reduced gw- to k-; in queen, gw- became kw-.)
Welsh bol (stomach) is cognate with English belly.
And I haven't even gotten through the Bs. Cognates are fairly common. This wasn't even a list of Celtic words that are cognate with English words; it was a list of Celtic words that are cognate with other Celtic words.
For basic grammar sure, but English has what 30-40% of its vocabulary from French? There's also a lot of influence from Latin and Greek in English as well.
Likely it's just less cross-cultural sharing from Welsh into English. We get much more exposed to more tidbits from romance languages or German in English than we do Welsh or Gaelic.
Yeah correct, the French relationship with modern English is much closer because of (among other reasons) the Norman conquest that happened long after the Indo-European split and much closer to our time
> but English has what 30-40% of its vocabulary from French?
You have to be careful what you're counting when you quote figures like that. Here is your comment, but including only the words derived from French:
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... basic grammar sure, ............. influence ... Latin ...... just .... cultural .......... exposed† ..... Romance languages .................
† exposed is unlike "normal" French-derived words in English in that it is not derived from Old French; the equivalent from Old French is expound(ed), and even there I'm not sure why we have ex- instead of es-. I might credit exposed more to Latin than French.
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Here's English:
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for xxxx xxxx xxxx, but English has what 30 to 40 xxxx of its xxxx from French? There's also a lot of xxxx from xxxx and xxxx in English as well.
Likely it's xxxx less xxxx-xxxx sharing from Welsh into English. We xxxx much more xxxx to more tidbits from xxxx xxxx or xxxx in English than we do Welsh or xxxx.
xxxx! Something to read up on.
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53 / 71 words (including Welsh, but not Gaelic) are native English.
(Welsh ultimately derives from the name of a Celtic tribe known to us from Roman writers. In Germanic, the name became a generic word for foreigners. I think it's fair to call it English; it was already like that in proto-Germanic. Gaelic is more recent.)
10 / 71 words, including the somewhat questionable exposed, are from French.
5 are Latin, two are Norse, and then there's Gaelic. Greek is not represented except in the -ic ending on Gaelic (or basic).
If you're listening to someone speak English, knowing French is unlikely to be worth much.
Nice observation but it just illustrates what the GP is saying: the basic grammar is English while a huge proportion of the vocabulary comes from French. If you remove the grammatical words from the English selection you made, there's hardly anything left.
> If you're listening to someone speak English, knowing French is unlikely to be worth much.
It can help a lot when learning because of the huge vocabulary overlap, e.g. more or less every word ending with -tion, you just learn to pronounce it differently
I rated each word in the comment for how much I felt it represented grammar vs semantics (total adding to 1 for each word; ratings in increments of 0.1).
The ratings divided into 31.5 words worth of syntax and 37.5 words worth of semantics, adding up to 69 instead of 71 because I combined "a lot" and "as well" into one word each for this purpose.
French accounted for 6% of the grammar (reflecting my rating of sure and just as 90% "grammatical" each), and 22% of the semantics.
English got 91% of the grammar and 59% of the semantics. The point you might be most likely to disagree with is that I rated many prepositions as 50% semantic. (For example, to in the phrase thirty to forty got that rating, although to in get exposed to and something to read up on were rated 0% semantic.) The second point, cutting in the other direction, is that I rated all pronouns as 0% semantic; realistically they should rate a bit higher. In a better model, I'd probably like to rate them 100% grammatical and also ~30% semantic.
(The residual ~3% of grammar is the passive marker get, from Norse.)
If this is the kind of thing you enjoy, I'd be interested in your evaluation.
> Despite many Welsh not speaking it now there’s more active Welsh speakers than Irish Gaelic speakers!
I wanted to learn Welsh when I was living in Wales back in the 00s, but I couldn't find anywhere to take lessons that wasn't ridiculously expensive. I picked up bits and bobs over the years, but hardly anyone speaks it on a regular basis in the south, so I never got that much exposure.
If you like a challenge or know any half decent private torrent trackers, there are a number of dual welsh | english audio and subtitled tv series about:
"Death Valley" is a recent gentle comedic crime detective series on the BBC (iPlayer), set in Wales and the characters frequently break into Welsh (with English subtitles). It's lovely to hear!
...is not a term for any language. In Scotland, you might want to talk about Scots (a Germanic language) or Scots Gaelic (a Gaelic one).
Annoyingly, "Irish Gaelic" (the English phrase) uses the pronunciation /geɪlɪk/ (first syllable rhymes with "pale"), while "Scots Gaelic" uses /gælɪk/ (first syllable rhymes with "pal").
Scots is fascinating and the overlap with English is something those that live down south (England) don't really understand as it is more than an accent that is going on. Coupled with Scots there are accents, such as Glaswegian, which is very difficult for outsiders to understand. This is why Scottish people have their 'telephone voice' for when they need to communicate with English speakers that are not Scottish. 'Telephone voice' means speaking s-l-o-w-l-y and using words that are more widely understood, so 'wee' becomes 'little' or 'small'.
In the parts of Wales where Welsh is spoken, an English person isn't going to understand a word of it unless hearing a word is for something new, so 'helicopter' is still 'helicopter'. Everyone that speaks Welsh can speak English just fine, with a Welsh accent, but there won't be substitute words, so 'yes' is 'yes', whereas in Scots, that will be 'aye'.
As for Scots Gaelic, good point on the pronunciation. That language is on artificial life support, much like Welsh, where there has to be considerable government initiatives to keep it alive.
Danish to me sounds like northern English, especially Yorkshire, which historically makes a lot of sense. Yorkshire people pronounce the O in phone as Ø.
[Scotland] Scotland - it's quite a small country, there's not a large population, but we obviously we used to have Scots Gaelic, which was our national language but then, eh... something eh... [England pointedly looks in the other direction] another country came over and uh, kind of, uh...
I think, honestly, the percentage of people who speak Scots Gaelic is one percent. But now everyone speaks English...
[...]
[Wales] We... are probably one of the most patriotic bred people here. That's a bold claim. [video cuts] that we have to be very proud of our culture and our language because, uh, similar history with Scotland... so our language was on the edge of dying out, but, it sounds really different to English. Most people don't know that
[...]
[Ireland] Oh, yeah, so... Ireland is similar with Wales and Scotland with the... [gestures to England] our friend...
The Scotsman and the Irish girl speak only English, but the Welsh girl was raised speaking Welsh, so there does appear to be some comparative health.
Yeah though Brythonic and Goidelic both are considered to inherit from Insular Celtic. So it’s not completely off base.
My fiancé is Welsh but only speaks a few words. Despite many Welsh not speaking it now there’s more active Welsh speakers than Irish Gaelic speakers!
I spent some time in North Wales last summer where it’s still commonly spoken. It’s fascinating to hear Welsh. It’s not related to any Germanic or French or others so there’s little vocabulary shared with English aside from some loan words. Even the phonetics are quite strange sounding compared to other European languages.
https://www.translationdirectory.com/articles/article2577.ph...