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| Jim Heckman |
 Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2005 6:44 pm |
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Guest
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Hi all,
What's the current consensus confidence level that Germanic and
Balto-Slavic are more closely related to each other than to other
branches of Indo-European? Various websites mention
Proto-Germano-Balto-Slavic; Wikipedia says there are 164
reconstructed roots.
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Jim Heckman |
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| brennus |
| Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 1:32 am |
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Joined: 19 Feb 2005
Posts: 74
Location: Seattle
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Traditionally linguists divided the Indo-European superfamily of languages into a western (Centum) group and and eastern (Satem) group. However, I read an article by one linguist writing in "Zeitschrift Fur Keltische Philologie" in the early 1990's who has a different view. I kind of agree with him. He divides Indo-European into Northern and Southern groups. The Northern group includes Baltic, Slavic, Gotho-Germanic and probably Indo-Iranian. The Southern group includes Tocharian, Armenian, Greek, Albanian (Thraco-Illyrian), Italic, Latin and Celtic.
This study is based largely on the number of isoglosses these languages have in common with each other. For example, the Germanic languages have more isoglosses in common with the Slavic languages. Some German words which do have close Celtic cognates like "Reich", "Sieg" "Eisen" and "Leder" have actually been shown to be borrowings from Celtic instead. When we look at native Germanic words, we see fewer genuine cognates with Celtic. Old English strael "arrow" is definitely more like Russian strela "ray" than Irish words for "arrow" and "ray" (saighead; gath ) Compare also English beard and Russian boroda "beard" but Irish féasóg etc.  |
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