WELSH-HINDI CONNECTION

"Indo-European" isn't the mother of all languages; it's only the mother of all indo-european languages, assuming it ever existed at all.

My apologies, gungasnake. What I wrote was misleading. The professor from Cardiff University said it was the proto-European language. I certainly make no claims to know the true origin. Even I'm not old enough to have been around at the time.

Just a question of semantics really. Proto IndoEuropean, if it ever existed, was basically the mother of all indoeuropean languages and nothing more.

It seems at least possible to me that proto IE existed. The kinds of things I do not believe in are claims of super families of languages such as "Nostratic", or a "proto-world" language.

Those things are supposed to have existed 40,000 - 200,000 years ago and the problem is there is no real evidence of modern man being on the planet that long, and it's just REAL hard to picture any sort of a language getting passed down to humans from neanderthals or chimpanzees.

Oh I don't know, gungasnake. Watch any TV lately?

Not much. Other than for sports events, I pretty much stopped watching TV when they took Amos and Andy and Have Gun, Will Travel off the air.

Hah. Borax Mule Team.

It would be interesting to hear from Mezzie or some of the other linguists on the site take on this.

I've found Mezzie's discussions on language quite helpful.

Please come visit Mezzie. I would also be interested in what the Prince has to say.

The Prince should be home from Egypt soon - send him a note asking him to pop by here

Ah, didn't realize he was away.

This might be one of those occasions when folk wisdom might have something to add. I recall as a child that the accent of Indians (East Indians for our North American friends) was described as "Bombay Welsh". Now I have no idea if that is a reference to some deeply buried ancient knowledge about the true common origins of Welsh and the myriad of languages spoken in the sub-continent or whether it's a reference to the "sing-song" nature (from a native English-speaker's aural perspective anyway) of English as spoken by Indians. However using Occam's Razor, I prefer the latter explanation for now.

Goodfielder, fascinating. I too go along with your theory of ancient knowledge being the most direct source of understanding, even with all the changes and different connotations that can occur with those old sayings.

I have no clue to be honest. I have been to Wales once - where no one spoke to me in Welsh (well, I used to speak to people face to face which I guess is different), I hardly know any welsh people, and have had just one (I think) welsh lover

I did read the article, and was surprised myself, but that was the limit of my emotion and curiosity.

Sorry....

Thanks for your response. I think someone who had quite a lot of interaction with the Welsh and Hindi languages would have a better perspective.

I do hope this woman continues with her research--it would be fascinating to find out if there had been a connection at sometime perhaps before the Roman Empire or before the Norse started invading--in fact, did the Norse ever make it to Wales? My knoweldge of the history of Wales is almost nonexistent, much to my chagrin.

Marking in sanskrit and welsh.

Solveig, my ex wife, told me when we started dating that Finnish was the purest language in the world. It started as a Ugro language. The closest to it was very old Hungarian. Techno and social changes have wrought a change since that time. The Finns are less insular now than they were.

Origins

The "Urheimat" of Proto-Finno-Ugric, the proto-language of the modern Finno-Ugric languages, cannot be located with any certainty. The area west of the Ural mountains is generally assumed as a likely candidate, at a time of maybe the 3rd millennium BC. This is based both on linguistic migration theory, which appears to suggest a "centre of gravity" somewhere around the middle Volga River, and on reconstructed plant and animal names (notably including spruce, Siberian pine, Siberian fir, Siberian larch, brittle willow/elm, and hedgehog). Proto-Finno-Ugric contains Indo-Iranian loanwords, notably the words for "honeybee" and "honey", probably from the time when Indo-Iranian tribes (such as Scythians and Sarmatians) inhabited the Eurasian steppes.

There is evidence that before the arrival of the Slavic tribes to the area of modern-day Russia, speakers of Finno-Ugrian languages may have been scattered across the whole area between the Urals and the Baltic Sea. This was the distribution of the Comb Ceramic Culture, a stone age culture which appears to have corresponded to the Finno-Ugric populations, ca 4200 BC- ca 2000 BC.

There have been attempts to relate the Finno-Ugric languages to the Indo-European languages, but there are not enough similarities to link them with any certainty. Conversely, there have been suggestions that the Germanic languages evolved from an Indo-European language such as Celtic imposed on a Finnic substrate, but no satisfactory proof yet exists. (On the other hand, it is now believed that Germanic was initially much more akin to Balto-Slavic and moved closer to Celtic during its protohistoric development.)

A portion of the Baltic-Finnic lexicon is not shared with the remaining Finno-Ugric languages and may be due to a pre-Finnic substrate, which may coincide in part with the substrate of the Indo-European Baltic languages. As far as the Samic (Lappic) languages are concerned, a hypothesis has been advanced that the Sami were originally speakers of a different language, who adopted their current Finno-Ugric speech under the pressure of their Finnic neighbors.
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History

The first mention of an Uralic people is in Tacitus' Germania, mentioning the Finns as adjacent to Germanic territory. In the late 15th century, European scholars noted the resemblance of the names Hungaria and Yugria, the names of settlements east of the Ural. They assumed a connection, but did not look into linguistic evidence. In 1671, Swedish scholar Georg Stiernhielm commented on the similarities of Lapp, Estonian and Finnish, and also on a few similar words in Finnish and Hungarian, while the German scholar Martin Vogel tried to establish a relationship between Finnish, Lapp and Hungarian. These two authors were thus the first to outline what was to become the classification of a Finno-Ugric family. In 1717, Swedish professor Olaf Rudbeck proposed about 100 etymologies connecting Finnish and Hungarian, of which about 40 are still considered valid (Collinder, 1965). In the same year, the German scholar J. G. von Eckhart (published in Leibniz' Collectanea Etymologica) for the first time proposed a relation to the Samoyedic languages. By 1770, all constituents of Finno-Ugric were known, almost 20 years before the traditional starting-point of Indo-European studies. Nonetheless, these relationships were not widely accepted. Especially Hungarian intellectuals were not interested in the theory and preferred to assume connections with Turkic tribes, an attitude characterized by Ruhlen (1987) as due to "the wild unfettered Romanticism of the epoch". Still, in spite of the hostile climate, the Hungarian Jesuit J. Sajnovics suggested a relationship of Hungarian and Lapp in 1770, and in 1799, the Hungarian Samuel Gyarmathi published the most complete work on Finno-Ugric to that date.

At the beginning of the 19th century, research on Finno-Ugric was thus more advanced than Indo-European research. But the rise of Indo-European comparitive linguistics absorbed so much attention and enthusiasm that Finno-Ugric linguistics was all but eclipsed in Europe; in Hungary, the only European country that would have had a vested interest in the family (Finland and Estonia being under Russian rule), the political climate was too hostile for the development of Uralic comparative linguistics. Some progress was made, however, culminating in the work of the German Jozsef Budenz, who for 20 years was the leading Finno-Ugric specialist in Hungary. Another late-19th-century contribution is that of Hungarian linguist Ignac Halasz, who published extensive comparative material of Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic in the 1890s, and whose work is at the base of the wide acceptance of the Samoyed-Finno-Ugric relationship today.

During the 1990s, linguists Kalevi Wiik, Janos Pusztay and Ago Künnap and historian Kyösti Julku announced a "breakthrough in Present-Day Uralistics", dating Proto-Finnic to 10,000 BC. The theory was almost entirely unsuccessful in the scientific community (cf. Merlijn de Smit, see external links).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_language#Origins

They did a bit of raping and pillaging but no settling preserving the welsh language. My welsh history isn't that good either.

All the Hindi I know is; Kiap hindi samasti he? - Do you understand hindi?

My knowledge of written welsh is more extensive. In welsh it is; Wyt ti'n deall hindi? which is totally different.

Linguistically hindi and welsh are essentially as far apart as you can get for Indo-european languages.

Though the accents could just be a coincidence.

"She later spoke to professor Colin Williams of Cardiff University's School Of Welsh, who specialises in comparative languages.

He suggested that the similarities are because they come from the same mother language - the proto-European language. "

So this is a non-story really. Apart from silly Welsh people who cant spot an Indian from kith and kin.

When I try to imitate the Welsh accent, my friends all think I sound like an Indian.

It must be because my family originates from Wales. I didn't realise I was that good at it.