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Semitic Substratum in Celtic Languages?
#1
OK, this is a very weird idea, a colleague mentioned it to me today. In a throwaway sentence in an NZZ article, the author (writing on the history of English) mentions that we can trace Semitic influences (at the grammatical/syntactic level) in Celtic languages.

Confusedhock:

Well, that's the first time I've heard of it, but maybe one of you knows more and can help me? I'm hoping this is more than the last feeble stirrings of British Israelism.

Edit: I have been referred to the theories of Karel Jongeling of Leiden university, but so far a book search had only thrown up Punic and Hebrew epigraphics. Ring any bells?
Der Kessel ist voll Bärks!

Volker Bach
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#2
Sounds very, very fishy to me...
but there is a brief discussion on the Celtic-L list available here:
https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A ... c-l&P=5133
Dan Diffendale
Ph.D. candidate, University of Michigan
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#3
This is a bit of a myth (IMHO) , as the points of resemblance are shared with African and other languages according to one of my obscure books..
Some Welsh and Semitic group similarities are:-
-the verb comes first in a normal sentence
-In a genitive phrase such as "the voice of the king", its written "voice the king" llais y brenn (Welsh) kol ha mmelkh (Hebew)
-prepositions are conjugated
-in Hebrew and Welsh the initial letter of a word may be changed or mutated because of the word that precedes it, so Cymru (Wales) becomes gymru. So the first roadsign you see over the border is "Croeso y Gymru" (Welcome to Wales)

This theory still is around- for example, this book :-

"Comparing Welsh and Hebrew

Karel Jongeling

Comparing Welsh and Hebrew consists of two parts. In the first part the author discusses the history of the comparison of Welsh and Hebrew. In the first half of the seventeenth century the comparability of Welsh and Hebrew, on the level of syntax as well as on the level of the lexicon, was extensively discussed.
This is, of course, a long time before the emergence of historical linguistics in its own right in the nineteenth century, and therefore only interesting from a historical point of view. However, the insight that Celtic is one of the branches of the Indo-European languages, accepted since the second half of the nineteenth century, was not enough to put an end to this discussion. It rather made a change in the type of solution proposed.
The second part of this study gives an overview of the points comparable in Hebrew and Welsh syntax. There are even more of them than supposed by earlier scholars. The question how this situation came about is tentatively solved by the supposition of an Afro-Asiatic substratum in the British Isles, and perhaps also on the Atlantic shores of the continent.
(In English, 176 pp.) "


So, you pays your money and makes your choice..... :roll:
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#4
Thanks! That's about what I suspected. You've been very helpful.
Der Kessel ist voll Bärks!

Volker Bach
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