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Celtic language, Hebrew? Historians?
Has anyone read this history on yahooanswers? The Hebrew language has about 500 of the same words as the ancient Gaelic, and Celtic dialects. This was lost in the English language when the Catholic church interjected latin to replaced Gaelic when teaching the children of the British Isles. But th language is still spoken. It still translates to Hebrew. Has
1 Answer
- PontusLv 71 year ago
That's absolutely false.
If it's true, provide links.
Most likely the words are not identical (just seemingly similar) and someone is seeing what they want to believe.
Hebrew and Celtic languages are not at all related.
Any similar words either come from direct borrowing (from one to the other, or through a third language that did the borrowing for them) or are just coincidences, which do happen. The human body is capable of producing a finite set of syllables. Some syllables/words do occur among many languages, usually with different meanings, but sometimes by chance they happen to be similar or the same.
One example from Japanese:
namae = name. Although Japanese has borrowed words from English and other languages related to English, namae is not one of them.
namae - is composed of two parts: na (meaning name) and mae (meaning before). The "before" or first name, which in Japanese is the family name (last names comes first). Over time, namae came to just mean name (family, given, or full).
The English word name, comes from the Latin root "nom".
nom & the Japanese na -- aren't related. It's coincidence.
Although I don't speak Hebrew or Celtic languages, I have read many linguistics articles on them. They aren't related. To say that Hebrew has about 500 of the same words as ancient Celtic languages requires verifiable proof, and would be big news in linguistics circles (and it isn't).
It's also problematic, because Hebrew words often work very differently from Celtic (or other Indo-European words). Hebrew words often consist of a root of two or three consonants. Numerous patterns of vowels are added to produce a family of related words (and other parts of speech or tenses etc).
Just because one particular set of vowels and consonants happens to be similar doesn't mean that the words are related.
500 cases is rather high and would have to be explained by more than coincidence:
1. direct borrowing 2. common ancestor - which so far no linguists says, not even rogue ones that I'm aware of 3. or the 500 cases aren't actually similar.
