Posted on 01/11/2014 6:13:55 AM PST by NYer
Ping!
FYI ping for those who are of Irish descent. Enjoy!
Thank you.
These scientists are still puzzled by DNA, aren’t they.
Searching for the Welsh-Hindi link
BBC ^ | Monday, 14 March, 2005, 10:31 GMT | BBC
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1363051/posts
A BBC journalist is urging helpful linguists to come forward to help solve a mystery - why the Hindi (India’s official language, along with English) accent has so much in common with Welsh. Sonia Mathur, a native Hindi speaker, had her interest sparked when she moved from India to work for the BBC in Wales - and found that two accents from countries 5,000 miles apart seemed to have something in common.
It has long been known that the two languages stem from Indo-European, the “mother of all languages” - but the peculiar similarities between the two accents when spoken in English are striking.
Remarkably, no-one has yet done a direct proper comparative study between the two languages to found out why this is so, says Ms Mathur.
“What I’m hoping is that if amateurs like myself - who have indulged in doing a little bit of research here and there - come forward, we can actually do proper research with professional linguists,” she told BBC World Service’s Everywoman programme.
No coincidence
Ms Mathur explained that when she moved to Wales, everyone instantly assumed she was Welsh from her accent.
“I would just answer the phone, and they would say ‘oh hello, which part of Wales are you from?’,” she said.
We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels
Sonia Mathur “I would explain that I’m not from Wales at all - I’m from India.
“It was just hilarious each time this conversation happened.”
Her interest aroused, Ms Mathur spoke to a number of other people whose first language is Hindi.
One Hindi doctor in north Wales told her that when he answered the phone, people hearing his accent would begin talking to him in Welsh.
“I thought maybe it isn’t a coincidence, and if I dig deeper I might find something more,” Ms Mathur said.
Particular similarities between the accents are the way that both place emphasis on the last part of word, and an elongated way of speaking that pronounces all the letters of a word.
“We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels,” Ms Mathur said.
“For example, if you were to pronounce ‘predominantly’, it would sound really similar in both because the ‘r’ is rolled, there is an emphasis on the ‘d’, and all the letters that are used to make the word can be heard.
“It’s just fascinating that these things happen between people who come from such varied backgrounds.”
The similarities have sometimes proved particularly tricky for actors - Pete Postlethwaite, playing an Asian criminal in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, had his accent described by Empire magazine as “Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea”.
Proto-European language
But not only the two languages’ accents share notable common features - their vocabularies do too.
‘Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea’ or Pete Postlethwaite? Ms Mathur’s own research on basic words, such as the numbers one to 10, found that many were similar - “seven”, for example, is “saith” in Welsh, “saat” in Hindi.
“These kind of things really struck me,” she said.
“When I reached number nine they were exactly the same - it’s ‘naw’ - and I thought there had to be more to it than sheer 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.
“It was basically the mother language to Celtic, Latin, and Sanskrit,” Ms Mathur added.
“So basically that’s where this link originates from.”
Scottish and English are the main portions of my DNA. Add to the mix German, French and a tad of Cherokee. That is on my mom’s side, not been able to trace down my dad’s side. Doesn’t really matter, unless you want to consider the fact I’m a tightwad who wants value for my $ or that I am hard headed. I am 100% AMERICAN BORN.
As I seem to recall some where around the Saxon time period, Vikings, invaded, raped, killed, etc. Left their imprint on the DNA. Then you had the wars with France under Richard and John and various English kings thereafter, where English/Irish/Scot nobility intermarried for treaty reasons.
Then you have the more common intermingling of English, Wales, Scotland and Ireland that is happening today.
Those are game changers in the area of DNA.
Yeah, they should just give up and leave it all a mystery. /s
Super...thanks. I have known about this connection to Spain for some time and always thought that this was why I was drawn to learn the Spanish language. ;-)
Then there is the epicanthic fold found on some wonderful red-headed Irish girls that points to still more interesting DNA origins.
“Additionally, European ethnic groups that tend to have epicanthus relatively frequently are Scandinavians, Samis,[7] Poles, Germans, the Irish and British.[”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicanthic_fold
Since almost anybody from Europe who could cobble together a watercraft eventually visited or invaded Ireland, I’m not surprised that we are mutts.
That red headed cutie has hair the color mine was as a child. A little browner now, but still red.
We here in the Boston area have been referring to the “black Irish” as far back as I can remember.
I had an Irish friend who looked Hispanic.
.
5.56mm
They don’t even mention the norse, vikings, danes which invaded England and Ireland. I wonder why.
My Irish wife constantly complains about her unruly hair. I told her she had the WIBGH gene. She, not having learned yet to know when I am getting ready to chide her, asked what is that gene. My comment: Irish Wild Banchee Gene Hair Gene. I ducked, fortunately.
How fascinating! Thank you for posting the article to this thread.
Don’t forget the Sicilians. Indeed, plenty of blondes and red heads from that island.
****As late as the 1950s researchers were busy collecting data among Irish people such as hair colour and height, in order to categorise them as a ‘race’ and define them as different to the British.*****
‘British’ is not a ‘race’ - it is a nationality or descriptive of territory. Should have used - Anglo-Saxon.
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