Cornish Language Making a Comeback

The National Post (orig. The Sunday Telegraph) ^ | November 18, 2002 | Francis Elliott

[stands2reason]

The Hungarians are related to the Finns; they migrated down to their present area.

[stands2reason]

ping

[tdadams]

I say that the day that English is the lingua franca in the entire planet can't get here soon enough. American English, that is.

Sure, that's good for you. But I'm sure the Muslims are saying the same thing about Arabic. "Speak Arabic or die, infidel!"

That's really mature thinking.

[tdadams]

Only little bity babies can NOT speak gaelic. It is mandatory in school to age 18 so just about everyone can speak it.

Where is your friend from? As far as I know Gaelic is only being actively taught in the west and I didn't meet anyone east of County Meath that could speak it.

[tdadams]

I know that now you now see Gaelic as well as English on all the street signs

Not always. In Connemara, it's only Gaelic, no English. There's also a Gaelic radio station there.

[alisasny]

Waiting for a reply, will get back to you when I get it!!

[Defiant]

Thanks for the info, not sure where I read that Finno-Ugrik and Turkic languages were related. I stand corrected; it sounds like you are well versed on the subject. I was under no confusion about Basque being related to Celtic. From what I have read, Basque is the last remaining language from the peoples who inhabited southern Europe before the Indo-Europeans migrated there. Etruscan was another such language, but I don't think we know whether it was related to Basque, being that there aren't any Etruscans around any more.

[Virginia-American]

... Finno-Ugrik and Turkic languages were related. ...

The Ural-Altaic connection was very popular in the late 1800's and still has some adherents. The main reason is that both language families have an agglutinating grammar (you can put a *lot* of sufixes on a word: eg "because of his disobedience" is an inflected form of "obey")

I have seen posters claim Basque and Celtic are related. Don't ask me why!

Actually, a Russian linguist (Starostin) has proposed the so-called Dene-Caucasian family, consisting of the isolated languages Basque (Spain-France), Burushaski (Pakistan) and Yeniesian (Siberia), and the Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian (Dagestanian, Abhkhazian, Chechen, etc), and Na-Dene (Navaho, Haida, Tlingit, most of the Indian languages in Alaska and NW Canada) families.

Do a Google search on Dene-Caucasian to find a number of interesting sites.

If you like this sort of thing, check out Merritt Ruhlen's books.