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Anyone read this book?
http://www.joensuu.fi/fld/ecc/public...tic_roots.html
I recently got hold of an article by one of the contributors Theo Vennemann in which he argues that Celtic Brythonic has had a substantial grammatical impact on the structure of the English language.
In particular he focuses on something called external possessor construction, it’s quite a complex term to describe (I’m not a linguist but I can follow his argument). The EPC is common in all continental Indo-European languages but it is none existent in English, the only other languages that lack EPC are the insular Celtic tongues, Vennemann postulates that the Celtic population that survived and adopted the Old English tongue basically shaped it around this lack of EPC.
He also goes onto suggest that a lack of EPC in Celtic is a direct link to Semitic languages, not as barmy as it sounds given that one major IE origin theory places it in the Near East and Celtic languages may well be amongst the oldest IE branches.
I can’t comment on the accuracy of the conclusion, I’m not a linguist, but I find the possibility fascinating.
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