Media: BBC: Searching for the Welsh-Hindi link
| Submitter: |
Antony Green
|
| Submitter Email: | toniogreen@web.de |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
General Linguistics |
| Media Body: |
At http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4328733.stm there's a story about a BBC journalist from India, now living in Wales, who has noticed 'peculiar similarites' between the Indian accent and the Welsh accent of English, and calling on professional linguists to help her figure out why. In my opinion, her speculations are unlikely to yield any useful results. I can predict what the results of any serious linguistic comparison will be: Welsh and Hindi are both pitch-accent languages, resulting in superficial intonational similarities in the respective accents of English. The fact that Welsh and Hindi are both pitch-accent languages is probably coincidental, as Welsh at least does not preserve the Proto-Indo-European pitch accent (Proto-Celtic almost certainly had a stress accent). And calling Indo-European 'the mother of all languages' is just absurd, and really shoddy journalism. ========================================== Antony D. Green Quitzowstr. 114 10559 Berlin Germany toniogreen@web.de |
| Issue Number: | 16.790 |
| Date Posted: | March 15, 2005 |
