Discussion Details
| Title: | The supposed Welsh-Hindi link |
| Submitter: | Bernard Comrie |
| Description: | As a follow-up to Briony Williams' comment (Linguist List 16.802) on
the relevance of a word-final high pitch to the perceived phonetic similarity of Welsh and Hindi etc. accents in English: A similar phenomenon is found in accents of the north-east of England (Tyneside, Wearside), and indeed before my own accent started undergoing massive dialect contact I had such an accent (I'm from Sunderland). On a number of occasions in those days I was asked by Welsh people, including native speakers of Welsh, if I was Welsh. [Some irrelevant, if not irreverent, additions: (1) Wales and north-east England also share a strong Methodist religious tradition and were regions dominated by coal-mining; since India and Pakistan do not share these features, they are presumably independent of the prosodic feature. (2) I doubt if any of the Welsh people were affected by any similarity of the family name "Comrie" to the Welsh words "Cymru" 'Wales', "Cymry" 'Welsh people', since I assume they would recognize the name as not being familiar to them as a Welsh name; the family name in fact comes from the name of the village Comrie in Scotland (District of Perth and Kinross).] Bernard Comrie Prof. Dr. Bernard Comrie Director, Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, University of California Santa Barbara For previous messages in this discussion, see: http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-790.html http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-802.html Original article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4328733.stm |
| Date Posted: | 17-Mar-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Phonetics
Phonology |
| LL Issue: | 16.824 |
| Posted: | 17-Mar-2005 |
