Putting Language Pieces Together

I've been looking at modern Irish, Old Irish and proto-Indo-European. Not speaking Indo-European, I tend to use Latin as my cross-reference for thinking about how Old Irish works.

It turns out I'm not the only one baffled by Celtic languages at times. When the Indo-European family was first being considered, they weren't even sure Celtic belonged given its exotic verbal system and the peculiar phenomenon of initial mutation. It was Franz Bopp who realized that Celtic initial mutations were, in a manner of speaking, tacking classic IE endings on the start of the next word. He made the leap in comparing Celtic phrases with Sanskrit equivalents, incidentally.

Now, today, I stumbled upon another nifty bit in Fortson (Intro to IE). In Old Irish another feature you run into is a sort of umlaut - internal vowel mutation - which takes the form of "raising" and "lowering." Again, at first glance it looks like another feature the Celts came up with to confuse everyone else. On closer inspection, though, you find out that the changes take place depending - again - on the missing ending from IE and proto-Celtic.

The only drawback about these neat discoveries is you need to have some familiarity with another older IE language to make use of them. Fortunately, I do, so it's been interesting to see the confusion that is Old Irish slowly start to make sense.

This is one thing to be said for learning multiple languages, or even studying them at the same time. While there's more to learn, there are also more connections to be made.