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Welcome to (Frequently Asked) QuestionsThis page contains answers to common questions asked at the
INA classes in Sydney,
How do I get a fada (long sign) on my vowel?
How do I get a ponc (dot) on my consonant?
Where can I learn the Irish language and Irish set dancing
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The Northern group of the Teutonic sub-family, includes the Scandinavian languages:
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The map below shows the general distribution of Celtic (Gaelic and
Brythonic groups)
and Teutonic (Western and Northern groups) in north-western Europe:
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A language family is a group of languages that have been proven to have descended from a common ancestral language. Branches of families likewise represent groups of languages with a more recent common ancestor. For example, English, Dutch, and German have a common ancestor, which we label Proto-West-Germanic, and thus belong to the West Germanic branch of Germanic. Icelandic and Norwegian are descended from Proto-North Germanic, a separate branch of Germanic. All the Germanic languages have a common ancestor, Proto-Germanic; farther back, this ancestor was descended from Proto-Indo-European, as were the ancestors of the Italic, Slavic, and other branches.
Not all languages are known to be related to each other. It is possible that they are related but the evidence of relationship has been lost; it's also possible they arose separately. It is likely that some families will eventually turn out to be related to one another.
Based on language comparisons and re-construction, it would appear that the Indo-Europeans lived in a cold northern region, that it was not near the water but among forests, that they raised such domestic animals as the sheep, the dog, the cow and the horse, and that among wild animals they knew the bear and the wolf, that among metals they probably knew only copper.
The general consensus is that the original Indo-European civilisation developed somewhere in Eastern Europe before 3000 BCE. About 2500 BCE it broke up; the people left their homeland and migrated in many different directions. Some moved into Greece, others made their way into Italy, others moved through Central Europe until they made their way into Britain and Ireland. Wherever they settled, the Indo-Europeans appear to have overcome the existing population and imposed their language on them.
The Celts were among the first Indo-Europeans to migrate from the eastern homeland across Western Europe, eventually occupying the Iberian peninsula and Britain and Ireland by the 5th century BCE. In the last few centuries BCE, three Celtic languages dominated the European mainland: Gaulish (France and northern Italy), Celtiberian (Spain and Portugal) and Galatian (Turkey). Eventually, they all succumbed to the might of Latin. Today, only two Celtic subgroups survive in coastal pockets of Europe’s far west.
The original Gaelic (Goidelic) speakers were the Irish, probably the first Celts to arrive in Britain and Ireland around 600 BCE. Around the 5th century CE, Gaelic-speaking Irish colonists settled the Isle of Man and Scotland, assimilating the indigenous Picts.
The Brythonic Celts, (or Britons), followed the Irish into Britain in the first few centuries BCE. Their tongue remained so similar to Continental Gaulish that it was considered the same language up until the Roman occupation. Invading Germanic tribes in the 5th century CE, then pressed the Britons to Britain’s peripheries: southern Scotland, Wales, Devon and Cornwall.
For several centuries, Britons also escaped the Saxon trespass by migrating back to the continent, south to Brittany in France, where Breton is still spoken today.
It is generally assumed that by the first century BCE, Germanic peoples speaking a fairly uniform language lived on both sides of the North and Baltic seas. The West Germanic tribes settled between the Elbe and Oder rivers and it is here that the German language gradually evolved. The East Germanic tribes settled east of the Oder River, but their languages have long since become extinct. In Scandinavia, the North Germanic tribes spoke a language we now call Old Norse, the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages. In the 5th century CE, three West Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, crossed the North Sea into Britain, bringing with them a language that would later be known as English. And in the 9th century, Old Norse was carried far westward to Iceland.
Yiddish developed first as a dialect of German spoken among the Jewish communities in Central Europe during the Middle Ages. Now it is spoken mostly as a community language in New York City and Israel. Afrikaans grew out of the Dutch spoken by the farmers (Boers) who emigrated to South Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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