Comparing Welsh and Hebrew (Paperback)

Comparing Welsh and Hebrew consists of two parts. In the first part the author discusses the history of the comparison of Welsh and Hebrew. In the first half of the seventeenth century the comparability of Welsh and Hebrew, on the level of syntax as well as on the level of the lexicon, was extensively discussed. This is, of course, a long time before the emergence of historical linguistics in its own right in the nineteenth century, and therefore only interesting from a historical point of view. However, the insight that Celtic is one of the branches of the Indo-European languages, accepted since the second half of the nineteenth century, was not enough to put an end to this discussion. It rather made a change in the type of solution proposed. The second part of this study gives an overview of the points comparable in Hebrew and Welsh syntax. There are even more of them than supposed by earlier scholars. The question how this situation came about is tentatively solved by the supposition of an Afro-Asiatic substratum in the British Isles, and perhaps also on the Atlantic shores of the continent.