The common Indoeuropean heritage of Welsh and Hindi

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Sonia Mathur, a native Hindi-speaking journalist who moved from India to Wales to work for BBC Radio Wales, a service of BBC, was amazed when she discovered the many similarities between the Welsh and Hindi languages, including numerous common words and almost the same pronunciation rules that made the locals to assume she was from Wales. The BBC article Searching for the Welsh-Hindi link contains more information about how she understood the relation between the two languages.

Ms. Mathur contacted a professional linguist, Dr. Colin H. Williams, who ascribed the similarities to the common heritage of the Welsh and Hindi languages: the Proto-Indoeuropean language.

Dr. Colin Williams is a Research Professor at the Ysgol y Gymraeg (School of Welsh) of the Prifysgol Caerdydd (Cardiff University) from 1993. He is a member of the Bwrdd yr Iaith Gymraeg (Welsh Language Board) and has authored numerous books on languages - especially minority languages.

The Proto-Indoeuropean is a hypothetical language spoken by the common ancestors of most Europeans, Iranians and Indians: the Indoeuropeans. It is not proven where their original homeland was, but possible locations include Caucasus, central Asia, northern Balkans (southeastern Europe) and the northern coasts of the Black Sea.

As the Indoeuropeans migrated in Europe, Iran and India, their language quickly changed and divided in what are now the members of the Indoeuropean language group. These languages include Welsh, Hindi, Greek, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, Portuguese, all Celtic languages and several others.

[edit] The Welsh (Cymraeg) language

Welsh (Cymraeg or Gymraeg) is a Celtic language spoken by the Welsh (Cymry) people, mainly in Wales (Cymru). It is not a dialect of English but a distinct language, although both of them are members of the Indoeuropean group (with English being in the Germanic subgroup and Welsh in the Celtic).

The Celts were living in Britain before it was invaded by the Romans (43-70 CE) and by various Germanic tribes (350-500 CE). In 1067 CE the Normans invaded Britain along with Anglo-Saxons and many English-speaking people settled in Britain. After the Act of Union of 1536, Wales was incorporated in England and English was the only official language, while Welsh speakers who could not speak English were banned from government positions. The first Welsh book, "Yn y lhyvr hwnn" ("In this book"), was printed in 1546. Later, in 1563, Queen Elizabeth I decided that all Christian churches in Wales should have a Bible with a Welsh translation side by side with the English text. (source: Story of Welsh Timeline from BBC)

In 1582 Richard Hakluyt published a book which included a tale taken from a Welsh poem of the 15th century; the tale says that Madog ap Owain Gwynedd, a legendary Welsh prince and sailor, went to North America and landed in Florida (New Spain) in 1170. It is believed that he colonised the land he discovered by returning there later with 10 ships (source: Encyclopaedia Britannica). Today this story is disputed but in the end of the 18th century it was so popular that John Evans of Waunfawr travelled to the New World to find the Padoucas or Madogwys, the legendary Welsh-speaking descendants of Madog ap Owain Gwynedd that were believed to live around the Missouri River in North America! Madog ap Owain Gwynedd was still the subject of several poems even in the 19th and 20th centuries (two examples are the Robert Southey's poem of 1805 and the T. Gwynn Jones' poem of 1918 - source: Britannica Student Encyclopedia).

In the 19th century pupils speaking [<a href= Welsh] were being punished by teachers in certain schools. With the Industrial Revolution, waves of immigrants came into Wales and the 1911 census showed that Welsh was for the first time in 2000 years a minority language spoken by 43.5% of the population. Today Welsh is primarily strong in the northwestern areas around Snowdonia, but of course it is spoken as south as Cardiff.

[edit] The Hindi language

Hindi is spoken by more than 480 million people, is related to Sanskrit and is similar to Urdu (used in Pakistan). Hindi uses the Devanagari script, a descentant of Bhahmi. Most words are of Sanskrit origin but there are also Arabic, Turkish and Persian loanwords together with enrichments from the Portuguese (which influenced many other parts of Asia, too) and the English languages.

Hindi is well-suited for songs and poems, but also for rational reasoning. The honorific structure of Hindi has three levels: Formal, familiar and intimate.

In contrast with English people, Hindi-speakers read all the letters of a word; this also happens in the Welsh language.

The text of this article is Copyright (C) 2005 by Nikolaos S. Karastathis and can be republished or otherwise used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence as long as this notice remains intact and a reference to its original location is given: http://portal.wikinerds.org/welsh-hindi-indoeuropean-2005mar

Image credits: The maps showing the spread of Indoeuropean languages over time were created by Dieter A. Bachmann and are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. More information can be found here.