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Q

Within the Indo-European language family, are Germanic languages closer to the Balto-Slavic subgroup or to the Italo-Celtic subgroup?
https://www.quora.com/Within-the-Indo-European-language-family-are-Germanic-languages-closer-to-the-Balto-Slavic-subgroup-or-to-the-Italo-Celtic-subgroup/answer/Hans-Georg-Lundahl-1

Answer requested by

Samuel Pelletier

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Fri

amateur linguist

First, the premiss is, Indo-European languages are a family (like Romance languages) and not a Sprachbund (like Balkan languages).

Second, the question is actually moot. IE groups (subgroups in your terms) divide both Satem-Centum, with k’, g’, gh’ remaining velars in Centum, becoming sh / zh in Satem, but one could also consider a division South to North, where South has f, th, (b), (d) and dh for IE *dh, and North has d for IE *dh.

Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic are all “North” in this sense (and so it would seem is Persian). Italic is “South”.

On the other hand Italic, Celtic and Germanic are all Centum, while Baltic and Slavic are Satem.

Kristijan Vladimirovitsch Schmidt

Fri

Is this not an useless cathegorisation?

“Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic are all “North” in this sense (and so it would seem is Persian). Italic is “South”.”

Slavic and Roman dialects share way more vocabulary than Slavic and German (people get lost when they think about “national languages = dialects”.) It means they probably split later from each other than from German.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

45m ago

Did you catch “First, the premiss is, Indo-European languages are a family (like Romance languages) and not a Sprachbund (like Balkan languages).”

Trubetskoy …

Whether it is useful or useless, it is about as general as the Centum / Satem split, which according to some (of those accepting a Protolanguage) was the first one.

“Slavic and Roman dialects share way more vocabulary than Slavic and German”

I doubt that. Pflug, pliugas, pluk … aratrum.

Would you mind sharing the source of those stats?

Kristijan Vladimirovitsch Schmidt

14m ago

That is why I say “Is this not an useless cathegorisation?”, Sir!

you think you know languages and you obviously don't know about the vocabulary overlap between Slavic and Romanic languages🤷‍♀️

I ask again “ Is this not an useless cathegorisation?”

As I write this, he had taken the insulted attitude and blocked me from answering. He asked again, but - on quora - banned me from replying again.

Nevertheless, he might change, and his answers may resume below. I am answering the last one's two arguments and one personal taunt:

1) Classifications are considered useful (by what I take as normal linguists):

• for the ten or so "branches" of Indo-European, where in each case a common proto-language is very probable;
• for pairs of them where it is at least a somewhat more tenable hypothesis than not - Italo-Celtic, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian;
• for larger groups than that sharing certain traits and where at least one of them has geographic contiguity : commonly accepted : Satem / Centum, my own North / South.

2) I do not know whether the overlap between Slavic and Italic languages is greater or smaller than that between Slavic and Germanic.

Now for the taunt. He doubts my qualification as amateur linguist in these terms:

"you think you know languages"

Er, no. Whether I know a certain language or not is not up to thinking, it is up to test. Can I read a text in it? Yes? Partly? No? With a total no, I know I don't know the language. I know I know other languages in writing but not in speech, couldn't converse. But "knowing languages" was not my stated qualification. It was being some kind of - in my case "amateur" - linguist.

No linguist would consider the claim of "being a linguist" as tantamount to a claim of "knowing languages". Precisely as no linguist would take Romance rather than Italic as one subgroup of (presumed family) Indo-European. Romance are the surviving Italic languages, developed from Latin, which was the one surviving Italic one (when Oscic, Umbrian, Sabellic etc had gone down). I am inclined to think Mr. Schmidt is simply thinking of international words loaned from Latin to Slavic languages, and misses that even where German may have an indigenous word instead, English often has the same loan word./HGL