Italo-Celtic
1. I was listening to Celtic Woman and began wondering why, amidst all the Irish music, they'd included the Italian song "Nella Fantasia" written by Chiara Ferraù and Ennio Morricone. What's so Celtic about that? There's more connection between the two than meets the eye.
2. Italo-Celtic is a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. At some point quite early in the divergence of Proto-Indo-European, one of the second-level nodes that separated out from the rest was the ancestor of both the Celtic branch and the Italic branch: Italo-Celtic. This means that, say, Irish and Italian are more closely related to each other than they are to other branches of Indo-European. The time depth for Proto-Italo-Celtic is probably the middle Bronze Age, around 2,000 BCE.
What's interesting is that the division between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic cuts right across the Italic languages too. The P and Q here refer to what became of the Proto-Indo-European labiovelar *kw- sound. In P-Celtic it changed to a /p/ sound (labial) while in Q-Celtic it became a /k/ sound (velar). So the words for four and five, PIE *kwetwer- and *penkwe, became pedwar and pump in Welsh, but ceathair and cúig in Irish. Well, the identical split happened in Italic languages too: compare Oscan petiro-, pumperias with Latin quattuor, quinque. Irish and Italian both belong to the Q side of this division.
The word cara is identical in both Irish and Italian. Not a coincidence, an Italo-Celtic cognate.
3. What are the two most common types of music in 6/8 meter? The Irish jig and the tarantella. What is it about 6/8 anyway?
4. My mother is Irish, my father Italian. Beginning around the mid-20th century, there began to be a large number of Irish-Italian marriages in America. I remember when I was young, my parents remarking on all the Irish-Italian pairings around, which were a recent phenomenon. I think around that time the American Catholic church had gone through a sociological development of amalgamating its various ethnic communities into a broader pan-Catholic identity. Prior to that, it had been considered de rigueur to marry only within one's own ethnic group. As the Irish and the Italians were two of the largest Catholic communities in the eastern United States, it naturally followed that they would wind up marrying each other a lot. So I wouldn't be surprised if Celtic Woman had purposely included a nod to my demographic-if not the prehistoric unity of the two peoples.
2. Italo-Celtic is a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. At some point quite early in the divergence of Proto-Indo-European, one of the second-level nodes that separated out from the rest was the ancestor of both the Celtic branch and the Italic branch: Italo-Celtic. This means that, say, Irish and Italian are more closely related to each other than they are to other branches of Indo-European. The time depth for Proto-Italo-Celtic is probably the middle Bronze Age, around 2,000 BCE.
What's interesting is that the division between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic cuts right across the Italic languages too. The P and Q here refer to what became of the Proto-Indo-European labiovelar *kw- sound. In P-Celtic it changed to a /p/ sound (labial) while in Q-Celtic it became a /k/ sound (velar). So the words for four and five, PIE *kwetwer- and *penkwe, became pedwar and pump in Welsh, but ceathair and cúig in Irish. Well, the identical split happened in Italic languages too: compare Oscan petiro-, pumperias with Latin quattuor, quinque. Irish and Italian both belong to the Q side of this division.
The word cara is identical in both Irish and Italian. Not a coincidence, an Italo-Celtic cognate.
3. What are the two most common types of music in 6/8 meter? The Irish jig and the tarantella. What is it about 6/8 anyway?
4. My mother is Irish, my father Italian. Beginning around the mid-20th century, there began to be a large number of Irish-Italian marriages in America. I remember when I was young, my parents remarking on all the Irish-Italian pairings around, which were a recent phenomenon. I think around that time the American Catholic church had gone through a sociological development of amalgamating its various ethnic communities into a broader pan-Catholic identity. Prior to that, it had been considered de rigueur to marry only within one's own ethnic group. As the Irish and the Italians were two of the largest Catholic communities in the eastern United States, it naturally followed that they would wind up marrying each other a lot. So I wouldn't be surprised if Celtic Woman had purposely included a nod to my demographic-if not the prehistoric unity of the two peoples.