> Here a new member hoping you can help me out a bit.
> I am interested in the period when Italic and Goidoleic were more
> closely related. Can anyone
>
> (a) point me in the right direction
> (b) give me any direct information
> (c) tell me how to spell Goidoleic
>
> Many thanks already from a very amateur linguist.
Goidelic (representing Proto-/Old/Middle/Modern Irish, Scots Gaelic
and Manx) is but one branch of the Celtic family of languages. Seeing
that it is a daughter language of Common Celtic, it was never
particularly close to Italic (of course, Proto-Irish had the look of
Latin, with gender suffixes and case system), but there _are_ enough
similarities between the parent Common Celtic and the Italic
languages to suppose at some time that there was a larger Italo-
Celtic family of languages on the Western peripheral of the Indo
European world.
For more on the history of Celtic, see Paul Russell, "Introduction to
the Celtic Languages" (Longman, 1995).
- Chris Gwinn