110-Modern Welsh Basic Vocabulary Word List (Стословный список базовой лексики для современного валлийского языка)
Elena Parina
Russian Academy of Sciences
Abstract
The importance of the 100-word lists in genetic language studies is widely accepted. Despite the seeming simplicity of the items it includes it is gathered and used by comparative linguists in many different ways. The recent work by Petra Novotná and Václav Blažek on the Celtic glottochronology represents one of the possibilities. The aim of this paper was to gather a reliable 100-word list of the Modern Welsh as spoken nowadays by its native speakers, which, as we believe, is of importance for studies in Welsh historical semantics. The material was gathered according to methods discussed in the Nostratic seminar of the Centre of Comparative Language studies of the Russian State University for Humanities in spring 2006, i.e. by using special contexts and not only word by word translations. We had respondents from both northern and southern dialects of Welsh. The data was then verified according to the main contemporary Welsh dictionaries and other sources. The resulting 110-word list is represented in the table on pages 140–143.
