Quote Originally Posted by Elmetiacos View Post
It started in the 18th Century in a silly way, with Welshmen trying to draw false analogies with Hebrew to prove the antiquity of Welsh, but more recently some people have drawn different parallels, mainly the unusual word order of modern insular Celtic languages, which are apparently more like Hamitic or Semitic than Indo-European. It's been used to argue that an Afro-Asiatic language was spoken in the British Isles, either as a pre-Celtic substrate or in a Phoenician trading colony. I was on the same mailing list as a Celticist called Alex Kondratiev a few years ago and we floated the idea that the non-Celtic Pictish oghams could be Hamitic on the basis that the Picts were supposedly matrilinear and the syllable ETT kept appearing, so it could be the feminine T affix. Following this reasoning the inscription at Lunasting (E)TTUCUHETTSAHEHHTANNNHCCVVEVVNEHHTON starts t-wkw-t sa... which suggests a goddess whose name means bright or shining (3152) is asked to do something to someone. The theory didn't really take off...
thanks for enlightening me.