Editing Openai/69186d20-2d14-8013-b9c6-c09000f173f6 (section)

=== Assistant: 2511141808ET ===
251114_1808ET

short answer: no, you shouldn’t expect “more obvious word-level cognates” between Celtic and Italic than between Germanic and Italic. The claim that Celtic is especially close to Italic is about shared innovations in morphology and sound law, not about how many everyday words look alike to you.

Your “foot/ped” intuition is actually a good example of the difference.

===== - foot ← PGmc ''fōt- ← PIE ''pṓds =====
'' ped- (Latin pēs, pedis) ← same PIE root ''ped-/pṓds

That root is pan-Indo-European. There are reflexes all over the family (Greek, Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, probably Celtic too in older strata / toponyms).

So “Germanic has foot, Italic has ped-” tells you:

: 

That’s retention, not evidence of a special Italic–Germanic subgroup. You’ll find just as many PIE cognates between Celtic and Italic if you dig:
* ‘three’: Lat trēs ~ Ir trí
* ‘new’: Lat novus ~ Ir nua
* ‘name’: Lat nōmen ~ Ir ainm (with regular Celtic sound changes), etc.

But those are all-branch IE roots, not Italo-Celtic-only tricks.

===== The Italo-Celtic business is about shared ''derived'' features that other IE branches don’t have, for example (schematically): =====
* Superlative morphology built on a common -isamo- type pattern (Latin -issimus, Old Irish endings from the same template).
* Parallel developments in certain case endings and verb tenses/moods, where Latin and Celtic show the same weird reshaping and others don’t.
* Some specific sound changes and lexical isoglosses that look like common innovations, not just inherited PIE.

Those are the things that push Celtic and Italic together higher up the tree. They’re buried in paradigms and reconstructions, not in transparent modern words.

So:
* Germanic–Italic: tons of obvious cognates because you know both families well, but nearly all are just “shared PIE roots + regular sound changes.”
* Celtic–Italic: fewer visibly similar modern words to your eye, but more shared weird morphology that looks like it happened once and was then inherited by both.

===== Three big biases: =====
# You know Germanic + Romance much better → You spot foot/ped, heart/cor, two/duo instantly. → You don’t yet have Irish/Welsh in your bones to the same degree; a lot of cognates are masked by heavy Celtic sound shifts and broad/slender effects.
# Celtic data is historically sparse - For Gaulish, Celtiberian etc. we have fragments, not a full lexicon. - If we had them like we have Latin + Gothic, many more Celtic–Italic–Germanic patterns would be obvious.
# Closeness ≠ number of “obvious lookalikes” - Closeness is about shared innovations: things that are too strange to be coincidence and too specific to be simple retention. - Those are mostly in inflectional paradigms and sound laws, not in the 500 most transparent dictionary entries.

===== : =====
* Not “more total cognates” in your everyday vocab. All the old IE branches share a huge common stock; Germanic+Italic and Celtic+Italic both sit on that.
'' What Italo-Celtic is saying is: - If you zoom out to the reconstructed grammar level, - there are more shared ''innovations* between Italic and Celtic than between Italic and, say, Greek or Indo-Iranian. - Germanic then shares some additional stuff with that West-IE cluster, but the strongest “special relationship” is often drawn between Italic and Celtic.

So your intuition is good but needs this twist:

>