A jumble of classifications of Celtic

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

First off I will state that what I'm after here is reasoned debate on the issues I am raising. I have no nationalist axe to grind (unlike some of the proponents of the debate, something I will go into in a little more detail). So, it started from reading Stephen Oppenheimer's origins of the British, and also with reference to Barry Cunliffe's (and others) work on Celtic from the West. The more I look, the more reason I have to doubt the 'standard' understanding of Hallstat/La Tene being the centre of so-called Celtic culture. At least part of the problem here is in terms of a broad use of the term Celtic to incorporate on the one hand a spread of material cultures, and on the other the spread of Celtic languages, and the confusion thereof. Associated with this is a linking of the terms Gaul/Gala and Celtic, so that the two terms become synonymous. At the heart of all of this lies, imo, a simple Geographical error, on the part of Herodotus, which has been compounded by a rather romanticised (though honest) extrapolation of material finds into what amounts to a pan-European uber-culture.

There are so many questions to put that I hardly know where to start, so I'll start with the error. Herodotus (or perhaps some later scribe), for some reason, places the source of the Ister (Danube) somewhere in the Pyrennes. He then goes on to describe the location of the Keltoi as beyond the pillars of Heracles (the straights of Gibralter) , which is indeed where we find the Celtici. recent work by Koch on Tartessian seems to have it classified as a Celtic language, and therefore as possibly the earliest written Celtic language. Now what do we actually know about Celtic languages? The remaining Celtic languages (Gaelic/Goidillic, Welsh, Cornish and Bretton) all survive on the West Atlantic coastal areas. Hispano-Celtic languages were spoken most predominantly within the Western part of the Iberian peninsula, with older probably pre-Indo-European, Iberian languages along the Eastern seaboard (along with Greek and Punic insertions). I have little reason to doubt that Gaulish was a Celtic language, especially as Caesar tells us that those within 'real' Gaul (of which more later) refer to themselves as Keltoi. Now, this is quite important, if true. There seems to be an idea that the word Keltoi is a Greek term meaning 'foreigner', but we know from inscriptions found particularly in Spain, that Celtici/Celticos is used by the natives.

Now, in terms of using foreign terms to describe oneself, this brings up the matter of the various 'sub-tribes' of the Volcae. It seems to be accepted that Volcae is derived from proto-Germanic Walhaz (meaning foreigner, allegedly). This should be a rather jarring concept, and I have no idea why it isn't seen as such. Why would we believe that the Romans and Greeks were referring to 'Celtic' tribes by a Germanic term? If it is how the tribes themselves called themselves then why were they using what amounts to a pejorative, foreign term as a prefix for their tribal affiliation? How many other tribal affiliations describe themselves thus (ie a tribal affinity subject to an overarching affinity)? I can think only of the Aeromici. In terms of Volcae there is another possibilty, albeit one might have to stop assuming that they are Celtic speaking. There is a proto-Germanic route wolk, from which is derived the English folk and the German volk. So Volcae (the latinised form) would mean the people/nation/ tribe of. To me this makes more sense. This, however, goes against the prevailing concept of 'Celtic' material culture and Celtic language being synonymous and developed within the Danube are (Halstat, La Tene).

This is exacerbated by the extrapolation of Gaul being equivalent to Celtic. Again we have a surprisingly jarring proposition that Gala (and thence Gaul) is derived from the proto-Germanic route Walhaz. But, again, why would the Romans and Greeks be using a proto-Germanic term? A more convincing etymology is from the Greek Galact, or milk - referring to either the paleness of the people (which is something the Greeks make a point of) or, perhaps, from their reliance upon cattle and therefore dairy produce. Also, as a sidenote, Walhaz is a compound, from the root Wal, which means battle (hence Valhalla, Valkyrie), so Wal-Haz probably means those we battle - so not simply foreigner, but more like enemy.

Tacitus gives us a clue that the language spoken in Galatia was perhaps not German, though his words have been generally taken to inform that they did. He says that the Galatians still spoke a language that was similar to that of the Treveri. That seems pretty specific. Not in Gaul (more generally) but the Treveri in particular. The Treveri identified themselves as Germanic. Another tidbit from Tacitus informs us that the Aesti, who live to the East of the Suevi, share the manners and customs of the Suevi but speak a language more like that of the British. Tacitus spent a fair bit of time in Britain (particularly, I believe, Eburacon - ie North-East England); he was interested in languages and is one of the few early historians to associate languages in writing.

In terms of the languages spoken in Britain the role of Commius is quite telling also. It was he who was sent over to 'sound out' the various British tribes. It was he, also, who negotiated on Caesar's behalf with Cassivellaunus. As this was what amounted to a capitulation to Caesar's power why was Caesar himself or any of his own officers instrumental in this? Commius was a leading member of the Northern Belgic Atrebates (who are likely to be associated with the British entity of the same name). Caesar nowhere else uses a proxy for his negotiations, except for when he sent a friend from the province of Gaul to negotiate with Ariovistus. He was sent because he spoke Gaulish which we are assured by Caesar Ariovistus spoke, due to his long association with the Gauls. So, quite possibly, there was a language barrier between Gaul proper and the British polities which Commius was able to bridge.

One only has to look at a language map of the Italian peninsula during the period of Roman expansion to see that even in such a small area there was a great proliferation of languages. Today once one scratches under the surface of legal national languages on finds a plethora of smaller languages and dialect groups. I think that Brythonnic (as in the relation of modern Welsh) was one of a number of languages present within Britain at the time of first contact with the Roman world. There are substantial differences between the cultural entities that existed within Britain in terms of organisation, religious beliefs and, I believe, language.

I also believe that the Danube cultures which are linked with 'Celtic' material culture had a language with closer affiliations with proto-Germanic, and that the Celtic languages are of the Western Atlantic zone. Only by re-assessing the whole picture (which would involve unpicking the romanticised 'Celtic' story formed in the 19th century) and putting aside prejudices conceived from this, are we likely to piece together a realistic picture of the power structures and affinities during the period leading up to and during the Roman period, and how rhose tie in with subsequent history.

I will state again that I am not interested in any nationalist agenda or ethnic affiliation and would distance myself from any such agenda. I would be very interested in other's thoughts on this.

[Fisherking]

I have heard of the theory but have not read the book of its author.

I understand that it has made a few converts but it is still a fringe theory.

If that theory is based on making the central zone of Hallstat a proto-Germanic one, I would say it is rubbish.

I have no doubt that there were many Celtic dialects. Likely it was more a cultural group than strictly a linguistic one. The culture was an advanced one. More advanced in some regards than those of the Mediterranean cultures they bordered.

I would not say I have a strong nationalistic motive either in asserting that the Hallstat and La Téne cultures were not Germanic or proto-Germanic. The linguistic evidence you have offered (presumably from the books authors) is very flimsy for a number of reasons. So is the location of the Pillars of Heracles. The lands of the Tartessians were split between a Celtic influence and an area without. The languages of Spain is a bad place to try an figure out who was where and when. If we assume that Indo-European languages started in the east and worked west then the Celts had to start in the east. If you wish to assume that the Celts were the first Indo-Europeans you get a whole new set of problems. Due to language distributions it makes more sense that they were the newcomers.

We call the Hallstat culture Celtic and we can trace its spread, at least to a degree. They spread the iron sword through Europe. However, about the same time the iron age also started in Britain, but not Ireland or Spain. In fact we don’t have the iron age in Ireland until about 200 BC, about the same time Celts, at least a later wave, arrived there.

Linguistically there are many rivers in Austria and Germany which still have Celtic names. Other place names we know were Germanized. Relying on the Romans to give us a clear picture of ethnicity of tribes is usually a mistake. We know of many seemingly Celtic tribes in Germany proper and a few German tribes in Celtic areas. We are unsure of the languages of the Belgae. They could have been a mixture of Celtic and Germanic tribes speaking a mixture of languages.

In Spain we do have some Celts in the far west, mostly mixed with other groups, where the Celts are seemingly more advanced and expanding into new areas. If we assume they were there first we have to also assume they are in decline and other groups, while less advanced culturally are in the ascendancy.

When we look at movements prior to the conquest of Gaul and Spain we find Celtic tribes moving into areas previously dominated by others. Are we to assume that it was the reverse in Spain? Why did it take some 300 to 500 years for iron age technologies to find there way to Ireland?

It is not impossible that Celts moved out of Spain, acquired higher levels of technologies and spread them back to the source, but it is unlikely.

[Arjos]

Also the germanic identity, in the area, really came to be later on, with the roman borders and the greater influx of migrating people from Jutland and later with the Goths.

BTW don't get too much mistaken with belgic tribes and Britain, as it seems to have been a relatively recent migration, possibly related to the Cimbrian War. So Commios, simply was a very close kin, even in the range of one lifetime.
Brythonic was the regional evolution of either the local language, mixing with a celtic tongue, brought by new settlers; or of a much earlier proto-celtic language from the Bronze Age.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

I have heard of the theory but have not read the book of its author.

I understand that it has made a few converts but it is still a fringe theory.

I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions that are drawn, but the book raised alot of questions which I have tried to summarise briefly. As for it being a fringe theory, well I'm not sure what that means. In terms of the questions it raises it shouldn't be a fringe theory because at the heart of it it questions a pretty big leap of attribution taken with little, if any, evidence to back it up.

If that theory is based on making the central zone of Hallstat a proto-Germanic one, I would say it is rubbish.

Well I tried to make sure I didn't claim that the language of the area was proto-Germanic, rather that the language may have had more affinity with Proto-Germanic that with Proto-Celtic. (interestingly, the Veneti - those of the Adriatic - language seems to have parallels with Germanic languages, according to Julius Pokorny, a proponent of Celtic philology, ironically). I'm interested to know why you think the idea rubbish. Presumably because you believe that the language of this area is Celtic, but that's my point. On what basis has this link been made? Do you know?

I have no doubt that there were many Celtic dialects. Likely it was more a cultural group than strictly a linguistic one. The culture was an advanced one. More advanced in some regards than those of the Mediterranean cultures they bordered.

Yes, that's my point. There is clearly an advanced material culture which seems to be centered around this area, but on what basis was the link between this material culture and the Celtic languages made? This is where the whole problem starts, because the material culture and language have been linked from the period of initial extrapolation, without any real evidence to do so, yet somehow has become a standard axiom. It might seem self-evident, because of its axiomatic nature, but actually the initial link has little going for it.

I would not say I have a strong nationalistic motive either in asserting that the Hallstat and La Téne cultures were not Germanic or proto-Germanic. The linguistic evidence you have offered (presumably from the books authors) is very flimsy for a number of reasons.

I'd be interested in what those reasons are. To me it seems flimsy, in the extreme, to find a Celtic etymology of the Volcae by imagining that the Romans and Greeks were using a term with a proto-Germanic route and/or the allegedly Celtic tribe were refering to themselves by means of a pejorative proto-Germanic term within the context of a hierarchical dithematic tribal affiliation otherwise unattested among Celtic tribes. the other problem with this particular etymology is that Wal itself does not mean foreigner, it means battle. In terms of attributing Gala again from that same proto-germanic route meaning foreigner the problem arises that not only do we have to imagine the Greeks using a proto-Germanic route, but a compound route - Wal-haz. Were the Greeks in such close contact with the Germanics at this time? And why not use the more obvious Greek root Gala/Galact; milk.

So is the location of the Pillars of Heracles. The lands of the Tartessians were split between a Celtic influence and an area without.

But beyond the pillars of Heracles , I'm sure you will agree, is indeed where we find the Tartessos and the Celtici. And Tartessian has been shown to be a Celtic language and that makes it the oldest known written Celtic language. So, I'm not sure what you are driving at here.

The languages of Spain is a bad place to try an figure out who was where and when. If we assume that Indo-European languages started in the east and worked west then the Celts had to start in the east. If you wish to assume that the Celts were the first Indo-Europeans you get a whole new set of problems. Due to language distributions it makes more sense that they were the newcomers.

But, in what form did Indo-European languages come to Europe, and - just like Greek and Phoenician language/culture, a coastal starting point is not an unreasonable proposition.

We call the Hallstat culture Celtic and we can trace its spread, at least to a degree. They spread the iron sword through Europe. However, about the same time the iron age also started in Britain, but not Ireland or Spain. In fact we don’t have the iron age in Ireland until about 200 BC, about the same time Celts, at least a later wave, arrived there.

This is a bit of a muddled picture, requiring one to ignore the 'oriental' influence in Southern Iberia. But what you highlight again is that link without a basis. yes we call that material culture Celtic, but why? What is the evidence linking Celtic languages with that material culture of central Europe?

Linguistically there are many rivers in Austria and Germany which still have Celtic names. Other place names we know were Germanized.

But many of those so-called Celtic names are actually extrapolated from PIE roots rather than definitive Celtic, and many others have equally competent Germanic roots. Its almost as if the assumption has been made that the material culture and language are linked and therefore there must be Celtic roots within the area.

Relying on the Romans to give us a clear picture of ethnicity of tribes is usually a mistake. We know of many seemingly Celtic tribes in Germany proper and a few German tribes in Celtic areas. We are unsure of the languages of the Belgae. They could have been a mixture of Celtic and Germanic tribes speaking a mixture of languages.

Actually we are unsure of the linguistic attribution of most tribes/polities of this era, and claiming that we know that certain tribes were definitely Celtic is over-egging the case - which seems to be what has been done since the first attribution of 'Celtic' as synonymous with Halstat/La Tene culture. What muddies the waters even more is that, at this early stage what written records we have of the various peoples of Europe are from Latin and/or Greek writers and speakers. Whatever terms we have coming through them attributable to Germanic or Celtic speakers has been transposed in an alphabet that does not necessarily conform to the phonetic reality of the words, and via the ear of one perhaps not attuned to the subtleties of the language. An example is the name Ariovistus. It is clear that Ariovistus does not speak a Celtic language (certainly not Gaulish) as his first language, as Caesar tells us he had learned it through close contact with them. He will have spoken a proto-germanic language yet his name, as transcribed by Caesar seems 'Celtic'. Hari (which means army) and perhaps Vesti ( in the form Vestoz) to live among is a reasonable )ie plausible) proto-Germanic etymology, but Casar would be unlikely to do other than a first approximation when naming him (he's not going to ask him how he spells his name) and so Latinise the name.

In Spain we do have some Celts in the far west, mostly mixed with other groups, where the Celts are seemingly more advanced and expanding into new areas. If we assume they were there first we have to also assume they are in decline and other groups, while less advanced culturally are in the ascendancy.

I don't know what your point is here. What do you mean by "there first"? As opposed to who? The Iberians? The Iberian languages are non Indo-European (so pre-Indo-European). The Celtic language is not supposed to be some millenia old language. The earliest Tartessos inscriptions date to around the 8th century BC, the Celtic language would then spread via the Atlantic zone and up through North-west Spain (predominantly). Bear in mind that what Archaic Latin of this period was preserved in Rome was unintelligible to the Republican Romans.

When we look at movements prior to the conquest of Gaul and Spain we find Celtic tribes moving into areas previously dominated by others. Are we to assume that it was the reverse in Spain? Why did it take some 300 to 500 years for iron age technologies to find there way to Ireland?

This, again, highlights how axiomatic the idea is. You have automatically fallen into the assumed position that the Halstat material culture is synonymous with Celtic languages. And recent evidence suggests that iron working may have begun as early as the 9th century BC in Ireland (http://www.museum.ie/en/collection/iron-age.aspx)

It is not impossible that Celts moved out of Spain, acquired higher levels of technologies and spread them back to the source, but it is unlikely.

This comes back to the axiom at the heart of this. Have a look at the genesis of this idea (that halstat culture is linked with Celtic languages) and you will quickly discover that there is little (if anything, I'm still looking) that leads to the initial link. It is an axiom based upon the imaginings of a pan-European romanticist. I promise you, have a look for yourself. There is nothing in it, which makes me wonder how it could have built itself such a firm grounding within academic circles.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

Also the germanic identity, in the area, really came to be later on, with the roman borders and the greater influx of migrating people from Jutland and later with the Goths.

BTW don't get too much mistaken with belgic tribes and Britain, as it seems to have been a relatively recent migration, possibly related to the Cimbrian War. So Commios, simply was a very close kin, even in the range of one lifetime.
Brythonic was the regional evolution of either the local language, mixing with a celtic tongue, brought by new settlers; or of a much earlier proto-celtic language from the Bronze Age.

Well, there are many germanic placenames in these areas (Belgic), and there seems to have been an influx of Danubian 'Celts' during the third century BC if I remember correctly. Of course if one assumes that those from the Danube spoke a Celtic language then one will see a Celtic language area. But what is the link between Halstat culture and Celtic languages at the heart of that axiom?

[Arjos]

For once your correlation with the noun Walhaz, which you rightly translated as "foreigners", "enemies". Would be the most peculiar and unnatural way to identify one's own group, for any society.
Not to mention the very same word (walhaz), was used to describe any foreigner, be that celtic or roman for example.
While if you consider it, as the loanword for a germanic speaking group, to identify their neighbours (who at first happened to be only celtic), makes that much more sense.

The root wolkiō, "river dwellers", has been connected to their homeland: the danubian basin.
It was by their own celtic name, Uolkai, coming into contact with greeks and romans, that the names Οὐόλκαι and Volcae, came to be.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

For once your correlation with the noun Walhaz, which you rightly translated as "foreigners", "enemies". Would be the most peculiar and unnatural way to identify one's own group, for any society.
Not to mention the very same word (walhaz), was used to describe any foreigner, be that celtic or roman for example.
While if you consider it, as the loanword for a germanic speaking group, to identify their neighbours (who at first happened to be only celtic), makes that much more sense.

The root wolkiō, "river dwellers", has been connected to their homeland: the danubian basin.
It was by their own celtic name, Uolkai, coming into contact with greeks and romans, that the names Οὐόλκαι and Volcae, came to be.

And here you present me with a prime example of the circular method of obtaining a Celtic root. The alleged basis for the proto-Germanic walh is from a proposed Celtic, pre-German root wolk. There is no attested proto-Celtic root wolk, it is derived by circular reasoning that the Volcae must be Celtic (due to the Halstat attribution) and therefore the name of the Volcae must derive from a Celtic root. But there is a Germanic root wolk, from which the terms folk (English) and volk (German) are derived. Quite what this proposed pre-Germanic Celtic root is supposed to mean seems to have been overlooked. However if, as you say, it means river dweller from what known Celtic term is this meaning derived?

[Arjos]

That's one of the many hypothesis, another is uolko- for wanderer.

Volk, seems blatant to me that it's a later term, since as I said, it started as a description of their neighbouring "foreigners", ie culturally different people, (Keltoi, more specifically the danubian Uolkai). And it was extended to any foreigner, thus the meaning "people".

The point here is that the the distinction between germanic and celtic, took form at a much later period. So it doesn't make sense to introduce a pre-germanic root for those names. And again the one you mentioned, is hardly fitting for a personal tribe/group, as it means something "external".

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

That's one of the many hypothesis, another is uolko- for wanderer.

This doesn't address the point, and so I have to ask the same question, just of a different hypothesised term. What known Celtic term can this root be derived from? It isn't a Proto-Celtic root is a proposed Celtic root without any evidential standing.

Volk, seems blatant to me that it's a later term, since as I said, it started as a description of their neighbouring "foreigners", ie culturally different people, (Keltoi, more specifically the danubian Uolkai). And it was extended to any foreigner, thus the meaning "people".

But wolk/volk doesn't mean foreigner, it means people. It is not used to refer to other people but to nominate belonging. The term walha is alleged to be derived from this hypothetical proto-Celtic volk - but that proposition a)ignores the Germanic root wolk, and b)ignores the compound Germanic root wal-haz. In other words there is no reason to try and derive the term walha from anything outside of proto-Germanic. The idea that the known Germanic root wolk (ie it has cognates in later Germanic languages) must be derived from a hypothetical Celtic root volk(for which there is no known Celtic cognate) is a quite obtuse piece of logic, don't you think?

The point here is that the the distinction between germanic and celtic, took form at a much later period. So it doesn't make sense to introduce a pre-germanic root for those names. And again the one you mentioned, is hardly fitting for a personal tribe/group, as it means something "external".

It means something pre-positional (people of, folk of, nation of) to the tribal name, which makes far more sense than an additional, tiered ethnonym - a form which is unattested anywhere else. And I'm not sure what you mean by the distinction between German and Celtic happened much later - as far as I'm aware proto-Germanic is proposed from around 500BC, and proto-Celtic from around 800BC.

[Arjos]

But the root of those germanic words is fulka- and I still don't understand, how are you pre-dating wolk- to uolko- or uolkio- for example. It's a loanword.

As for the distinction, in central europe, there wasn't a germanic ethnicity 'til much later. Take the kinship between the Eluetoi and the western Balts, predating the cimbrian war.
You are juxtaposing germanic nouns in time.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

But the root of those germanic words is fulka- and I still don't understand, how are you pre-dating wolk- to uolko- or uolkio- for example. It's a loanword.

You haven't addressed the basic tennet at the base of this, you keep avoiding the question yet still demanding (ie categorically stating rather than suggesting) that wolk is a loanword. You haven't addressed how the conclusion has been reached that wolk is a loanword. What known Celtic term can be understood via the root volk? There aren't any. There is no attested Celtic root volk. There is an attested Germanic root. So in what way, on what basis, is the argument of the definitive nature of this as a loan-word from Celtic structured?

As for the distinction, in central europe, there wasn't a germanic ethnicity 'til much later. Take the kinship between the Eluetoi and the western Balts, predating the cimbrian war.
You are juxtaposing germanic nouns in time.

Again, you are simply taking the axiomatic position without addressing where that position springs from. Did the Western Balts speak a Celtic language? Really? Based upon what evidence? There is no evidential link between the material culture known to us as Halstatt and the languages known to us as Celtic. Some 19th Century romantic has linked the two and it has stuck. The link is based on nothing. Where do we find Celtic languages? Today we find the remnants on the Western Atlantic face of Europe. Hispano-Celtic and Gaulish are, again, Western European languages (and Gaulish is very poorly attested). Look for yourself, I'm not making this up. There is simply no evidential reason why the Halstatt culture and the Celtic languages should ever have been linked. It was and great work and contrivance has been undergone since to shore up that proposition. It is a baseless theory.

Another thing, neither material culture nor language should be associated with ethnicity.

[Arjos]

The fact that those who invaded the Balkans, settled Anatolia in the early 3rd century BC, were celtic and migrated over a century from that area.. None of them spoke a germanic language. The fact that at that time the Jastorf culture, was just beginning to experience depopulation. I never said anything about Eluetoi and Balts sharing language (but again at that time, peoples from core germanic areas, knew and spoke celtic: see, Boiorix, later Ariovistus etc), but in the late 2nd century BC, they considered themselves as close kin and kept close relations. It was in these groups that the Cimbri, found useful intermediaries.

That in your view a language should survive forever in time, where it once was, is honestly ridiculous. Especially considering the adaptability of these tribes.
Central Europe oppidas (another celtic feature), suffered something of a cataclysmic series of events. And it was in that depleted (in terms of population) area, that germanic tribes settled and developed.

What evidences do you have for the wolk- root to predate any celtic language?
Which again on the note of meaning, if you take wolk-, those danubians called themselves "people" (really?), or if you take walh-, they called themselves "foreigners" (again, really?).

And in overall, the distinction germanic/celtic, (with germanic as we understand it today), was something that developed later, with basically the extinction of the eastern celts. Since the bronze age, central europe and northern europe, saw the spreading of communities, close in customs and trade, with in time regionally developed in their own way, in connection to the specific resources or contacts with other cultures.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

The fact that those who invaded the Balkans, settled Anatolia in the early 3rd century BC, were celtic and migrated over a century from that area.. None of them spoke a germanic language. The fact that at that time the Jastorf culture, was just beginning to experience depopulation. I never said anything about Eluetoi and Balts sharing language (but again at that time, peoples from core germanic areas, knew and spoke celtic: see, Boiorix, later Ariovistus etc), but in the late 2nd century BC, they considered themselves as close kin and kept close relations. It was in these groups that the Cimbri, found useful intermediaries.

That in your view a language should survive forever in time, where it once was, is honestly ridiculous. Especially considering the adaptability of these tribes.
Central Europe oppidas (another celtic feature), suffered something of a cataclysmic series of events. And it was in that depleted (in terms of population) area, that germanic tribes settled and developed.

What evidences do you have for the wolk- root to predate any celtic language?
Which again on the note of meaning, if you take wolk-, those danubians called themselves "people" (really?), or if you take walh-, they called themselves "foreigners" (again, really?).

And in overall, the distinction germanic/celtic, (with germanic as we understand it today), was something that developed later, with basically the extinction of the eastern celts. Since the bronze age, central europe and northern europe, saw the spreading of communities, close in customs and trade, with in time regionally developed in their own way, in connection to the specific resources or contacts with other cultures.

Again you come back with the axiomatic response, without addressing the central question. I am not suggesting a language should remain within an area I am saying that the remaining Celtic languages are on the West as are any truly attested Celtic languages from any period.

You ask what evidence I have for wolk which predates Celtic which utterly ignores the fact that there is no known Celtic term which can be derived from wolk. There is no Celtic root wolk, there is only a proposed Celtic root from which it is alleged the German root wolk is derived. It is ludicrous circular logic.

Again you just keep pronouncing on these Eastern Celts without addressing the central question. What evidence is there that links Halstatt culture with Celtic languages? And, again, you confuse material technology with the language and that is the problem - an erroneous link has been formed without any evidence to support it and it is so axiomatic you seem incapable of even understanding that it is being questioned.

What evidence is there that those who settled Anatolia spoke a Celtic language? You will find that the evidence is, again, derived from circular logic.

[Fisherking]

We can talk about 19th century bias and much of it could use revision. The idea that the Celts could have come from the west was an idea I had long, long ago as a kid looking at maps. But then I studied them. I am not one to overlook controversial theories, but with this one it would take something quite extraordinary to convince me of its validity.

Relying on Herodotus for information is problematic. Some call him the father of history, other have called him the father of lies. He had some pretty wild notions.


The Romans called the Celts Gallia and the Greeks Keltoi. This is presumably what they called themselves. In Irish the word for folk (ethnically like peoples) is Gael. The Brythonic languages have changed so much that it is difficult to say. These are also Insular Celtic languages. There are no surviving Continental Celtic languages. Gaul is what the Romans called the areas of Celtic dominance but Latin had undergone shifts in pronunciation from the time they first met those peoples. Greek had also shifted. Gael and Kell are not that far apart.

It is not a good practice to pick a few words and try to tie them to another Indo-European language. Also tribal names are usually what others call a people and not what they call themselves. Trying to attribute proto-Germanic roots to Celtic names could prove an upside down process as Germanic derived later than Celtic and the peoples were in direct contact with each other.

We have no complete vocabularies for those Celtic languages but extrapolate from known Insular words.

Now, very importantly, the Tartessian language is recently classified as Celtic (2011) but doing so overlooks some serious problems. As I said before, a portion of there lands were occupied by Celts and part not. Just like calling Pictish Celtic it is a stretch IMO to call Tartessian Celtic because some elements may be similar. Pictish was once linked to Basque, who are the modern descendants of the Aquitani and covered most of the area leading to Iberia. Modern DNA testing is also linking the Irish most closely to these people. There are several ways to view this. My take would be the old Celtic veneer, where the base population was ruled by a Celtic elite. Further, there was also an important Paleolithic culture in the area of the Basques which may well have been seafarers, as are their Basques were in historic times.

The Veneti of Gaul were a Celtic people but the Veneti of Italy were not. Many people assume they were the same. It is a common error.

Hallstatt culture is linked with the Celts but so are the Beaker culture and the Urnfeld culture though others seem to be offshoots of those cultures, particularly the Beaker culture which took in an even larger area than Hallstatt or La Téne.

I will agree that placing Iberian and Irish Celts is problematic but they are Indo-European speakers, though not the earliest, meaning they likely arrived in the late bronze age. We also have anecdotal evidence that at the time of the Celtic-Roman meeting the two languages were mutually intelligible. This would mean they were separated only by a few hundred years from divergence, in all likelihood.

By the way, Hallstatt means salt town. There is a German root for hall that means something very different than the Celtic one for salt. The statt is Germanic. There are a lot of Celtic root words used in town names in Austria and Germany. Some have been Germanized others not. The Germans didn’t make those names up and they serve no nationalistic purpose. If the Celts were never there then who made up the names?

Much in the attempts to tie Celtic names to Germanic roots is not beneficial. It could be looked upon as obfuscation. Many languages have word of similar sounds that mean something totally different. With German and Celtic being both Indo-European a few may even mean the same.

German is a younger language than Celtic. I am tempted to say that much of the authors theory is based on his own obfuscations, intended or unintended. Trying to turn Celts of the Danube into Germans is way over the top. Danube its self is Celtic and relates to the goddess Danu which you also find in the western fringe of Europe.

I am not from here but I happen to be living in Bavaria (said to mean land of the Boii) in a town with a Germanized Celtic root by a river with a Celtic name with Hallstatt remains all around and there is nothing exceptional about this place. There are hundreds more as well as a few with Roman names. There is evidence of Celtic speakers from France, across Germany, Czechoslovakia, into the Balkans to the Black Sea, to what is today Turkey and beyond. We have as much evidence of Celtic speakers in Bulgaria as we have in Spain. The coinage left behind is not in German, it is Celtic. I am afraid those arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny.

The argument is starting to sound like a : We never went to the moon, prove that we did. Well along with the material artifacts the Celts had a great propensity for minting coins. So unless the Germans used Celtic for all the coinage they made then it would mean they must have been speaking Celtic languages and using Celtic names. Does anyone have proof that the Germans were even making coins at that time?

It makes perfect sense that the Celtic languages that survived did so because they were in the far west just as it makes sense that Basque survived because it was isolated and insulated from the Romantic languages. Linguistically the argument just does not wash.

All that said, I wouldn’t mind taking a look at the material and forming my own conclusions but that could take a while.


edit: Also as to your link, iron making doesn’t mean iron age. Iron was long known but not as useful as bronze until the processes of hardening it were discovered. The Hallstatt culture also made steel on a frequent basis. That in and of its self makes it easy to identify its smithing.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

We can talk about 19th century bias and much of it could use revision. The idea that the Celts could have come from the west was an idea I had long, long ago as a kid looking at maps. But then I studied them. I am not one to overlook controversial theories, but with this one it would take something quite extraordinary to convince me of its validity.

Studied 'them'? You have fallen straight into the axiomatic position; the Halstatt culture=Celtic language. That is the issue here. There is no evidence (other than forced - unattested - proposed etymologies) that Halstatt culture and Celtic languages have very much to do with each other. It was a leap of imagination made a couple of centuries ago, with no evidential support. One might as well blindly believe that the Romans are, most assuredly, Trojan refugees. It is a myth, and yet has become so entrenched that minds seem transfixed by it. Just have a look for yourself how little evidence there is for a Celtic language being spoken in the Danube area.

Relying on Herodotus for information is problematic. Some call him the father of history, other have called him the father of lies. He had some pretty wild notions.

Pretty ironic considering that it was the association (mistaken) of Celtic with the Danube that lead to the myth in the first place. What we do know is that, as Herodotus tells us, The Celtici live in this area (ie beyond the pillars of Heracles). Of all the now dead languages of Europe, the ones that we can most comfortably attribute as Celtic (ie are related to surviving insular Celtic languages) are those in the Western portion of the Iberian peninsular. Tartessos has been confirmed as being related to Celtic. So here we have an attested, written Celtic language from the 8th century BC. No such evidence for a Celtic language exists within the Danube basin. So, how does it make sense to continue with the story of Celtic migration through Northern Iberia and down when Celtic is attested some four centuries before this is supposed to have happened in the South-West of that country?

The Romans called the Celts Gallia and the Greeks Keltoi. This is presumably what they called themselves. In Irish the word for folk (ethnically like peoples) is Gael. The Brythonic languages have changed so much that it is difficult to say. These are also Insular Celtic languages. There are no surviving Continental Celtic languages. Gaul is what the Romans called the areas of Celtic dominance but Latin had undergone shifts in pronunciation from the time they first met those peoples. Greek had also shifted. Gael and Kell are not that far apart.

This is too much of a simplification of the use of the terms Kelt and Gaul. It is a little more complex than that, and the two terms became almost synonymous being used in different contexts as meaning very different things. And as for the idea that people identify themselves by what others call them, that is by no means a hard and fast rule. It may be that it occurs, but it doesn't follow that it is the case. What is almost certainly the case is that when a tribal name is used it is generally from the people themselves and is more than likely how they identify themselves.

It is not a good practice to pick a few words and try to tie them to another Indo-European language.

Again this is pretty ironic because this is what the whole facade of 'evidence' for Celtic languages in Central Europe during the Halstatt period is based upon - conjectured, unattested etymologies.

Also tribal names are usually what others call a people and not what they call themselves.

As I said above, what we usually see (except when using sweeping terms like Gaul or Germani or Kelt) is a name by which the people concerned identify themselves. I don't think it would be stretching it too far to propose that the Aedui would perceive themselves as being of the Aedui, for example.

Trying to attribute proto-Germanic roots to Celtic names could prove an upside down process as Germanic derived later than Celtic and the peoples were in direct contact with each other.

Firstly I'm not trying to attribute Germanic roots to Celtic names. If you are referring to Ariovistus then... he was Germanic and almost certainly spoke a Germanic language. It seems likely, therefore, that he would have a Germanic name. My point was that Caesar's Latin ear, and his practiced use of the Latin alphabet, leads to a Latinised form of the name (the same can be seen with Arminius, for example). As for the idea that the German language deriving later than Celtic - well we don't know when Germanic or Celtic initially derived from PIE, and as for their being in close contact - this again is straight back to the axiomatic 'truth' of Halstatt material culture=Celtic language.

We have no complete vocabularies for those Celtic languages but extrapolate from known Insular words.

I know, but the problem is some of the extrapolations are very, very stretched.

Now, very importantly, the Tartessian language is recently classified as Celtic (2011) but doing so overlooks some serious problems. As I said before, a portion of there lands were occupied by Celts and part not. Just like calling Pictish Celtic it is a stretch IMO to call Tartessian Celtic because some elements may be similar.

I'm not really sure what your argument is here. Whether or not you think it should be classified as Celtic it is, and that is through many long years of work by John Koch. In Italy some parts spoke Italic and some parts didn't. Does that mean we shouldn't classify those languages as Italic because there were other languages present? I can assure you that the language has not been accepted because it has some similarities but because Koch showed that it is a Celtic language. He didn't just say one day this looks a bit Celtic and...voila it was so.

Pictish was once linked to Basque, who are the modern descendants of the Aquitani and covered most of the area leading to Iberia. Modern DNA testing is also linking the Irish most closely to these people. There are several ways to view this. My take would be the old Celtic veneer, where the base population was ruled by a Celtic elite. Further, there was also an important Paleolithic culture in the area of the Basques which may well have been seafarers, as are their Basques were in historic times.

I'm not sure what this has to do with Tartessian being a celtic language.

The Veneti of Gaul were a Celtic people but the Veneti of Italy were not. Many people assume they were the same. It is a common error.

I didn't make the error, I was specifically referring to the Adriatic Veneti. The reason I brought them up was because there is a possible link between the language of the Adriatic Veneti and Germanic languages. There are reasons to believe that Adriatic Veneti and Rhaetic are related in some way though Rhaetic is very poorly attested. Poorly attested though it is it there is more evidence for a Rhaetic language in the area of the Danube around this time than there is any Celtic language. Now Adriatic Venetic has also been seen as sharing similarities with Slavic languages. So, what we possibly have here are a set of related languages, or a 'sprachbunden' from which proto-Germanic and proto-Balto-Slavic have arisen (so you see I am not talking of a Germanic language per sé, but rather pre-proto-Germanic languages.

Hallstatt culture is linked with the Celts but so are the Beaker culture and the Urnfeld culture though others seem to be offshoots of those cultures, particularly the Beaker culture which took in an even larger area than Hallstatt or La Téne.

Yes it has been, but why, that is fundamentally the question I am trying to get you to address. If you look at the original reasoning you will find no evidential reasoning for linking these material cultures with Celtic languages.

I will agree that placing Iberian and Irish Celts is problematic but they are Indo-European speakers, though not the earliest, meaning they likely arrived in the late bronze age. We also have anecdotal evidence that at the time of the Celtic-Roman meeting the two languages were mutually intelligible. This would mean they were separated only by a few hundred years from divergence, in all likelihood.

Well I don't think that we do have such evidence, what we do have is a lack of references to the use of translators (Caesar does mention a Gaul from the Province on his staff - I forget his name - who he sends to Ariovistus because he speaks Gaulish), and we also forget the probability that, among the trading and aristocratic classes at least, being multi-lingual was probably the norm.

By the way, Hallstatt means salt town. There is a German root for hall that means something very different than the Celtic one for salt.

And what is the Celtic root for salt? The PIE for salt is sal. The Welsh for Salt is halen. However this has come about as a result of changes that occured within Welsh sometime between the 8th and 12th centuries AD - between Old and Middle Welsh (http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/dwew2/old...ddle_welsh.pdf), so the alleged Celtic root for salt here is in error.

The statt is Germanic. There are a lot of Celtic root words used in town names in Austria and Germany. Some have been Germanized others not. The Germans didn’t make those names up and they serve no nationalistic purpose. If the Celts were never there then who made up the names?

Check those alleged Celtic roots out and you'll find they are as far-fetched as Hal for salt.

Much in the attempts to tie Celtic names to Germanic roots is not beneficial.

Even less beneficial has been the forcing in of false etymologys to non-Celtic words. They are NOT Celtic words, that is the point.

It could be looked upon as obfuscation. Many languages have word of similar sounds that mean something totally different. With German and Celtic being both Indo-European a few may even mean the same.

The obfuscation has already taken place. I've said it before. Investigate those supposed Celtic roots for yourself and you will begin to see how forced the Celtic etymology is. You are right to say that there are many shared roots and many of the alleged Celtic terms are simply PIE roots, with no attestation in Celtic at all.

German is a younger language than Celtic. I am tempted to say that much of the authors theory is based on his own obfuscations, intended or unintended. Trying to turn Celts of the Danube into Germans is way over the top. Danube its self is Celtic and relates to the goddess Danu which you also find in the western fringe of Europe.

Axiomatic central tenet appears again. There is no reason to believe that the Halstatt culture should be linked to Celtic languages. Danu is indeed a Celtic God, but what you obviously haven't been told is that Danu is pretty Indo-European wide. There is also a Mother-Goddess called Danu in the Hindu Rigveda, Goddess of a lake. Danu also happens to be a Scythian term likely meaning river and probably from the same religious root. Danu is PIE not Celtic.

I am not from here but I happen to be living in Bavaria (said to mean land of the Boii) in a town with a Germanized Celtic root by a river with a Celtic name with Hallstatt remains all around and there is nothing exceptional about this place. There are hundreds more as well as a few with Roman names. There is evidence of Celtic speakers from France, across Germany, Czechoslovakia, into the Balkans to the Black Sea, to what is today Turkey and beyond. We have as much evidence of Celtic speakers in Bulgaria as we have in Spain. The coinage left behind is not in German, it is Celtic. I am afraid those arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny.

What is celtic about it? Please just check for yourself. Watch the celtic facade crumble before your eyes.

The argument is starting to sound like a : We never went to the moon, prove that we did. Well along with the material artifacts the Celts had a great propensity for minting coins. So unless the Germans used Celtic for all the coinage they made then it would mean they must have been speaking Celtic languages and using Celtic names. Does anyone have proof that the Germans were even making coins at that time?

What Celtic is this that you speak of? Have a closer look.

It makes perfect sense that the Celtic languages that survived did so because they were in the far west just as it makes sense that Basque survived because it was isolated and insulated from the Romantic languages. Linguistically the argument just does not wash.

All that said, I wouldn’t mind taking a look at the material and forming my own conclusions but that could take a while.


edit: Also as to your link, iron making doesn’t mean iron age. Iron was long known but not as useful as bronze until the processes of hardening it were discovered. The Hallstatt culture also made steel on a frequent basis. That in and of its self makes it easy to identify its smithing.[/QUOTE]

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

Just a quick addendum. Danu is not attested within Celtic writing. The idea comes from a proposed root for Tuatha Dé Danann, but the extrapolation of mother-Goddess Danu seems to be a much later (Victorian) invention which bears little resemblance to the text itself. Which leaves Danu as a Scythian/Vedic (Indo-Iranian) word. Given the geographical position of the Scythians and the rivers bearing the Danu/Don prefix a Scythian root is far more likely than a Celtic one.

[Zarakas]

Question - did not the people originally move from the East to the West, thus inhabiting western Europe? Hence, most European languages are indo-european?

[Fisherking]

You know, I couldn’t even read the posts after I read part of your first sentence.

For all the world you sound like a Political Commissar.

If you can extrapolate the name of a tribe into some German root I think I can extrapolate Danu from Donau which the Germans still call the River.

German place names are very simplistic and straight forward; Hog-brook, Bridge at thunder hill, Deep valley. They have one or two names for hills and so on. Celtic languages are much more varied. There are eight or more names for hills of different types, differences in streams beyond brook and river. The differences are easy to spot in names. Not some other convenient language for those who chose to deny…but then again, I don’t think you want to see. What most vanishes before my eyes is the preposterousness of your book’s argument.

While writing this I also noted your use of Welsh for etymology. Forget it!

In the early 5th century the language changed so quickly and profoundly that one generation could not understand the next. Not to mention the later changes. It is like trying to build the works of Shakespeare from a shredded Norwegian book.

Most of your linguistics are just cherry picking and obfuscation.

It is all starting to sound too much like a sensationalist author having the Celts arriving from the west from some Atlantian Culture with the Children of Danu.

There is a lot wrong with the study of ancient Celts. Too much romanticism and too much New Age tripe.

Arguing that the Celts didn’t start in Central Europe is like arguing that there were no Native Americans in the eastern US because there is insufficient linguistic evidence.

I don’t think the authors were very interested in facts or what is known. I think they wanted to make a splash and sell books.

This all ignores too much, distorts evidence, uses straw men and denies artifacts in order to offer the gullible enough to go along with their premise.

Thanks for enlightening me.



Your premise asks us to assume that the Celts in the west were always there and since they were Indo-European then that language group had to spread in the opposite direction. As language is usually assumed to spread with cultures, please tell me what culture spread from the west eastward to account for this. Do you have one?

The earliest archaeological date for Celts in Spain is circa 1400 BC with the Urnfeld culture. What proof do you have that they were there before?
They are not placed in the British Isles until 650 BC or later. Do you have some evidence that they were there at an earlier date?

The Celts, Italics, and Illyrians are linked to the “cord pottery” culture in Central Europe and said to have been one of the first Indo-Europeans to have arrived. Circa 2100 BC these languages were though to have diverged. Of course in your view the Celts were never in Central Europe so how do you explain the similarities linguistically?

What you may not be aware of and what your linguistic scrabble game is ignoring is Celtic peoples were called different names: Gauls in France, Belgae in Northern France, Galates in the Balkans and numerous tribal names everywhere. But there is no doubt that they all spoke one language, or similar varieties of the same one. This comes from town names, inscriptions and Celtic words written down by Greek and Roman authors. Their language system is what is called "Classical Celtic": it was very close to the Italic group of tongues, and Julius Caesar even had to write his letters to his legates in Greek for Gaulish leaders not to be able to read them if they might happen to gain hold of these missives. He did so because Latin could be understood by Celts quite well without having had to study it.

Gaulish was highly inflected, but had practically nothing in common with Insular Celtic morphology and phonetics: it had no initial mutations, had an ordinary Indo-European word order (subject - predicate - adverbial modifiers) and grammatical forms similar to those of the Proto-Indo-European model.

I am afraid that the whole thing sounds like a case of Denial and little else.

[Fisherking]

I read the Bryn Mawr review.

I have to say I am skeptical of the work.

Disregarding cultural artifacts is not unacceptable other than the coinage. Coinage and inscriptions disregarded is too much IMO. My opinion on the classification of Tartessian as Celtic is too presumptive and ignores too much of the vocabulary. I can see it as influenced by Celtic but not much more.

The theory relies more heavily on lack of evidence than anything else. It doesn’t explain the relationship between Italic and Illyrian languages. It not only ignores classical authors testaments to a Celtic presence it also ignores people who call themselves Celtic or Gauls in those lands.

We not only have artifacts bearing Celtic inscriptions as far as the Balkans but in some cases we have the inscribed negatives used to make the molds for those items, and they are of local manufacture. In other words, we have better proof of Celts in the east than we do of Celts in the west, if we are to rely on Celtic inscriptions.

With the recent DNA analyses linking Irish and Basque it is not good supporting evidence for a western origin of Celtic speakers. That is until Koch proves that Basque is also a Celtic language and not a non Indo-European one.

I am disinclined to accept lack of evidence as proof of western origins. It ignores too much recorded data and inscriptions and chooses the data set and applies it inconsistently to suit the primus.

To me it is just another case of an academic reaching a conclusion and using only that which supports the case while ignoring or discarding conflicting evidence and viewpoints.

The book is quite expensive and I don’t think I will be buying it.

I do see why you took the tact you did in presenting the case. Looking from a different prospective is not bad but this requires overlooking too much hard data for me to credit it.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

You know, I couldn’t even read the posts after I read part of your first sentence.

For all the world you sound like a Political Commissar.

In what way? (and, by the way, I have taken part in this discussion without recourse to personal effrontery, that is generally how I pursue such debates.) This is THE crux of the argument; that the notion of Celtic roots in the Danube area is the result of a misreading of Heroditus, linking the Danube with the area of the Celts - which is why it was ironic that you claimed that Herodotus was a poor witness. When you read it properly you will note that his placing of the Celts is not connected at all with the Danube. he places them beyond the pillar of Heracles, naming the Celtici. We also now have a confirmed written Celtic language dating from the 8th century BC in this area - whether or not you believe it to be so.

ALL of the etymologies attributed as Celtic are forced etymologies. If the argument that you counter this with is that you have studied the Celts and decided it is not so then all you are doing is highlighting that you have studied the Halstatt era material culture and just accepted that they are Celtic - without any notion of how, linguistically, that attribution has come about. Don't take my word for it - as I have said many times - check them out for yourself and you will see that the so-called Celtic roots are either PIE roots (and therefore equally applicable in other PIE languages) or horribly mangled and stretched narratives which, when one looks just a little more closely, begin to look, frankly, foolish - an example of this is the alleged Celtic etymology of volc, which is unattested, and linking this with the Germanic Wal-haz, which has a perfectly well reasoned internal etymology not requiring any contortion from external sources. As for the basis of wolk/volc, there is the PIE ueik (to happen, to become equal, to come together), perhaps related to uoiko (house, village, settlement). We know that there is a Germanic term volk/folk, or perhaps this root might be ulcoas (wolf) which we know from vlk (Slovak) volk (Slovenian). What volc is not is an attested Celtic root.

If you can extrapolate the name of a tribe into some German root I think I can extrapolate Danu from Donau which the Germans still call the River.

Yet you are happy to accept an unattested etymology of said tribe as Celtic. Why? And, as I said before, the attribution of Danu as an Irish deity does not bear out closer inspection.

German place names are very simplistic and straight forward; Hog-brook, Bridge at thunder hill, Deep valley. They have one or two names for hills and so on. Celtic languages are much more varied. There are eight or more names for hills of different types, differences in streams beyond brook and river.

There are as many words for hill in proto-Germanic as there are in any of the near PIE languages. Also, many of the alleged Celtic roots for such as hill are (at the fear of repeating myself) PIE, and merely proposed as Celtic - as I keep suggesting, you can check this out for yourself.

The differences are easy to spot in names. Not some other convenient language for those who chose to deny…but then again, I don’t think you want to see. What most vanishes before my eyes is the preposterousness of your book’s argument.

...and you haven't bothered to look at the basis of those alleged Celtic etymologies have you?

While writing this I also noted your use of Welsh for etymology. Forget it!

Thank you. This is part of exactly the point I'm trying to make. Where do you think the Celtic etymology of Hall(Hal) for salt comes from? The only Celtic attestation of any term for salt with Hal is the Welsh Halen - which as I pointed out is a much later internal change.

Most of your linguistics are just cherry picking and obfuscation.

Don't take my word for it then, check for yourself. The etymologies I have pointed out are responses to the 'clearly' Celtic terms you have put forward. Tell me where you think the alleged Celtic etymology for hal as salt comes from.

It is all starting to sound too much like a sensationalist author having the Celts arriving from the west from some Atlantian Culture with the Children of Danu.

Which is another ironic statement when you consider, ie actually look at - as I have asked you to do - the basis of the Celtic from the Danube narrative. It is based upon the romantic notions of a 19th century historian forming a story about a united pan-European culture and language. There was no linguistic evidence to link Celtic with the Halstatt culture.

There is a lot wrong with the study of ancient Celts. Too much romanticism and too much New Age tripe.

Exactly.

Arguing that the Celts didn’t start in Central Europe is like arguing that there were no Native Americans in the eastern US because there is insufficient linguistic evidence.

No it isn't. It is nothing like the same thing. Take a look for yourself where the story comes from.

This all ignores too much, distorts evidence, uses straw men and denies artifacts in order to offer the gullible enough to go along with their premise.

Distorts evidence? I don't know how many times I have to repeat this, take a look for yourself how distorted the alleged Celtic roots are for the alleged Celtic words in the Danube area. As for ignores too much; Herodotus said that the Celtici live beyond the pillars of Heracles - where we find a written Celtic language from the 8th century BC. Any link between the Danube and the Celts within Herodotus' description is completely in error. So, how do you deal with that information?

Let's see...

Your premise asks us to assume that the Celts in the west were always there and since they were Indo-European then that language group had to spread in the opposite direction.

Well, we see a strawman. Why "always there"?

As language is usually assumed to spread with cultures, please tell me what culture spread from the west eastward to account for this. Do you have one?

No, language has been assumed to spread in this instance, and language spread and the spread of culture is a little more nuanced. Again a strawman.

The earliest archaeological date for Celts in Spain is circa 1400 BC with the Urnfeld culture.

Whoa there. Now the Celts are determined as Urnfield and existing since 1400BC....??

They are not placed in the British Isles until 650 BC or later. Do you have some evidence that they were there at an earlier date?

And, again, you are on with 'they', in other words straight back to the axiomatic 'truth'.

The Celts, Italics, and Illyrians are linked to the “cord pottery” culture in Central Europe and said to have been one of the first Indo-Europeans to have arrived. Circa 2100 BC these languages were though to have diverged. Of course in your view the Celts were never in Central Europe so how do you explain the similarities linguistically?

The later archaeological cultures are linked with cord pottery you are right, but how this in any argues for the linguistic predilictions of these people is a bit of a puzzle. You are going off at a tangent, but I know exactly why.

What you may not be aware of and what your linguistic scrabble game is ignoring is Celtic peoples were called different names: Gauls in France, Belgae in Northern France, Galates in the Balkans and numerous tribal names everywhere.

I'm not ignoring anything, you are simply following the axiomatic 'truth' again. There is no evidence that Galatians or the Belgae in Northern France spoke a Celtic language.

But there is no doubt that they all spoke one language, or similar varieties of the same one. This comes from town names, inscriptions and Celtic words written down by Greek and Roman authors. Their language system is what is called "Classical Celtic": it was very close to the Italic group of tongues, and Julius Caesar even had to write his letters to his legates in Greek for Gaulish leaders not to be able to read them if they might happen to gain hold of these missives. He did so because Latin could be understood by Celts quite well without having had to study it.

This is just such a poorly evidenced proposition I don't know where to begin. Latin was not comprehensible if you spoke Gaulish, but if you spoke Latin it would be. Pretty straight-forward. As for "Classical Celtic", what is that? I have never heard of such a thing. I know that most of the words that come to us through Latin speakers are Latinised, but that obscures rather than illuminates a languages true form.

Gaulish was highly inflected, but had practically nothing in common with Insular Celtic morphology and phonetics: it had no initial mutations, had an ordinary Indo-European word order (subject - predicate - adverbial modifiers) and grammatical forms similar to those of the Proto-Indo-European model.

Yes, that is because a) Gaulish is a very, very tentatively attested language and also the fact that insular languages have undergone hundreds of years of insular changes. The Celto-Iberian languages are very much PIE as well, as is Tartessian.

I am afraid that the whole thing sounds like a case of Denial and little else.

Hang on, aren't you the one denying the peer-reviewed work of John Koch? And the attestation of Celtici as the oldest known form of the word Celtic, and even their geographical location?

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

I read the Bryn Mawr review.

I have to say I am skeptical of the work.

Disregarding cultural artifacts is not unacceptable other than the coinage. Coinage and inscriptions disregarded is too much IMO. My opinion on the classification of Tartessian as Celtic is too presumptive and ignores too much of the vocabulary. I can see it as influenced by Celtic but not much more.

The theory relies more heavily on lack of evidence than anything else. It doesn’t explain the relationship between Italic and Illyrian languages. It not only ignores classical authors testaments to a Celtic presence it also ignores people who call themselves Celtic or Gauls in those lands.

We not only have artifacts bearing Celtic inscriptions as far as the Balkans but in some cases we have the inscribed negatives used to make the molds for those items, and they are of local manufacture. In other words, we have better proof of Celts in the east than we do of Celts in the west, if we are to rely on Celtic inscriptions.

With the recent DNA analyses linking Irish and Basque it is not good supporting evidence for a western origin of Celtic speakers. That is until Koch proves that Basque is also a Celtic language and not a non Indo-European one.

I am disinclined to accept lack of evidence as proof of western origins. It ignores too much recorded data and inscriptions and chooses the data set and applies it inconsistently to suit the primus.

To me it is just another case of an academic reaching a conclusion and using only that which supports the case while ignoring or discarding conflicting evidence and viewpoints.

The book is quite expensive and I don’t think I will be buying it.

I do see why you took the tact you did in presenting the case. Looking from a different prospective is not bad but this requires overlooking too much hard data for me to credit it.

It seems that some of the hard data you refer to may not be as 'hard' as you believe. You say that "it doesn't explain the relationship between Italian and Illyrian languages", I'm not sure what you mean. I don't see how an explanation of Celtic origin would have to explain a relationship between two completely separate languages. If, on the other hand, you mean the relationship between Celtic and these two languages there is no close link. They are PIE languages, but the proposed Italo-Celtic is widely discredited (it was politically motivated when formed, and has very, very little merit), and llyrian is so poorly attested that nothing much can be said of its relationship with other languages.

As for the link between Irish and Basque, that was a very tentative argument, and many attempts have made to link Basque with a number of languages (most famously Finnish) - again there really is very little supporting those propositions.

It seems odd, then, that you cite these rather tentative and generally unsupported language relationships as a reason to discount the peer-reviewed and accepted argument of Tartessian as Celtic

EDIT: I have re-read and realised that I have misunderstood your point regarding Basque and Irish. You spoke of a genetic link between the Basque region and Ireland (a link that also exists within the British isles more generally). This is from a very early (mesolithic) migration from a proposed Iberian refuge. It is one part of the evidence of an Atlantic zone within Europe, and is one piece of the jigsaw of Celtic from the West. We know that cultures were spread along the West Atlantic coast and that this seems to form a separate zone from the mediterranean zone and the central European zone (and yet another, Baltic zone), though all of these zones had interactions with each other.

[Fisherking]

Now that we understand each other a little better perhaps we can do somewhat better.

My view is that the author defines the Celts based only on language and then denies that the language extended over a larger area.

We have Celtic inscriptions and coins using Celtic languages, along with their molds over a very wide area. We have Classical Era authors placing them in that same area. The authors (Barry Cunliffe and John T. Koch) choose to discount our ignore this information.

Now, just to clear things up, at least Koch, discounts the culture and language link. To our knowledge these are generally linked. We can trace examples throughout known history but for this instance we should ignore it and say that it should not exist.

Tartessian is classed as a Celtic language per Koch. The prime dissenters are in everyway the equal of Koch in scholarship, if not more so, but review is a political process and with Cunliffe on the team it adds a lot of political weight.

Tartessian falls in an area which had been overrun by Celts but until Koch it was seen as a PIE isolate and most of it is still unintelligible. Turdetani language is still classed as PIE even though the two are closely related. So, here we are asked to believe that Tartessian had not become Celtizied but was Celtic but we must ignore its closest related language.

At any rate, we are asked to believe that these peoples didn‘t move around much. That people starting in the west stayed in the west. I take it that we are to assume that the first peoples in the British Isles came there from France and or Spain. Someone had to move there after the ice age and they couldn‘t sprout like mushrooms.

We are asked to assume that these people spoke a Celtic language that they brought with them. For me this is much too big of an assumption, given the rules they themselves set out.

The most dynamic and expansionist peoples or cultures going back to the Paleolithic (old stone age) were centered in Southwestern France and Northeastern Spain. The very regions associated with the Proto-Basques. They did expand their material cultures into areas the authors assume to have always been Celtic but we do class Basque as PIE, do we not? These people are also the ones linked genetically with the British Isles. Why are we to assume they took a different language?
Here, Pictish shows similarities with the Basque language but has recently also been classed with Celtic but it still shows strong PIE traits and vocabulary. Languages do change and are sometimes replaced. Why are we to assume that this never occurred until historic times?

There are other inconsistencies in the material I may get to later but I don‘t want to get too longwinded.

Some graphics that might be of use:


http://llmap.org/viewer.html?maps=11626

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...eria_300BC.svg

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

As you say we seem to understand each other a little better, you are right, but I don't think that you understand the argument very well. The reason I say this is that you keep referring to them as always having been there. Now, Koch is not suggesting that a PIE language appeared in isolation on the South-West coast of the Iberian peninsula To quote him "It
should be explained at the outset that an Atlantic hypothesis of Celtic origins does not require a rejection or minimizing of the Indo-European character of Celtic (cf. Meid 2008), nor a relocation of the Indo-European homeland to the west.. "
http://ifc.dpz.es/recursos/publicaciones/29/54/26koch.pdf

The 'corded-ware' culture is not the only Neolithic expansion from the East, there was also a Mediterranean expansion which we can see in the 'impressed ware' culture that is found in modern Croatia/West coastal Greece, Eastern Italian peninsula up to the Po and round to the toe; Eastern Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Liguria, South France with further pockets on the Eastern Iberian peninsula and South-West Portugal (beyond the pillars of Heracles).

We also see a cultural/material link between the Western Atlantic peoples during the late bronze age, defining it as a separate cultural zone from both the more general Mediterranean and the Central-European zones.

As for the assuredly Celtic names on Central European coins... The names as they appear on the coins are often shortened, and suffixes etc. are usually deduced. This is important to understand because, obviously, whatever your apriori assumptions about the coin's cultural origins will affect the deductions you make. You also mentioned Ambiorix as a clearly Celtic name, but this is in no way clear. Rix and ambi are PIE roots, riks being a particularly ancient and wide-spread example; rex (Latin), raja (Sanskrit) and in German we see it in OHG as Rih, in Vandalic as Riks, Gothic as Reiks etc.

One other thing to note is that, outside of this alleged Celtic 'home' there are few (if any) terms with bi-lingual roots (the examples you have brought up are Hal-statt and Ba(io)varia. Again, this expectation (that alone among the world's languages) that Celtic was introduced as a partial prefix or suffix into an alien language, ought to be jarring.

Of course if one dismisses Celtic as the language of these areas then what was spoken? A pre-proto-Germanic language (and pre-Balto-Slavic). We may even have the remnants of this extinct language within modern Dutch. Maurits Gysseling proposed, based upon work by himself and Dr. S.J. De Laet a 'Belgian' language (associated with the Belgae); this is based upon endonyms, toponyms and in certain suffixes found in the Dutch language which are not Celtic nor Germanic, but PIE.

The work on this is far from a solid case, however, and I offer it only as a additional question regarding the security of Celtic as originating in the Danube. The endonyms, toponyms and suffixes linked with this are of very questionable heritage in terms of both Germanic and Celtic, but the problem is that any linguistic argument put forth regarding language is, ironically, shouted down by a projected language origin based upon unattested links to a material culture, dreamed up many years ago in the mind of a very earnest but idealistic and romantic academic.

[Zarakas]

The attached may be of interest and add to debate.
Celts Origin.pdf

[Fisherking]

I think you misunderstood my assertion. I referred to some of the problems I have with the work but given the terms of their argument I was wondering why they believe the Celts of Iberia carried Basque genetic markers to the British Isles when it is perfectly feasible that those peoples were able to do it themselves.

There was a long succession of Paleolithic and Mesolithic cultures springing form the exact area of the modern Basque and Gascon peoples. These peoples are of a Non Indo-European language group. There are two other Non Indo-European languages that were present within known history, the Turdetani and the Iberians. Iberian shows strong signs of being a related language to the Basque language.

DNA studies show the most similarities between the Basques and the population of the British Isles.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

When one examines the “G Y-DNA a slightly different picture emerges.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Why are the Welsh and Cornish different? Could this mean that they came from Spain and brought their language with them? Well except that they were P-Celtic speakers rather than Q-Celtic speakers. Celts of Iberia spoke Q-Celtic. According to the authors, however there were only Germans where P-Celtic was supposed to be spoken.

Kotch theorizes that Celts arrive from Iberia 1200 to 700 BC. Genetic links say the people arrived about 4000 years ago, linking them to the Urnfelds culture of Central Europe because of the metal working of these people in the archeological record. This is also compatible with the Y-DNA evidence.

I do not doubt contact between Iberia and the British Isles, marine or otherwise but the early arrival time and the language spoken do not support this theory.

The other interesting thing I noticed is that Koch acknowledges the existence of the other Celtic languages but then goes to great lengths to deny that the inscriptions and testimony are valid and only Proto Indo-European or German. Doesn’t anyone find this curious?

[Fisherking]

And now back to the Celts.

It might help if we knew just where the other Celtic languages were spoken.

Koch in his earlier books and in his translations attests to their existence.

Saying that the peoples of Central Europe were all Germanic or Raetic have larger problems.

Proto Germanic contained a large number of Celtic loan words but at least a third of the language was of Non Indo-European origins. Germanic languages also have different sounds not common to other Indo-European languages. The commonalities between Veneti and Germanic are not very strong. It is a poorly documented language and only the words and cases for one’s self are akin to German but just as akin to Latin. Since inscriptions and coins have a lot to do with kings and rulers these would be readily noticeable in inscriptions. You may cite Gothic for king but before you do, that was a Celtic loan in its form.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

This quote is only from Wikipedia, but I thought you might find it interesting:

Loans into Proto-Germanic from other Indo-European languages can be relatively dated by how well they conform to Germanic sound laws. Since the dates of borrowings and sound laws are not precisely known, using the loans for absolute, or calendar, chronology would be impossible.

Most loans from Celtic appear to have been made before or during the Germanic Sound Shift.[15] For instance, one specimen *rīks 'ruler' was borrowed from Celtic *rīxs 'king' (stem *rīg-), with g → k.[16] It is clearly not native because PIE *ē → ī is not typical of Germanic but is a feature of Celtic languages. Another is *walhaz "foreigner; Celt" from the Celtic tribal name Volcae with k → h and o → a. Other likely Celtic loans include *ambahtaz 'servant', *brunjǭ 'mailshirt', *gīslaz 'hostage', *īsarną 'iron', *lēkijaz 'healer', *laudą 'lead', *Rīnaz 'Rhine', and *tūnaz, tūną 'fortified enclosure'.[17] These loans would likely have been borrowed during the Celtic Hallstatt and early La Tène cultures when the Celts dominated central Europe, although the period spanned several centuries.

Raetic was also a Non Indo-European language, kin to Etruscan but it showed very strong influences from Illyrian and Celtic, more from Celtic. At one point it was thought to be a bridge language between the two.

For languages to contain enough loan words to produce confusion it must also show that they were in contact with people who spoke the language it was barrowed from. It must mean that all these people were in close contact with Celtic speaking peoples.

I hope that Koch and others did not bring up the Pan-Illyrian theory. That was long ago disproved. Also Illyrian names show a strong influence from the Celts. A clear majority of names left in inscriptions derive from Celtic with lesser numbers deriving from Thracian and Greek.

Now we have someone speaking a language and leaving inscriptions that are looking very Celtic. This language is influencing people on all sides, far and near. We have dynamic cultures in the same area. We have people recording these people as Celts and Gauls. But now we are supposed to believe that the only Celts are parking their rear ends in Spain or have sailed on to Ireland and Britain.

Just how did all those people in Central Europe end up with those loanwords? Not PIE because that is just too coincidental, especially for the Germans who may have had very good Non Indo-European alternatives, some of which showed up in other variants of their language.

Who knows, maybe German would have been completely Non Indo-European with out the Celtic influence.

Now the issue of Germanics as the Hallstatt and La Téne cultures. I will not go into everything invented by these cultures but they were revolutionary in many areas. The one thing I will focus on is the use of metal plows. They made them. At least one was found in bronze and the remains of some in iron have been found in Central Europe and southern Scotland. Roman laws in Gaul and Britain effectively prevented there use. Until they were discovered it was thought that the metal plow was invented in China circa 450 AD.

Much of Classical Civilization was lost after the German migrations and the fall of Rome. If it had been the Germans who built and nourished these two cultures is it not safe to assume that they would have continued to practice the culture?

After these events we have no La Téne art, we have no iron plows, all construction including fortifications are done in timber. If the Germans were the founders of these cultures then why such a great leap backwards?

I do not find it so very unlikely that Celts reached the British Isles from Spain. There is more than enough evidence of Irish contact with Spain for me to say that. What I do find unacceptable is the notion that it was the origin of the language and that there is any lack of evidence in Hallstatt and La Téne being Celtic cultures.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

I think you misunderstood my assertion. I referred to some of the problems I have with the work but given the terms of their argument I was wondering why they believe the Celts of Iberia carried Basque genetic markers to the British Isles when it is perfectly feasible that those peoples were able to do it themselves.

I don't think that is the argument. The argument is, rather, that this really defines how old this separate European zone is. What is important is the continuing linkage of material cultures between these areas.

There was a long succession of Paleolithic and Mesolithic cultures springing form the exact area of the modern Basque and Gascon peoples. These peoples are of a Non Indo-European language group. There are two other Non Indo-European languages that were present within known history, the Turdetani and the Iberians. Iberian shows strong signs of being a related language to the Basque language.

No argument with you there, but I'm not sure what relevance that has with the clear link between the PIE Celtic languages of the Iberian peninsula, Brittany and Ireland/Western Britain.

Why are the Welsh and Cornish different? Could this mean that they came from Spain and brought their language with them? Well except that they were P-Celtic speakers rather than Q-Celtic speakers. Celts of Iberia spoke Q-Celtic. According to the authors, however there were only Germans where P-Celtic was supposed to be spoken.

The question of Q-Celtic vs P-Celtic is, at best, a neutral question. If one looks at the question a little more then there seem to be two distinct branches. The Hispanic Celtic languages and the Irish languages are Q-Celtic. It has been argued that P-Celtic is a result of aerial contact with other PIE derived languages (Italic/Germanic/ Balto-Slavic). We know that the Brythonnic languages and Gaulish were in contact with other PIE langauges for a considerable length of time. Finding Q-Celtic substrata would be a clue to the efficacy of that. Of course the more Eastern 'Celtic' dialects derive only P-Celtic groups.

The P-Celtic/Q-Celtic dichotomy also highlights how confused the linguistic arguments are. Many of the P-Celtic changes are argued using Middle and Old Irish....which are Q-Celtic languages.

Kotch theorizes that Celts arrive from Iberia 1200 to 700 BC. Genetic links say the people arrived about 4000 years ago, linking them to the Urnfelds culture of Central Europe because of the metal working of these people in the archeological record. This is also compatible with the Y-DNA evidence.

I do not doubt contact between Iberia and the British Isles, marine or otherwise but the early arrival time and the language spoken do not support this theory.

But, conversely, you were recently arguing that Celtic should be associated with the Neolithic expansion into Europe during the fifth and fourth millenia BC.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

And now back to the Celts.

It might help if we knew just where the other Celtic languages were spoken.

Koch in his earlier books and in his translations attests to their existence.

Saying that the peoples of Central Europe were all Germanic or Raetic have larger problems.

Proto Germanic contained a large number of Celtic loan words but at least a third of the language was of Non Indo-European origins. Germanic languages also have different sounds not common to other Indo-European languages. The commonalities between Veneti and Germanic are not very strong. It is a poorly documented language and only the words and cases for one’s self are akin to German but just as akin to Latin. Since inscriptions and coins have a lot to do with kings and rulers these would be readily noticeable in inscriptions. You may cite Gothic for king but before you do, that was a Celtic loan in its form.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

This quote is only from Wikipedia, but I thought you might find it interesting:

The thing is, why would it be a Celtic loan-word when the root riks is seen throughout the Germanic language. It is where Reich and rich from. It is, again, a forced etymology which has a perfectly consistent internal counterpart and needs no Celtic loan. This is exactly the kind of wooly thinking that has 'shown' a Celtic substrata within other languages.

Raetic was also a Non Indo-European language, kin to Etruscan but it showed very strong influences from Illyrian and Celtic, more from Celtic. At one point it was thought to be a bridge language between the two.

This positive attestation of Rhaetic, given the attestation, is too strongly held. It is with reference to these poorly attested languages that Celtic has been given such a falsely prominent position within the wider European, and PIE, languages. It is not known whether Raetic is PIE or not. In terms of the early languages of this area more generally you might be interested in this http://www.academia.edu/1841703/Etru...pdate_08.07.12

For languages to contain enough loan words to produce confusion it must also show that they were in contact with people who spoke the language it was barrowed from. It must mean that all these people were in close contact with Celtic speaking peoples.

I hope that Koch and others did not bring up the Pan-Illyrian theory. That was long ago disproved. Also Illyrian names show a strong influence from the Celts. A clear majority of names left in inscriptions derive from Celtic with lesser numbers deriving from Thracian and Greek.

Just how did all those people in Central Europe end up with those loanwords? Not PIE because that is just too coincidental, especially for the Germans who may have had very good Non Indo-European alternatives, some of which showed up in other variants of their language.

What do you mean by "Not PIE because that is just too coincidental"? Is Celltic not PIE? And are these supposed Celtic roots found within, for example, Western celtic languages.

I'm not going to address point after point (some of which are a little confused - there are no laws that I know of banning the use of metal ploughs, and the real push forward in agriculture is in terms of heavy ploughs - and some of the oldest terms for heavy ploughs are found in Slavic languages. As for Classicakl civilisation..... that was Greek and Roman, so I don't know where Celltic comes into the equation.

I will state the case again to see if you can understand how deeply this problem runs. The Danube/Celtic proposition was not a linguistic argument, but over the course of the last 200 years or so has become a linguistic a-priori. There are problems within Celtic that are well-known. Many of the phonological and morphological changes are known to be shared with other language groups, particularly Italic and Germanic. Others are euphemistically known as "problematic" - what this means is that sound changes are neither language wide, nor are they geographically consistent. These attributes of the language group ought to have been ringing alarm bells for linguists, but the idea is so ingrained that arguing against it is nigh impossible.

I'll give you an example of how messed up this is. Lepontic is stated as a Celtic language. When you actually look at the basis for this you start to see the cracks. First alarm bell; the letters used must be being used for different sound values within different inscriptions, and diifferently from other Italic scripts, in order for it to be read as Celtic. Even then the language shows signs of having similarities with Italic (and, with reference to the link above, with Etruscan). 2; the inscriptions cover a wide time period. 3; the language seems to have little affiliation even with its neighbouring 'Celtic' language Cisalpine Gaulish.

So, first we have Herodotus telling us the Celtici live beyond the pillars of Heracles, dubiously linked with a prior sentence talking of the source of the Danube (which, even if he meant the Pyrennes - rather than some now unknown village - is nowhere near the pillars of Heracles). What we also have is, from the mid-first century BC, Diodorus of Sicily writing about the end of the First Punic Wars. Presumably he was using contemporary sources. He talks of the Gauls and the Celts as separate identities. He writes about the Celts and the Gauls uniting, and then he tells us who these Celts are. They are the mercenaries of the un-warlike Tartessians.

The Romans came to use 'Gaul' as a geographical term, as they did Germania. Caesar is clear in telling us in his Gallic Wars that only one part of this geographical area is populated by people who call themselves Keltoi.

I would bet that if you re-assess these language groups without the baggage of the Halstatt/Celtic link (which was from the beginning a false link) then many of the problems of the current, sprawling, Celtic language group will begin to dissolve. Let's assess the Western Celtic languages as a group on their own, for example - starting with the Q-Celtic branches. Let's then assess what inscriptions we have in Central Europe/North Italy/Asia Minor without reference to those Western Celtic languages. What I would bet you would find would be a far different relationship between the language groups.

Koch, Cunliffe at al have to be very circumspect in their proposals. What they argue is that Celtic is a much deeper, older stratum within European languages. Reading between the lines of that one the proposal is(must be seen as) that the language groupings we have held to be Celtic are linked in a much broader, pre-Celtic, post PIE relationship. The other European groups (Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic) are later languages. In other words Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic languages are derived from this pre-Celtic, post PIE language group and the Western Celtic languages are, likewise, a separate branch. Hence the seemingly wide range of Celtic 'loanwords', the shared phonological/morphological changes, the "problematic" changes.

So, in summary. What we have is a Pre-Celtic, post PIE substrata introduced during the 5th and 4th millenia BC across Europe during the Neolithic migrations which has, through isolations, contacts (with other of these substrata and with pre-existing non-PIE groups) evolved into the Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Celtic groups from which our current languages derive.

The confusion is in the attribution of this pre-Celtic superstrata as being intrinsically tied to the 'modern' Celtic group; it is in the mis-attestation of a European branch of PIE (the pre-Celtic stratum) as being synonymous with the separate, later branch of Celtic languages (Celto-Iberian, Irish, Brythonnic) - ie the language group as distinct from Italic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic.

EDIT: It is worth pointing out that Proto-languages are not languages that would have been spoken anywhere, the most that we can hope for from proto-languages is to ascribe language cognates that would have been spoken within particular groups - usually we can see a geographical link, not surprisingly, but languages diversify pretty quickly to a point of non-intelligibility (for example, it seems that Latin, Umbrian and Oscan languages, despite being closely related, were not mutually intelligible). What we have then are sprachbunds, language areas which diversify with geographical distance (dialects) - so, the further one travels from one's home, the less related the language grouping becomes until you reach a point of non-intelligibility. With time these changes become so great that we can label the languages as being of a separate branch of the root proto-language. I say this to highlight how incongruent the idea of a European-wide language grouping surviving from the 4th millenium BC to the 1st millenium BC is. Italic is believed to have diversified from it's root around about 1200BC, yet already by the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC there are distinct un-intelligible groups - within a pretty small geographical area.

[Fisherking]

There is some food for thought in this work but the arguments they make are just as flawed as the earlier ones.

I don’t think that the hypotheses answers anything and only adds to the amount of questions that can be asked.

We have irrefutable proof of Central European contacts in the British Isles at early dates just as we have artifacts from Spain. Irish settlement patterns hearken back to the Neolithic but those in Britain proper would seem to be more developed.

If we take the Maritime Bell Beaker culture it points genetically to Wales and Southwestern England as a possible landing site. But it does not cover the whole of the isles. It also points to a different body type for the individuals after this time, but anthropologists discount it as proof of migration.

We can speculate on languages and differences for ever and still reach no conclusion. What we know is historically Celtic languages are or were spoken in the British Isles and reputed to have been spoken over a large area of the rest of Europe.

Culturally all these areas are seemingly linked to the Hallstatt and or La Téne cultures. Earlier cultural links go back to the Beaker culture. The areas are also tied together with the Megalithic cultures of Europe and may be tied to Magdalenian culture.

If we talk about a unifying Celtic culture we can not divorce it from bronze age Urnfelds culture regardless of the language spoken. If we speak of Celtic as only a language with no unifying culture we are left with only what we know historically. All the rest is conjecture. We are left with less to go on than before. We may as well rename the field Atlantic Fringe studies and linguistics can become a large subfield. Forget about most of France, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Czechia , Slovakia, Poland, All of the Balkans, Turkey, and the colony in Egypt as all obviously German want-a-bes.

I suppose I just can’t understand the wish to narrow the field to such an extent. Basing any argument on what Herodotus wrote and supposing that that instance was accurate and not one of his wilder claims just seems one of convince. Most other works by other authors and scholars are ignored. We can’t possibly take their word for it, but Herodotus is to be believed (in this instance) while all the others such as Posidonius and Caesar with first had experience must obviously be mistaken.

We are asked to forget what we know and take the teams assumptions without question. We are to assume that Iberian trade objects mean Celtic language while culture is meaningless in giving us a link. We must accept that German tribes occupied vast territory long before any evidence of their leaving their homelands. We must assume that what Roman and Greek writers recorded was tripe. They couldn’t tell a Celt from a German and the Germans were lying and saying they were Celts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...-en.svg&page=1

Rather than invent a hypotheses which seeks to cancel so much of what archeologists, linguists, and anthropologists have found, to include Celtic inscriptions through wide areas of Europe, it may have been wiser to have gone from the standpoint of the Paleolithic Continuity Theory.

http://www.continuitas.org/intro.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoli...tinuity_Theory

In this theory the Celts colonized from west to east. Something less problematic than changing everyone to Germans.

IMHO Koch and his team are focusing on his linking of a previously unclassified language and trying to draw conclusions linking it to the British Isles. The arguments over language and culture are leave us in a murky darkness. The framework of the PCT are just the reverse. PCT is not perfect. Its model may be too static but it is far clearer than the Western Celts theories put forward by Koch and his team.

The PIE invasion is its self a theory without definitive proof. The unmaking of Eastern Celtic languages is a misguided endeavor seeking to undo recorded history with a weak argument.

Not having read the book I am unsure exactly where these elements come from. Seemingly Cunliffe’s ideas on Celtic being a trade language is within bounds of believability. The Celtic areas of Europe have long been held as a vast trade network. It also would explain why languages would not diverge to unintelligibility and would exert a stronger influence on other languages with which it was in contact

During the time frame of the research Greek had undergone a change where many diverse dialects and branches of the language had disappeared and it had become an almost universal language from Italy to the Indus valley. This came about through a short lived conquest but remained because it facilitated trade. Is there any reason to doubt, in the face of numerous accounts, that it was other than a Celtic language being spoken? Spelling varieties should not be held as proof of nonintelligibility. We have enough to go on from our own English before spelling became a convention to account for a wide range of spellings of the same word.

ADDIDENDEM:

I am having a bit of difficulty here as I have not read the book but the theory is of interest.

I am not sure if it is the theory or your summation that I have the trouble with.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful to either the Koch team or to you.

My difficulties are with the changing of Hallstatt and La Téne as Germanic cultures and telling us that the Romans had no idea of who they were dealing with.

http://www4.uwm.edu/celtic/ekeltoi/b...garstki09.html

Also, separation of Celtic from Gaul I find problematic. Caesar tells us that these people call themselves Celts but the Romans name them Gauls. The Irish refer to themselves as Gaels. The Welsh don’t call themselves Celts either.

This could be because of language shifts, or not. Q-Celtic could be said to be the older form of the language at large but that also shows a degree of separation from the main body of speakers. Example: American and Australian English vs. British English. Those reflect the language as it was spoken at earlier times. American English did not go through the shift of the early 1820s and Australian dose not reflect the end of that same shift.

Further, the number of Celtic dialects or languages in Iberia could reflect successive migrations or colonization. It may reflect an older spoken form but does not mean that it was the founding area of the language.

We have Lepontic being absorbed into Gaulish in the 4th century BC. This only demonstrates closer ties with a core area of the language and an influx of speakers.

We can assuredly assume eastern expansion of the Celts. We see them moving south and east from Central Europe in Roman times.

There are models which would say that, for a time, Hallstatt became the new core area of the cultural area. La Téne too could have been a backwater area that developed new ideas that brought about continued expansion. These are patterns of human development. They should not be seen as the cradle of Celtic genesis.

Iberian Celts show Hallstatt influences. Marine Bell Beaker may show the closest to a unifying culture as we get at a later point but genetic links only point to Wales and the South of England. There are also differences in Ireland that would show it was not gotten direct from the source. This still leaves us wondering how the Irish acquired their language.

That just brings us back to this: http://www.continuitas.org/intro.html

Stephen Oppenheimer’s The Origins of the British goes into this area and it does tie in with Cunliffe. It is more a matter of how far back in time you think they may have originated.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

There is some food for thought in this work but the arguments they make are just as flawed as the earlier ones.

I don’t think that the hypotheses answers anything and only adds to the amount of questions that can be asked.

Therein lies the problem of raising such an issue, why it faces such hostility; people like narratives, and more so people like to believe they have a congruent narrative and dislike that being brought into question. However if one is looking for a level of truth in the narrative then one has to re-assess it based upon evidence. I'll explain more as I go along but, though at first it may seem to raise more questions than it answers ultimately it may help to bring a little more clarity into a wide area of subjects and may free up some new areas of investigation.

We have irrefutable proof of Central European contacts in the British Isles at early dates just as we have artifacts from Spain. Irish settlement patterns hearken back to the Neolithic but those in Britain proper would seem to be more developed.

If we take the Maritime Bell Beaker culture it points genetically to Wales and Southwestern England as a possible landing site. But it does not cover the whole of the isles. It also points to a different body type for the individuals after this time, but anthropologists discount it as proof of migration.

We can speculate on languages and differences for ever and still reach no conclusion. What we know is historically Celtic languages are or were spoken in the British Isles and reputed to have been spoken over a large area of the rest of Europe.

What we know is that Celtic languages were (and are) spoken in parts of the British Isles, the assumption (and I have so often seen it written as a statement of fact) that the whole of the British Isles spoke some form of Celtic has simply been assumed, or rather inferred from the initial, falsely attributable, narrative - which was not a linguistic proposition. As for the speculation of languages spoken; for so long it has been an accepted axiom that it was Celtic, and so entrenched is that narrative, that speculation as to other, possibly now extinct, language groups - some of which may help explain the origins of, for example, the Germanic languages, the Balto-Slavic languages and also the differences within branches of those languages. Re-addressing the sprawling and troublesome Celtic group (particularly in terms of Continental Celtic, most specifically the P-Celtic groups, but also pertaining to Welsh) may bring some clarity in terms of the 'problematic' changes and those shared with other groups.

Culturally all these areas are seemingly linked to the Hallstatt and or La Téne cultures. Earlier cultural links go back to the Beaker culture. The areas are also tied together with the Megalithic cultures of Europe and may be tied to Magdalenian culture.

There are cultural links, but the archaeological evidence does not support any major migration at this time, particularly into the Iberian peninsula or the British Isles. That is why I said earlier that any link between material culture and population change/language change are a little more nuanced than simply found shared material = population/language shift. I think it is reasonable to see, for example, the Neolithic expansion into Central Europe as a PIE migration - there was likely little in the way of Mesolithic communities in this area. As Neolithic cultures develop we can see certain zones which appear to follow similar religious practices/beliefs. In both the central European zone and the Western (Atlantic) zone we can see these as being, perhaps, Neolithic/PIE culturally (because of the shift in emphasis away from earlier Mesolithic practices). There are distinct differences between these zones and it can be argued that the Western Atlantic zone tends to at least give a nod, as it were, to earlier Mesolithic norms. In the North, along the Scandinavian coasts, there seems to be more of a continuation with older Mesolithic forms. Also, that in the North farming was much more 'equal' with a continuation of hunter-gatherer existence. (For a really good read on this I would recommend "Europe Between the Oceans" by Barry Cunliffe.

Now, linguistically, what this could mean (in a broad over-view) is that PIE languages were deeply entrenched within the central European zone (and the Mediteranean), that PIE was more heavily influenced on the Western Coast by indigenous languages - and possibly by other migrants into the area, there are some suggestions that there may be an Afro-Asiatic intrusion into Western Celtic languages - and that on the Scandinavian coast PIE might have been pretty much submerged within the older Mesolithic languages. Now that would help explain why there is a seemingly strong non-PIE strand within the Germanic branch of languages.

If we talk about a unifying Celtic culture we can not divorce it from bronze age Urnfelds culture regardless of the language spoken. If we speak of Celtic as only a language with no unifying culture we are left with only what we know historically. All the rest is conjecture. We are left with less to go on than before. We may as well rename the field Atlantic Fringe studies and linguistics can become a large subfield. Forget about most of France, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Czechia , Slovakia, Poland, All of the Balkans, Turkey, and the colony in Egypt as all obviously German want-a-bes.

But if we are talking about bronze age urnfield culture as the basis for Celtic then you are arguing exactly what is suggested. THAT 'Celtic' language is a much deeper stratum within European PIE languages than the languages, developed in the forms that we know them much later, that we find on the west coast of Europe. That these languages, from a pretty early point, follow separate paths surely quantifies them as different language groups. THAT 'Celtic' language would have to be a pre-cursor to at least the Germanic languages, as well as the Balto-Slavic, and quite possibly Italic as well (and hence the shared changes with those groups). It would also, almost certainly, be the pre-cursor of other, now extinct, PIE language groups which may have left traces within modern languages that we have simply attributed to this notional pan-European 'Celtic' (and in doing so misunderstanding the changes that have occured within areas that may be present within modern languages, and may help explain - and would certainly help to broaden investigation into - many linguistic puzzles.

I suppose I just can’t understand the wish to narrow the field to such an extent. Basing any argument on what Herodotus wrote and supposing that that instance was accurate and not one of his wilder claims just seems one of convince. Most other works by other authors and scholars are ignored. We can’t possibly take their word for it, but Herodotus is to be believed (in this instance) while all the others such as Posidonius and Caesar with first had experience must obviously be mistaken.

But that's simply a misrepresentation of the works of authors. Celtic and Gaul were not interchangeable ethnicities until much later. The term Gaul came (over time) to be used as a geographical area. Even then Caesar does not refer to those who lived in Gaul as Celtic (only a portion who called themselves thus). Diodorus of Sicily, as I said, re-iterates the difference between the ethnic/cultural identity of Celts and Gauls and links the Celts with the Tartessians. There is no linking between Gaul and Celt until much later in the day. I have seen the argument made that Galatians spoke a Celltic language because they spoke the same language as in Gaul. Well that isn't what was said by our ancient writer. He specifies the Treveri language, not a more general Gaulish, and the Treveri describe themselves as 'Germanic' (though not German). We talk of a Celtic language being spoken throughout the British Isles as a given, yet we have an ancient writer describing the speech of the Britons as being like that of the Aesti, a tribe in Eastern Germanic/Baltic lands. Which ancient writers is it we have to ignore? The Gaul/Celt synonym is a later invention, it is not to be found within the work of the ancient authors.

We are asked to forget what we know and take the teams assumptions without question.

No, we are asked to look at the evidence and re-assess pre-conceived ideas on the basis of it. That seems eminently reasonable and, indeed, should be the guiding principle, not an optional extra, in terms of reaching answers.

We are to assume that Iberian trade objects mean Celtic language while culture is meaningless in giving us a link.

You mean as opposed to seeing shared material artefacts (which show regional variation - British 'Celtic' art is distinct from that of the Danube area, for example) and - despite there being no archaeological evidence of any significant migration - believe that simply contact with these objects altered a persons speech?

We must accept that German tribes occupied vast territory long before any evidence of their leaving their homelands. We must assume that what Roman and Greek writers recorded was tripe. They couldn’t tell a Celt from a German and the Germans were lying and saying they were Celts.

Firstly, I think I have said something which has confused the issue. Germanic was one language group that arose from this deeper stratum (as were Italic, VBalto-Slavic and possibly/probably other, now extinct, language groups). What can besaid is these central European languages will be more related to those groups than to the Western Celtic languages. They weren't all Germans.

As for the tribes that were supposedly telling us they were Celtic, who were they exactly? Were they the Belgic tribes, or the Galatians, or the Danubian peoples; or even the Aedui or Arverni. Where are the self-proclaimed Celts that we are to call liars?

IMHO Koch and his team are focusing on his linking of a previously unclassified language and trying to draw conclusions linking it to the British Isles. The arguments over language and culture are leave us in a murky darkness. The framework of the PCT are just the reverse. PCT is not perfect. Its model may be too static but it is far clearer than the Western Celts theories put forward by Koch and his team.

But you have made the very argument that they are making. That the 'Celtic' language is to be associated with the Urnfield culture - ie it is a much deeper rooted structure qwithin European languages. It also follows that, in terms of evidence which would support any sort of migration into the British Isles or the Iberian peninsula (as examples) during or since that period that the Western languages we know as Celtic have followed a separate evolution. It cannot be argued that they are one and the same thing.

The PIE invasion is its self a theory without definitive proof. The unmaking of Eastern Celtic languages is a misguided endeavor seeking to undo recorded history with a weak argument.

Actually its not un-making anything except a rather forced conjunct between two language groups which have a)followed separate evolutions and b) are 3 millenia apart in basis.

Not having read the book I am unsure exactly where these elements come from. Seemingly Cunliffe’s ideas on Celtic being a trade language is within bounds of believability. The Celtic areas of Europe have long been held as a vast trade network. It also would explain why languages would not diverge to unintelligibility and would exert a stronger influence on other languages with which it was in contact

Trading languages are pretty rare, and they are usually second languages; so 'celtic' being a trading language would not answer anything about what languages were being spoken in Europe, except in a formalised aspect of trade. More often trade involves multi-linguism. the only force that ca be seen to hold a language together over large areas is...literacy. I don't think there is much argument that literacy was widespread in central Europe.

During the time frame of the research Greek had undergone a change where many diverse dialects and branches of the language had disappeared and it had become an almost universal language from Italy to the Indus valley. This came about through a short lived conquest but remained because it facilitated trade.

It came about, as later Latin did (and all of our most prominent modern languages) through literacy, education and - at the heart of that - accepted norms of grammatical and spelling norms. There is a reason that threatened languages fight for their survival through the right to teach them and through formalisms of them.



ADDIDENDEM:

I am having a bit of difficulty here as I have not read the book but the theory is of interest.

I am not sure if it is the theory or your summation that I have the trouble with.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful to either the Koch team or to you.

My difficulties are with the changing of Hallstatt and La Téne as Germanic cultures and telling us that the Romans had no idea of who they were dealing with.

As I say this may be due to something I said earlier. The argument is not that the La Tene cultures are germanic.

Also, separation of Celtic from Gaul I find problematic. Caesar tells us that these people call themselves Celts but the Romans name them Gauls. The Irish refer to themselves as Gaels. The Welsh don’t call themselves Celts either.

Caesar tells us that only some of the inhabitants of Gaul call themselves Keltoi. he says little about the languages spoken.

This could be because of language shifts, or not. Q-Celtic could be said to be the older form of the language at large but that also shows a degree of separation from the main body of speakers. Example: American and Australian English vs. British English. Those reflect the language as it was spoken at earlier times. American English did not go through the shift of the early 1820s and Australian dose not reflect the end of that same shift.

It goes a bit deeper than that though. You argued that 'Celtic' must be linked with the Urnfield culture.

Further, the number of Celtic dialects or languages in Iberia could reflect successive migrations or colonization. It may reflect an older spoken form but does not mean that it was the founding area of the language.

Except that the archaeological evidence simply doesn't support that argument.

We have Lepontic being absorbed into Gaulish in the 4th century BC. This only demonstrates closer ties with a core area of the language and an influx of speakers.

What do you mean by 'absorbed'. There seems to be very little in common between Lepontic and Gaulish. Lepontic seems to have ceased to be.

We can assuredly assume eastern expansion of the Celts. We see them moving south and east from Central Europe in Roman times.

No, we see Central Europeans moving South and East, not Celts.

There are models which would say that, for a time, Hallstatt became the new core area of the cultural area. La Téne too could have been a backwater area that developed new ideas that brought about continued expansion. These are patterns of human development. They should not be seen as the cradle of Celtic genesis.

I agree, but that is exactly the initial narrative that has lead to the whole 'celtic' story that holds such power over modern thinking.

Iberian Celts show Hallstatt influences. Marine Bell Beaker may show the closest to a unifying culture as we get at a later point but genetic links only point to Wales and the South of England. There are also differences in Ireland that would show it was not gotten direct from the source. This still leaves us wondering how the Irish acquired their language.

The Etruscans show Greek influence. That no more makes them or their language Greek than Halstatt culture can say anything about the cultural conformity or language of the Iberian peninsula or the British Isles. I'm sorry but I don't understand your last point.