Question about Brennos' interview

[Edorix]

This will never catch on.

[geala]

Interesting. I was of the opinion that the Celtic and Germanic languages and for example Latin and Greek are quite closely related, stemming from the constructed Indo-Germanic idiom of the people who might have settled in Europe since the 3rd c. BC. I have no great knowledge about languages however.

Wether the old "Irish"/Goidelic people were "Celts" or not, I don't know. The material culture, as Brennus has explained, can make one doubt it. At least what we see from old Irish (names from the 2nd c. AD and inscriptions from the 5th c. AD onwards) it is clearly a Celtic language and a very homogenous one. As there are no archaeolocical signs for big migrations - deal with it.

The sentence in the fasti triumphales of the year 222 BC which mentions "de Galleis et Germaneis" is quite often explained as a later corruption done in the Augustean period.

I don't want to split hairs and be a smart-ass too much, but I have to say this as a little retribution for my presumably often funny English which gnaws at my conscience: the book in which Hans Kuhn (together with Rolf Hachmann and Georg Kossack) offers the theory of the "Nordwestblock" between Celts and Germans is named "Völker zwischen Germanen and Kelten", meaning "Peoples between German and Celts". You wrote "Peoples weld Germans and Celts" retranslated.

BTW I don't believe in the Nordwestblock-theory, the arguments based mainly on names are not so convincing. Since 400 BC there was a idiosyncratic settlement north of the presumably "Celtic" oppida culture region, with a lot of fortifications against threads from the south at the northern rim of the low mountain range in today Lower Saxony. The settlement can be continously materially related to those who live there in the Roman imperial period, the latter being clearly Germanic people.

An unrelated remark: I have huge problems to post in the forums with Internet explorer. I always get the notice "not logged in" after clicking "submit reply", although I'm shown as logged in. This is with Firefox, no problems with it.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

Interesting. I was of the opinion that the Celtic and Germanic languages and for example Latin and Greek are quite closely related, stemming from the constructed Indo-Germanic idiom of the people who might have settled in Europe since the 3rd c. BC. I have no great knowledge about languages however.

Wether the old "Irish"/Goidelic people were "Celts" or not, I don't know. The material culture, as Brennus has explained, can make one doubt it. At least what we see from old Irish (names from the 2nd c. AD and inscriptions from the 5th c. AD onwards) it is clearly a Celtic language and a very homogenous one. As there are no archaeolocical signs for big migrations - deal with it.

The sentence in the fasti triumphales of the year 222 BC which mentions "de Galleis et Germaneis" is quite often explained as a later corruption done in the Augustean period.

I don't want to split hairs and be a smart-ass too much, but I have to say this as a little retribution for my presumably often funny English which gnaws at my conscience: the book in which Hans Kuhn (together with Rolf Hachmann and Georg Kossack) offers the theory of the "Nordwestblock" between Celts and Germans is named "Völker zwischen Germanen and Kelten", meaning "Peoples between German and Celts". You wrote "Peoples weld Germans and Celts" retranslated.

BTW I don't believe in the Nordwestblock-theory, the arguments based mainly on names are not so convincing. Since 400 BC there was a idiosyncratic settlement north of the presumably "Celtic" oppida culture region, with a lot of fortifications against threads from the south at the northern rim of the low mountain range in today Lower Saxony. The settlement can be continously materially related to those who live there in the Roman imperial period, the latter being clearly Germanic people.

An unrelated remark: I have huge problems to post in the forums with Internet explorer. I always get the notice "not logged in" after clicking "submit reply", although I'm shown as logged in. This is with Firefox, no problems with it.

Given that our conceptions of what are Celtic languages are largely derived from Welsh and Irish, the argument that Irish is a "clearly" Celltic language is....a rather circular proposition.

Caesar's description of Gaul specifies language differences between the Keltoi/Galli and the Belgae. Diodorus goes further and suggests there is a further distinction to be made between Keltoi (to the South) and Galli to the North. Caesar then tells us that the coastal areas of Britain are linked with the Belgae, the interior being indigenous. We have been told, then, that the language spoken in Britain was not that of the Keltoi. If we take Diodorus at his word we are an extra language group removed again.

What we hear from Tacitus is that the languages of the Britons differ little (rather confusingly, as Caesar tells us there are Belgae and indigenous peoples....but hey..) and that the Aesti ( a tribe on the Baltic coast, East of the Suebi) speak a language similar to that of the Britons....

Why, exactly,are we sure that the languages the Britons spoke were Celtic?

As for the Nordwest block....Why would we not expect to see a number of distinct dialects in Europe. It is certainly what we see, and have seen, in the post-Roman period. Let's take a look at Roman era Italy. This is a remarkably compact area yet we have....how many near unintelligible dialects within that small area? Faliscian, Latin, Oscan, Messapic, Umbrian, Etruscan, Lepontic, Venetic.... and yet; we're supposed to believe that across the greater part of Northern Europe there were two basic languages. How realistic, in all honesty, is this likely to be?

[geala]

As I said I'm not scientifically interested in languages and only have some common knowledge about it. What you wrote sounds quite different to what I read (for example in H. Birkhan, "Kelten: Versuch einer Gesamtdarstellung ihrer Kultur"). I would say, it's historically (not philologically) quite probable that Cymreag/Welsh is closely related to the language of the inhabitants of Britain of late antiquity. In the time I was scientifically involved (in a different field) I kept an open heart for exciting new theories and a reluctance to accept them easily, what was a good rule by and large. I give the task to judge the interpretation of Welsh as a kind of vulgar Latin to better people than me, aka your scientific colleagues. When I look at the same text written in the different Celtic languages (sry, but I keep this term), I can clearly see similarities, much more than when I compare it to the text in a Germanic language or in Latin.

Although I find the thought interresting, the Nordwestblock theory seems not to be supported any longer by too many people. Udolph has dealt with it extensively and found the arguments are not convincing (Jürgen Udolph, Namenkundliche Studien zum Germanenproblem, 1994; although some are still favouring "the third way" like Wolfgang Meid, Germanenprobleme aus heutiger Sicht, in: Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, Bd. 1, 1999, S. 200). The excavations in the southern region of Lower Saxony give hints to a consistency of the population from at least 400 BC into the Roman imperial period (Erhard Cosack, Neue Forschungen zu den Latènezeitlichen Befestigungsanlagen im ehemaligen Regierungsbezirk Hannover, 2008). Archaeologically it is not necessary to think of people between the Celts and the Germans. If there was a "Germanisation" of a distinct Indo-Germanian group in southern Lower Saxony and northern Hesse, we don't see it in material findings. It's just Jastorf-culture and Harpstedt-Nienburger group and the more southern Latene oppida group, which also infuenced the northern groups.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

I think we have to be careful in considering either culture (archaeological data) or ethnicity (as a narrow genetic concept, a more prominent idea than I find intelligible) as markers for language. As a (simplistic) example; if, in a thousand years or so, someone is digging up a number of current cultural artifacts and sees a distinction between a coke bottle and a coke can phase, would we look for coke bottle and coke can people? That is simplistic, but it is useful in pointing out a cultural milieu that we call 'the West'. Do we all speak one language? Two of the major religions of this milieu contain the names of Semitic deities/prophets. Do we speak Semitic languages? If we were left with only a rare sample of literature, would Dutch, Croatian/Serbian, Estonian be visible? Would Catalan? Would Welsh? And that's with a highly literate society.

We see in the post-Roman era a huge diversity of languages, a plethora of petty Kingdoms - of differentiated social identities. Shouldn't we see greater convergence in such things, given the reach of Rome and the length of time it spent in these areas? Where did all these differentiations come from? The answer is, they were always there. We think in terms of 'Celtic', 'Germanic', 'Scythian' because they were the generalised terms the Romans and Greeks gave to people they weren't particularly interested in. The difference pre- and post- Roman is that these others (non Romans and non Greeks) are now leaving their own written records, where before they left no such record.

The idea that wholesale language replacement is a reasonable phenomenon does not hold out against recent evidence. Even where we have pretty genocidal behaviour (North and South America in particular) and massive recorded migration still the old languages exist (no matter how precariously). Somehow, though, we are supposed to believe that a pretty small insertion of elites wiped out any trace of the previous language (this is what we are supposed to believe about post-Roman Britain and is, fundamentally, the story of 'Indo-European').

As I said before, the languages closest to Rome (those they speak of at any length) in the Italian peninsula are hugely divergent. The Greeks acknowledge dialectical differences within the Hellenic world. The whole of Northern Europe 'becomes' linguistically divergent post-Rome - it 'becomes' so on the basis that the Romans said they were Celts and Germans and that, ipso facto, they spoke some notional 'Celtic' and 'German' languages...

I just have a notion that history, if it is to mean anything, must be understood within a real-life world. There isn't, in a real-life world, any mechanism for a continent wide series sound-shift.

I will quote Lt-Col. J. A. Garton from The Doones, 1971 from an article called "A Somerset Dialect"

"The dialect is not, as some people suppose, English spoken in a slovenly and ignorant way. It is the remains of a language—the court language of King Alfred. Many words, thought to be wrongly pronounced by the countryman, are actually correct, and it is the accepted pronunciation which is wrong."

The reason I quote it? Because the idea that dialects, accents are 'wrong', lazy, slovenly etc. derives from an idea driven by the tree model and the thinking that is axiomatic of that model. That languages exist in some notional 'pure' state which then devolve into daughter languages. This is patent nonsense. It is not what we see, at all, anywhere in real-life. What we consider standard English is, in fact, the expression of one dialect as being 'more correct' than others. Simply put; there was never a 'perfect English', a singular proto-English spoken across 'Anglo-Saxon' lands from which the dialects have diverged. What we have is a phonological, orthographical and grammatical imposition of what English 'should be'.

Languages, we see (in real-life) change through creolisation; in the context of taking on a language it is often taken on as an initially second langauge, and the first language (the mother tongue, literally..) is introduced into the new language. That is why we have such disparate vulgar Latins - they are Latin creoles, with the local phonology, lexicon and grammar creating, with Latin, new dialects.

Just take a little step back from the whole thing and... the idea of a proto-Germanic, a proto-Celtic etc. etc. to a proto Indo-European, can be seen for what they are. A nonsense.

[geala]

I concur with all you said, I just don't see how this is backing your former critique of Celtic or Germanic groups and languages. Reconstruction of old languages is a retrospective method, so if there was no big movement of people (as far as this can be judged from archaeological findings) and we have certain languages then and now, how do you argue against the common scientific approach of reconstruction and labeling certain groups with certain names? If you only liked to say that we have to be extremely careful not to overestimate the possible (speculative) correlation of certain archaeological groups with certain language groups or ethnic groups, ok.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

I concur with all you said, I just don't see how this is backing your former critique of Celtic or Germanic groups and languages. Reconstruction of old languages is a retrospective method, so if there was no big movement of people (as far as this can be judged from archaeological findings) and we have certain languages then and now, how do you argue against the common scientific approach of reconstruction and labeling certain groups with certain names? If you only liked to say that we have to be extremely careful not to overestimate the possible (speculative) correlation of certain archaeological groups with certain language groups or ethnic groups, ok.

I haven't explained myself very well obviously. It is axiomatic of the tree model that a language is grouped (as you say) with other languages - but those groups are themselves false concepts, because there is no real way of defining a language as a daughter language of another; that simply isn't the way language works. As with the example I gave above; there was no proto-English from which various dialects have derived. What we've also got to bear in mind is that the relatively recent phenomenon of urbanisation and (more importantly) mass literacy has fundamentally altered language use. Mass media has exacerbated that. In the late Iron Age (and before, and up until the printing press, then mass literacy) language would be shaped by the context of rural populations and what interactions took place. When Latin came to be used only a narrow, privileged elite would have any learning in Latin (grammatical, phonological and orthographic) and around that there would be levels of interaction which would define how much of the language (Latin) would be taken on. A small farm-holder might only see some tax inspector/collector, and he may come with an interpretor, may himself be a native speaker. There is very little need for any Latin in that interaction. Some of the rural community may have dealt with the Roman military (it is argued that the military presence was the driver of the economy of Roman Britain), and so they would learn more Latin...but they would not speak it at home. Words would leak into the language at home. The majority of the populations of Europe were rural.

Taking the example of Gaul on a few years.. French is derived from Frankish, or Franconian - a 'Germanic' language. French has as much in common with English and German as it does with Spanish and Italian. So, what makes it a 'Romance' language more than a 'Germanic' language? For no other reason than that it has to fit into the tree. This is madness; as a supposedly scientific proposition it fails; it fails on account of not matching what reality we know about language change.

As for reconstruction of old language, that is untestable. What makes things worse is where evidence for a singular language is actually taken from a broad temporal and geographic range. Irish and Welsh were originally alleged to be 'Celtic; on the basis that they were like Gaulish. Putting aside that Irish and Welsh are now treated as a separate group (insular 'Celtic') which brings into question the whole basis of the original argument one has to question what this 'Gaulish' actually is. We have enough records to be able to do a good job of defining classical Latin, Greek etc. Same with Old Irish and Old Welsh. Gaulsih is derived from a set of inscriptions, mostly very short and mostly of personal names stretching over a 400 year period and over thousands of miles. Galatian inscriptions are used to shore up Gaulish. They are all assumed to be the same language. The languages attested through such limited evidence are 'Gaulish' a-priori.

There is a distinction between Southern 'Gaulish' names and more Northern 'Gaulish' names (Celtilos, Luenios - Dumnorix, Diviciacus, Orgetorix). There is no reason to believe that there was one language being spoken over the entire landmass of what is now France, Belgium and Holland, Switzerland and Southern and Western Germany. There isn't now, there wasn't a hundred years ago, there wasn't at the turn of the first millenia AD....why should we think there was prior to the involvement with Rome?

In terms of what I am working on at the moment we have a problem. The problem is; how do you explain language loss in what is now England? If it was 'Celtic' then how did that get supplanted in its entirety by a 'Germanic' language? I've read all sorts of theories; the original one being, of course, that the Celts were killed, enslaved or moved to the West. Another is that the foreign invaders practiced a form of 'apartheid' (which...doesn't work because it would mean that German men would not marry with Celtic women, and in fact we should have a sub-strata of 'Celtic' as a socialect - surely).

If you put aside the idea of 'groups' of languages and accept that there were, instead, a number of dialects across Europe, that were constantly shifting due to differing levels and contexts of interaction then... one can look at the development of Welsh and English in a new light. Once you pass over that boundary then you can see that there are similarities in the etymology of words between the two languages; that there are similarities between the dialects across Britain that can be seen in Welsh and English, and dialectical and contextual differences that have resulted in the difference.

Look beyond that and beyond the invasionist principles that are axiomatic of the Indo-European model and....you'll realise that these people were obviously speaking something before 5000BC....why would they just drop it?

[spade]

Very interesting read!
Now, looking for more info on the subject I found the following pdf on twcenter and it reminded me a lot of this thread. I believe it would make a nice addition to the topic.
The authors make the hypothesis that Galatian cannot be explicitly categorised as Celtic, no more than they could be Germanic that is.
I found it interesting but I'm in no position to judge the paper's credibility. Therefore here it is!

http://www.proto-english.org/Galatians.pdf

[Brennus]

And from what we know, the related people/allies were the Senones, Bouiroi and Gaisatoi. That would make Germani an arbitrarily term that Caesar applied to people across the Rhine, related to the Galli. Perhaps to fit his tripartite description of the province he was conquering. (Bad PR saying there are other keltic speakers across the Rhine, he was unable to subdue, let's just call them Germani :D) Subtle differences like Noric, Belgic and Vindelic tongues?
Or it could be that Germani were "those who are related" to the Suebi, Caesar encountered and might be hinting the former spoke the same language as the latter. (did he ever heard them speak in a different manner?)

The first person to record the existence of Germani is Poseidonius, however in his case it applies to only a single tribe living on the eastern banks of the Rhine, a tribe which he considered to be Celtic. Caesar expanded the term Germani for political purposes, thereby creating a largely fictitious group whose borders stretched from the Rhine to the Oder. Caesar's description follows the classical historic approach of using rivers and other natural features as borders between distinct peoples. His description of the Germani living on one side of the Rhine and Galli on the other was simply a political tool to justify his conquest of Gaul. Had he sought to conquer all the "Gauls" his campaigns would have pushed much further east.

[Arjos]

The first person to record the existence of Germani is Poseidonius, however in his case it applies to only a single tribe living on the eastern banks of the Rhine, a tribe which he considered to be Celtic.

If that is the case, I'd like to know the reason for an Hellenistic educated Apameian to use a latin exonym to describe them. For afaik such are the origins of the word.

Then one looks at Roman annals and boom during the Cisalpine wars the allies of the Insubres are called Germani. Some modern scholars dismiss it, because it has come down to us from an Augustean inscription, on the ground that is hard to explain lol
The Romani were recording Gallic related peoples with a blanket term to denote a common origin. Poseidonios, who was active right after the publication of the Annales Maximi, imo, just corroborates his adoption of the latin exonym...