A jumble of classifications of Celtic

[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.