A jumble of classifications of Celtic

[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?