A jumble of classifications of Celtic

[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.