Question about Brennos' interview

[Arjos]

If there is such a quote I would be very interested. It might help in terms of where the word is actually from.

I'll try to find it. If my memory serves, they were mentioned as allies in the sense of a dependent group, which Keltic polities could call up to fight...
Obviously it was all from a Roman point of view, so there might be a lot of romanocentric rationalization...

what Koch is suggesting (and his, and others', work on Celtic from the West is certainly not consistent with that)

How does he fits something like Lepontic being attested, with a different alphabet, not even a century after Tartessian? Simply by moving the "however-he-likes-to-call" Proto-Celtic's homeland on the Atlantic?
If so, what is that an Indo-European teletransport that skipped half of Europe?

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

I'll try to find it. If my memory serves, they were mentioned as allies in the sense of a dependent group, which Keltic polities could call up to fight...
Obviously it was all from a Roman point of view, so there might be a lot of romanocentric rationalization...

Thanks. Even if it is Romano-Centric it may at least help understand the term's roots.

How does he fits something like Lepontic being attested, with a different alphabet, not even a century after Tartessian? Simply by moving the "however-he-likes-to-call" Proto-Celtic's homeland on the Atlantic?
If so, what is that an Indo-European teletransport that skipped half of Europe?

That's a good question. I haven't read Celtic from the West yet (its a very expensive book), so I can't really explain Koch's view in terms of the argument he makes there. But, what he said about Celtic being a deeper root in European languages may be a separate argument than that made in Celtic from the West.

As for Lepontic... I have tried to understand how such a thinly attributed language has been confirmed as being related to...very much at all. Equally mysterious is the confidence in Thracian as "definitely" an Indo-European language. I rather get the impression that Lepontic may have been 'confirmed' as a Celtic language because....well, it must be. There simply isn't anything like a structural understanding of it that would lead to a confirmation one way or another (even given that any such language group exists).

[Arjos]

Ok it's from the Fasti Triumphales and it goes:

M(arcus) Claudius M(arci) f(ilius) M(arci) n(epos) Marcellus an(no) DXX[XI] / co(n)s(ul) de Galleis Insubribus et Germ[an(eis)] / K(alendis) Mart(iis) isque spolia opima rettu[lit] / duce hostium Virdumaro ad Clastid[ium] / [interfecto]

This particular incision has been dated between 19 and 12 BCE. But other fragments have been discovered in other cities, with just variants of forms. So it is debated when the "originals" or other copies can be dated to. However events after 296 BCE seems to be taken from the Annales Maximi, written in 130 BCE. If all of that stands, in 130 BCE Publius Mucius Scaevola might've been speaking of Insubres and their germane (closely related?) allies fighting at Clastidium in 222 BCE.

What source was he using (Annales recorded by the contemporary Pontifex of 222 BCE?), whether the Fasti that have survived were based on him or whatever. We do not know :P
Still Poseidonios was writing something like 50 years later...

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?)

[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.

[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...