Quote Originally Posted by Arjos View Post
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.



Quote Originally Posted by Arjos View Post
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).