Question about Brennos' interview

[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.