A jumble of classifications of Celtic

[Fisherking]

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.

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.

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. 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.

While writing this I also noted your use of Welsh for etymology. Forget it!

In the early 5th century the language changed so quickly and profoundly that one generation could not understand the next. Not to mention the later changes. It is like trying to build the works of Shakespeare from a shredded Norwegian book.

Most of your linguistics are just cherry picking and obfuscation.

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.

There is a lot wrong with the study of ancient Celts. Too much romanticism and too much New Age tripe.

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.

I don’t think the authors were very interested in facts or what is known. I think they wanted to make a splash and sell books.

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.

Thanks for enlightening me.



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. 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?

The earliest archaeological date for Celts in Spain is circa 1400 BC with the Urnfeld culture. What proof do you have that they were there before?
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?

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?

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. 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.

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.

I am afraid that the whole thing sounds like a case of Denial and little else.

[Fisherking]

I read the Bryn Mawr review.

I have to say I am skeptical of the work.

Disregarding cultural artifacts is not unacceptable other than the coinage. Coinage and inscriptions disregarded is too much IMO. My opinion on the classification of Tartessian as Celtic is too presumptive and ignores too much of the vocabulary. I can see it as influenced by Celtic but not much more.

The theory relies more heavily on lack of evidence than anything else. It doesn’t explain the relationship between Italic and Illyrian languages. It not only ignores classical authors testaments to a Celtic presence it also ignores people who call themselves Celtic or Gauls in those lands.

We not only have artifacts bearing Celtic inscriptions as far as the Balkans but in some cases we have the inscribed negatives used to make the molds for those items, and they are of local manufacture. In other words, we have better proof of Celts in the east than we do of Celts in the west, if we are to rely on Celtic inscriptions.

With the recent DNA analyses linking Irish and Basque it is not good supporting evidence for a western origin of Celtic speakers. That is until Koch proves that Basque is also a Celtic language and not a non Indo-European one.

I am disinclined to accept lack of evidence as proof of western origins. It ignores too much recorded data and inscriptions and chooses the data set and applies it inconsistently to suit the primus.

To me it is just another case of an academic reaching a conclusion and using only that which supports the case while ignoring or discarding conflicting evidence and viewpoints.

The book is quite expensive and I don’t think I will be buying it.

I do see why you took the tact you did in presenting the case. Looking from a different prospective is not bad but this requires overlooking too much hard data for me to credit it.

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

I read the Bryn Mawr review.

I have to say I am skeptical of the work.

Disregarding cultural artifacts is not unacceptable other than the coinage. Coinage and inscriptions disregarded is too much IMO. My opinion on the classification of Tartessian as Celtic is too presumptive and ignores too much of the vocabulary. I can see it as influenced by Celtic but not much more.

The theory relies more heavily on lack of evidence than anything else. It doesn’t explain the relationship between Italic and Illyrian languages. It not only ignores classical authors testaments to a Celtic presence it also ignores people who call themselves Celtic or Gauls in those lands.

We not only have artifacts bearing Celtic inscriptions as far as the Balkans but in some cases we have the inscribed negatives used to make the molds for those items, and they are of local manufacture. In other words, we have better proof of Celts in the east than we do of Celts in the west, if we are to rely on Celtic inscriptions.

With the recent DNA analyses linking Irish and Basque it is not good supporting evidence for a western origin of Celtic speakers. That is until Koch proves that Basque is also a Celtic language and not a non Indo-European one.

I am disinclined to accept lack of evidence as proof of western origins. It ignores too much recorded data and inscriptions and chooses the data set and applies it inconsistently to suit the primus.

To me it is just another case of an academic reaching a conclusion and using only that which supports the case while ignoring or discarding conflicting evidence and viewpoints.

The book is quite expensive and I don’t think I will be buying it.

I do see why you took the tact you did in presenting the case. Looking from a different prospective is not bad but this requires overlooking too much hard data for me to credit it.

It seems that some of the hard data you refer to may not be as 'hard' as you believe. You say that "it doesn't explain the relationship between Italian and Illyrian languages", I'm not sure what you mean. I don't see how an explanation of Celtic origin would have to explain a relationship between two completely separate languages. If, on the other hand, you mean the relationship between Celtic and these two languages there is no close link. They are PIE languages, but the proposed Italo-Celtic is widely discredited (it was politically motivated when formed, and has very, very little merit), and llyrian is so poorly attested that nothing much can be said of its relationship with other languages.

As for the link between Irish and Basque, that was a very tentative argument, and many attempts have made to link Basque with a number of languages (most famously Finnish) - again there really is very little supporting those propositions.

It seems odd, then, that you cite these rather tentative and generally unsupported language relationships as a reason to discount the peer-reviewed and accepted argument of Tartessian as Celtic

EDIT: I have re-read and realised that I have misunderstood your point regarding Basque and Irish. You spoke of a genetic link between the Basque region and Ireland (a link that also exists within the British isles more generally). This is from a very early (mesolithic) migration from a proposed Iberian refuge. It is one part of the evidence of an Atlantic zone within Europe, and is one piece of the jigsaw of Celtic from the West. We know that cultures were spread along the West Atlantic coast and that this seems to form a separate zone from the mediterranean zone and the central European zone (and yet another, Baltic zone), though all of these zones had interactions with each other.

[Fisherking]

Now that we understand each other a little better perhaps we can do somewhat better.

My view is that the author defines the Celts based only on language and then denies that the language extended over a larger area.

We have Celtic inscriptions and coins using Celtic languages, along with their molds over a very wide area. We have Classical Era authors placing them in that same area. The authors (Barry Cunliffe and John T. Koch) choose to discount our ignore this information.

Now, just to clear things up, at least Koch, discounts the culture and language link. To our knowledge these are generally linked. We can trace examples throughout known history but for this instance we should ignore it and say that it should not exist.

Tartessian is classed as a Celtic language per Koch. The prime dissenters are in everyway the equal of Koch in scholarship, if not more so, but review is a political process and with Cunliffe on the team it adds a lot of political weight.

Tartessian falls in an area which had been overrun by Celts but until Koch it was seen as a PIE isolate and most of it is still unintelligible. Turdetani language is still classed as PIE even though the two are closely related. So, here we are asked to believe that Tartessian had not become Celtizied but was Celtic but we must ignore its closest related language.

At any rate, we are asked to believe that these peoples didn‘t move around much. That people starting in the west stayed in the west. I take it that we are to assume that the first peoples in the British Isles came there from France and or Spain. Someone had to move there after the ice age and they couldn‘t sprout like mushrooms.

We are asked to assume that these people spoke a Celtic language that they brought with them. For me this is much too big of an assumption, given the rules they themselves set out.

The most dynamic and expansionist peoples or cultures going back to the Paleolithic (old stone age) were centered in Southwestern France and Northeastern Spain. The very regions associated with the Proto-Basques. They did expand their material cultures into areas the authors assume to have always been Celtic but we do class Basque as PIE, do we not? These people are also the ones linked genetically with the British Isles. Why are we to assume they took a different language?
Here, Pictish shows similarities with the Basque language but has recently also been classed with Celtic but it still shows strong PIE traits and vocabulary. Languages do change and are sometimes replaced. Why are we to assume that this never occurred until historic times?

There are other inconsistencies in the material I may get to later but I don‘t want to get too longwinded.

Some graphics that might be of use:


http://llmap.org/viewer.html?maps=11626

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...eria_300BC.svg

[Gaius Sempronius Gracchus]

As you say we seem to understand each other a little better, you are right, but I don't think that you understand the argument very well. The reason I say this is that you keep referring to them as always having been there. Now, Koch is not suggesting that a PIE language appeared in isolation on the South-West coast of the Iberian peninsula To quote him "It
should be explained at the outset that an Atlantic hypothesis of Celtic origins does not require a rejection or minimizing of the Indo-European character of Celtic (cf. Meid 2008), nor a relocation of the Indo-European homeland to the west.. "
http://ifc.dpz.es/recursos/publicaciones/29/54/26koch.pdf

The 'corded-ware' culture is not the only Neolithic expansion from the East, there was also a Mediterranean expansion which we can see in the 'impressed ware' culture that is found in modern Croatia/West coastal Greece, Eastern Italian peninsula up to the Po and round to the toe; Eastern Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Liguria, South France with further pockets on the Eastern Iberian peninsula and South-West Portugal (beyond the pillars of Heracles).

We also see a cultural/material link between the Western Atlantic peoples during the late bronze age, defining it as a separate cultural zone from both the more general Mediterranean and the Central-European zones.

As for the assuredly Celtic names on Central European coins... The names as they appear on the coins are often shortened, and suffixes etc. are usually deduced. This is important to understand because, obviously, whatever your apriori assumptions about the coin's cultural origins will affect the deductions you make. You also mentioned Ambiorix as a clearly Celtic name, but this is in no way clear. Rix and ambi are PIE roots, riks being a particularly ancient and wide-spread example; rex (Latin), raja (Sanskrit) and in German we see it in OHG as Rih, in Vandalic as Riks, Gothic as Reiks etc.

One other thing to note is that, outside of this alleged Celtic 'home' there are few (if any) terms with bi-lingual roots (the examples you have brought up are Hal-statt and Ba(io)varia. Again, this expectation (that alone among the world's languages) that Celtic was introduced as a partial prefix or suffix into an alien language, ought to be jarring.

Of course if one dismisses Celtic as the language of these areas then what was spoken? A pre-proto-Germanic language (and pre-Balto-Slavic). We may even have the remnants of this extinct language within modern Dutch. Maurits Gysseling proposed, based upon work by himself and Dr. S.J. De Laet a 'Belgian' language (associated with the Belgae); this is based upon endonyms, toponyms and in certain suffixes found in the Dutch language which are not Celtic nor Germanic, but PIE.

The work on this is far from a solid case, however, and I offer it only as a additional question regarding the security of Celtic as originating in the Danube. The endonyms, toponyms and suffixes linked with this are of very questionable heritage in terms of both Germanic and Celtic, but the problem is that any linguistic argument put forth regarding language is, ironically, shouted down by a projected language origin based upon unattested links to a material culture, dreamed up many years ago in the mind of a very earnest but idealistic and romantic academic.

[Zarakas]

The attached may be of interest and add to debate.
Celts Origin.pdf

[Fisherking]

I think you misunderstood my assertion. I referred to some of the problems I have with the work but given the terms of their argument I was wondering why they believe the Celts of Iberia carried Basque genetic markers to the British Isles when it is perfectly feasible that those peoples were able to do it themselves.

There was a long succession of Paleolithic and Mesolithic cultures springing form the exact area of the modern Basque and Gascon peoples. These peoples are of a Non Indo-European language group. There are two other Non Indo-European languages that were present within known history, the Turdetani and the Iberians. Iberian shows strong signs of being a related language to the Basque language.

DNA studies show the most similarities between the Basques and the population of the British Isles.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

When one examines the “G Y-DNA a slightly different picture emerges.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Why are the Welsh and Cornish different? Could this mean that they came from Spain and brought their language with them? Well except that they were P-Celtic speakers rather than Q-Celtic speakers. Celts of Iberia spoke Q-Celtic. According to the authors, however there were only Germans where P-Celtic was supposed to be spoken.

Kotch theorizes that Celts arrive from Iberia 1200 to 700 BC. Genetic links say the people arrived about 4000 years ago, linking them to the Urnfelds culture of Central Europe because of the metal working of these people in the archeological record. This is also compatible with the Y-DNA evidence.

I do not doubt contact between Iberia and the British Isles, marine or otherwise but the early arrival time and the language spoken do not support this theory.

The other interesting thing I noticed is that Koch acknowledges the existence of the other Celtic languages but then goes to great lengths to deny that the inscriptions and testimony are valid and only Proto Indo-European or German. Doesn’t anyone find this curious?

[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?