There is some food for thought in this work but the arguments they make are just as flawed as the earlier ones.

I don’t think that the hypotheses answers anything and only adds to the amount of questions that can be asked.

We have irrefutable proof of Central European contacts in the British Isles at early dates just as we have artifacts from Spain. Irish settlement patterns hearken back to the Neolithic but those in Britain proper would seem to be more developed.

If we take the Maritime Bell Beaker culture it points genetically to Wales and Southwestern England as a possible landing site. But it does not cover the whole of the isles. It also points to a different body type for the individuals after this time, but anthropologists discount it as proof of migration.

We can speculate on languages and differences for ever and still reach no conclusion. What we know is historically Celtic languages are or were spoken in the British Isles and reputed to have been spoken over a large area of the rest of Europe.

Culturally all these areas are seemingly linked to the Hallstatt and or La Téne cultures. Earlier cultural links go back to the Beaker culture. The areas are also tied together with the Megalithic cultures of Europe and may be tied to Magdalenian culture.

If we talk about a unifying Celtic culture we can not divorce it from bronze age Urnfelds culture regardless of the language spoken. If we speak of Celtic as only a language with no unifying culture we are left with only what we know historically. All the rest is conjecture. We are left with less to go on than before. We may as well rename the field Atlantic Fringe studies and linguistics can become a large subfield. Forget about most of France, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Czechia , Slovakia, Poland, All of the Balkans, Turkey, and the colony in Egypt as all obviously German want-a-bes.

I suppose I just can’t understand the wish to narrow the field to such an extent. Basing any argument on what Herodotus wrote and supposing that that instance was accurate and not one of his wilder claims just seems one of convince. Most other works by other authors and scholars are ignored. We can’t possibly take their word for it, but Herodotus is to be believed (in this instance) while all the others such as Posidonius and Caesar with first had experience must obviously be mistaken.

We are asked to forget what we know and take the teams assumptions without question. We are to assume that Iberian trade objects mean Celtic language while culture is meaningless in giving us a link. We must accept that German tribes occupied vast territory long before any evidence of their leaving their homelands. We must assume that what Roman and Greek writers recorded was tripe. They couldn’t tell a Celt from a German and the Germans were lying and saying they were Celts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...-en.svg&page=1

Rather than invent a hypotheses which seeks to cancel so much of what archeologists, linguists, and anthropologists have found, to include Celtic inscriptions through wide areas of Europe, it may have been wiser to have gone from the standpoint of the Paleolithic Continuity Theory.

http://www.continuitas.org/intro.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoli...tinuity_Theory

In this theory the Celts colonized from west to east. Something less problematic than changing everyone to Germans.

IMHO Koch and his team are focusing on his linking of a previously unclassified language and trying to draw conclusions linking it to the British Isles. The arguments over language and culture are leave us in a murky darkness. The framework of the PCT are just the reverse. PCT is not perfect. Its model may be too static but it is far clearer than the Western Celts theories put forward by Koch and his team.

The PIE invasion is its self a theory without definitive proof. The unmaking of Eastern Celtic languages is a misguided endeavor seeking to undo recorded history with a weak argument.

Not having read the book I am unsure exactly where these elements come from. Seemingly Cunliffe’s ideas on Celtic being a trade language is within bounds of believability. The Celtic areas of Europe have long been held as a vast trade network. It also would explain why languages would not diverge to unintelligibility and would exert a stronger influence on other languages with which it was in contact

During the time frame of the research Greek had undergone a change where many diverse dialects and branches of the language had disappeared and it had become an almost universal language from Italy to the Indus valley. This came about through a short lived conquest but remained because it facilitated trade. Is there any reason to doubt, in the face of numerous accounts, that it was other than a Celtic language being spoken? Spelling varieties should not be held as proof of nonintelligibility. We have enough to go on from our own English before spelling became a convention to account for a wide range of spellings of the same word.

ADDIDENDEM:

I am having a bit of difficulty here as I have not read the book but the theory is of interest.

I am not sure if it is the theory or your summation that I have the trouble with.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful to either the Koch team or to you.

My difficulties are with the changing of Hallstatt and La Téne as Germanic cultures and telling us that the Romans had no idea of who they were dealing with.

http://www4.uwm.edu/celtic/ekeltoi/b...garstki09.html

Also, separation of Celtic from Gaul I find problematic. Caesar tells us that these people call themselves Celts but the Romans name them Gauls. The Irish refer to themselves as Gaels. The Welsh don’t call themselves Celts either.

This could be because of language shifts, or not. Q-Celtic could be said to be the older form of the language at large but that also shows a degree of separation from the main body of speakers. Example: American and Australian English vs. British English. Those reflect the language as it was spoken at earlier times. American English did not go through the shift of the early 1820s and Australian dose not reflect the end of that same shift.

Further, the number of Celtic dialects or languages in Iberia could reflect successive migrations or colonization. It may reflect an older spoken form but does not mean that it was the founding area of the language.

We have Lepontic being absorbed into Gaulish in the 4th century BC. This only demonstrates closer ties with a core area of the language and an influx of speakers.

We can assuredly assume eastern expansion of the Celts. We see them moving south and east from Central Europe in Roman times.

There are models which would say that, for a time, Hallstatt became the new core area of the cultural area. La Téne too could have been a backwater area that developed new ideas that brought about continued expansion. These are patterns of human development. They should not be seen as the cradle of Celtic genesis.

Iberian Celts show Hallstatt influences. Marine Bell Beaker may show the closest to a unifying culture as we get at a later point but genetic links only point to Wales and the South of England. There are also differences in Ireland that would show it was not gotten direct from the source. This still leaves us wondering how the Irish acquired their language.

That just brings us back to this: http://www.continuitas.org/intro.html

Stephen Oppenheimer’s The Origins of the British goes into this area and it does tie in with Cunliffe. It is more a matter of how far back in time you think they may have originated.