No offence, but you too easily dispense with presumed Celtic place names in Central Europe. There are many pre Roman place names and villages along with river names that also seem to occur in France and Spain. Hall may be problematic but there are many current and former names showing Celtic roots. Of course, viewing a Proto-Celtic mother tongue does much to explain this and should also support the theory rather than take away from it.

From what Cunliffe has written he seems to have less of a problem with a wide language distribution than what you say Koch does. (or it is a misunderstanding of some sort)

It would seem to me that Koch favors a highly diverse language pattern in Central Europe like that in Italy. There is no reason this should be so. If a Celtic language was a trading language in the Atlantic zone it could as easily have been the language in Central Europe as well. These things do not show where the language its self originated and we need not have diverse languages over large areas.


The seemingly huge distribution of Celtic languages in Europe are actually not so exceptional. That is not to say there were no dialects or other languages of a Celtic root. We just cannot say for sure.

If we look at North America at about the time of first contact we see areas of very diverse languages and huge areas of one language family. We even see one language and its dialects spoken over an area roughly ebullient in size to the distribution of all the Celtic languages of Europe.

Given the geography of the regions I see nothing exceptional for a wider distribution of Celtic. It very well could have given rise to other languages around it.

Years ago Celtic and Italic were a hyphenated subgroup of Indo-European. Latin in particular seems close in many ways

Language spread from west to east is not so difficult an idea to overcome. At least not for the Northwest groups. The Southeast group and those spoken in Asia seem a bit more problematic.