The Irish are Not Celts

[oudysseos]

the ancient Irish were telling us very clearly, that they were indeed not Celts

In a celtic language. Can we agree that they were a celtic-speaking peoples? Or do you think that q-celtic is misidentified and not related to continental celtic languages? And if I may ask, what do you think is an appropriate term for the Irish in the EB time period?

I'd also like to know what cmacq and elmetiacos (and anyone else) think of the descriptions of the Irish units on the EB web-site (about the statements concerning ethnicity, not the names of units).

Historically, early Ibero-Celtic Ireland was populated by numerous tribes with an overking, from which spawned the seat of the high king that fell into constant contest by the time Rome fell, and the sub-kingdoms of Ireland were rendered into warring splinters. However, despite the varying periods of relative stability with a kind of warring states period, the Goidils always relied on a tribal model, with each family being headed by an elected chief, who acted as the tribe's spokesman to the mounting tiers of officials.

Historically, the Goidils were not a single group of Celts, but intermingled blood of Gauls, Britons, Belgae, and even Iberians.

I'm asking about this because my (lay-man's) interpretation of the genetic evidence that we have been discussing is that the ethnic heritage common to Ireland and Iberia dates to the meso- or neo-lithic, thousands of years before q-celtic language and culture became part of Irish life. The McEvoy study says explicitly that two to three thousand year old Iberian haplogroups are not found in Ireland. To put it another way, the people who built Newgrange were not Celts/Gaels/Goidels/whateveryouwantotcallthem. So does a stone-age connexion between the Irish and Iberian populations warrant identifying an Ibero-Celtic culture? I'd say not, but there may be other information that those with more expertise have knowledge of.

Elmetiacos- re the punic-gaelic connexion: I'll defer to your superior knowledge, but I did want to point out that the quote from Empires of the Word does not seem to be a rehash of some 18th century chestnut, but rather recent research from Orin David Gensler, A Typological Evaluation of Celtic/Hamito-Semitic Syntactic Parallels, PhD Dissertation, UC Berkley, 1993.
http://books.google.ie/books?id=f899...sult#PPA890,M1

There is also a very interesting article in Archaeology and Language IV, Blench and Spriggs ed., Celts and Others, Maritime Contacts and Linguistic Change, by John Waddell and Jane Conroy.
http://books.google.ie/books?id=NemX...over#PPA125,M1