Preview: The Boii

[Ludens]

To bring this back to the various Celtic languages in EB- I, personally, am certain that there were many regional dialects and even distinct languages spreading from Britain and Iberia all the way to Anatolia- but I think that it is very likely that they were all more or less mutually intelligible- like Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, rather than German, Dutch, and English, to use a modern example.

What makes you think that Celtic languages would have stayed close to each other?

[oudysseos]

What makes you think that Celtic languages would have stayed close to each other?

There just doesn't seem to be any evidence of massive divergence- to the extent, of course, that there is much evidence at all. And we do have to consider that personal names might well persist longer than other parts of speech. But still, the Italian Boii aren't reported as speaking a language incomprehensible to the Senones, for example. The most divergent seems to be Celtiberian, at least in its written form.

The truth is there are many equally plausible scenarios. One critique to raise to my minimal divergence theory is how then is language congruency maintained?