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Yes, but before that, the Welsh may have been the indigenous Europeans who were on the island at the time the Celts migrated there. Those populations are still present in Europe genetically, although their languages are dead except for Basque.

Yes, I think they were just genetically "submerged" for the most part. Sometimes I see a European and think "that guy's part neanderthal, for sure".

perhaps they are the ancestors of the Amerindians if there is any truth to the Salutrean hypothesis

A much more reasonable explanation is that jain missionaries sent out by various West Indian kings in the 400s and 500s made it to Wales, Cornwall and Brittany.

Saint Gildas (who had 20 brothers, a typical jain way of describing it) has a name that means JOYFUL SERVANT in Sanskrit ~ and probably the Gujarat equivalent of Hindi at the time.

There are others.

Gildas taught a particularly rigorous type of pacifism called AHEMSA.

I"m sure everybody's read everything there is about this fellow.

Searching for the Welsh-Hindi link

Monday, 14 March, 2005, 10:31 GMT | BBC

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1363051/posts

A BBC journalist is urging helpful linguists to come forward to help solve a mystery - why the Hindi (India's official language, along with English) accent has so much in common with Welsh. Sonia Mathur, a native Hindi speaker, had her interest sparked when she moved from India to work for the BBC in Wales - and found that two accents from countries 5,000 miles apart seemed to have something in common.

It has long been known that the two languages stem from Indo-European, the “mother of all languages” - but the peculiar similarities between the two accents when spoken in English are striking.

Remarkably, no-one has yet done a direct proper comparative study between the two languages to found out why this is so, says Ms Mathur.

“What I'm hoping is that if amateurs like myself - who have indulged in doing a little bit of research here and there - come forward, we can actually do proper research with professional linguists,” she told BBC World Service's Everywoman programme.

No coincidence

Ms Mathur explained that when she moved to Wales, everyone instantly assumed she was Welsh from her accent.

“I would just answer the phone, and they would say ‘oh hello, which part of Wales are you from?’,” she said.

We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels

Sonia Mathur “I would explain that I'm not from Wales at all - I'm from India.

“It was just hilarious each time this conversation happened.”

Her interest aroused, Ms Mathur spoke to a number of other people whose first language is Hindi.

One Hindi doctor in north Wales told her that when he answered the phone, people hearing his accent would begin talking to him in Welsh.

“I thought maybe it isn't a coincidence, and if I dig deeper I might find something more,” Ms Mathur said.

Particular similarities between the accents are the way that both place emphasis on the last part of word, and an elongated way of speaking that pronounces all the letters of a word.

“We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels,” Ms Mathur said.

“For example, if you were to pronounce ‘predominantly’, it would sound really similar in both because the ‘r’ is rolled, there is an emphasis on the ‘d’, and all the letters that are used to make the word can be heard.

“It's just fascinating that these things happen between people who come from such varied backgrounds.”

The similarities have sometimes proved particularly tricky for actors - Pete Postlethwaite, playing an Asian criminal in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, had his accent described by Empire magazine as “Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea”.

Proto-European language

But not only the two languages’ accents share notable common features - their vocabularies do too.

‘Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea’ or Pete Postlethwaite? Ms Mathur’s own research on basic words, such as the numbers one to 10, found that many were similar - “seven”, for example, is “saith” in Welsh, “saat” in Hindi.

“These kind of things really struck me,” she said.

“When I reached number nine they were exactly the same - it's ‘naw’ - and I thought there had to be more to it than sheer coincidence.”

She later spoke to professor Colin Williams of Cardiff University's School Of Welsh, who specialises in comparative languages.

He suggested that the similarities are because they come from the same mother language - the proto-European language.

“It was basically the mother language to Celtic, Latin, and Sanskrit,” Ms Mathur added.

“So basically that's where this link originates from.”

Ms Mathur noticed the similarities after moving to BBC Radio Wales

"We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels."

Sonia Mathur

'Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea' or Pete Postlethwaite?

There's a genetic history and a philological history. Both are intertwined. The Galician version is very simple. The dominant Celts left the heartland North of the Greek speaking areas in Eastern Europe due to an uprising of their Germanic speaking tributary tribes.

This was a typical warrior elite sort of thing, they owned boats and engaged in both raiding and trade (selling what you steal is the only way to keep the boats afloat).

That was about 1000 BC.

They sailed around the Mediterraean for a few centuries ~ built some fortified towns ~ finally abandoned the area and settled in NW Spain in roughly 700 BC. They gradually took over adjoining Basque areas and finally took off for Ireland and Britain in maybe 500 BC. They took the Basques with them.

Again, they never got out of the warrior elite thing so their genes just disappeared in the far greater Basque and native Celtic genepool, but they did dominate with their language(s).

By the time the Romans arrived in 35AD the Irish were sufficiently advance to be too expensive to be conquered and dealt with. The Celts in Wales were also too expensive to be dealt with. The Celts in the Southern Coastal areas had the best lands and the Romans took them ~ see Boaddica ~ whose name is in a language that's probably been extinct about 1600 years ~ but it says she's the 'feminine form" King Arthur ~ which is really cute. Kind of different than the story handed down by the Romans but it doesn't seem to bother any of the old Celtic language specialists.

The Galician story is gradually displacing the competing British theories.

About 535 AD all he-double toothpicks broke loose and a large number of folks from SE Britain, and Cornwall, moved to Brittany ~ which had just recently lost all its population, its covering vegetation and its wild animals, so it was a mess.

BTW, Brittany in Roman times was run independently of Rome for some reason. These are the same people who'd earlier been allied with Carthage but I suspect they made a separate peace with Rome and that gave them a special status.

The more recent and significant history after the withdrawal of the Legions from Britain is simply that of Brittany ~ which worked in tandem with its counterpart Cornwall to control trade between the mediterranean and the North Sea. They became incredibly wealthy during the early Medieval period, and that lasted right down to Anne of Brittany who was married to three French kings among other things and was reputed to be the richest woman in Europe. The French royal family married into Brittany's top nobility and gradually took over.