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To: VadeRetro
So you're saying that, in advance of the collapse of the Northern Kingdom, a wave of Jewish emmigration went to Europe and underwent a language shift to Celtic.

I don't see that anywhere in this thread. You're just making that up.

Besides, if there were no Jews until after Babylon these people were not Jews anyway. They would have been Isralites, right?

They just happened to invent a new language more similar to the ones already there than the one they already had.

I've seen other posts on this (or other) thread which say that there are many similarities between european languages today and early hebrew. If that's true, they were not inventing any new language at all.

If they knew how to write, they forgot again until they eventually invented runes.

That doesn't ring true. One of the backbones of Celtic history is that they didn't keep written records because of religious and cultural reasons. That has nothing to do with being able to read and write.

If they were monotheists, they forgot.

Oh c'mon now, you know all of the Israelites from both Kingdoms worshipped the golden calf under Moses. They were all guilty of polytheism!

If they remembered anything of their old pottery and metallurgy styles, they forgot.

That's just as absurd. The effusive Celtic style which is seen in all the picture books about the Celts says that's crazy!

Then the Lost Tribes escaped circa 610 BC and became the Celts, second wave. They just happened to invent a new Indoeuropean language similar to the one invented by the Celts, first wave.

Why should that seem far fetched? both old and new were loosely based on the same hebrew.

I think you have a lot of explaining to do to convert your half-truths and innuendo into a coherent argument why the celts are not Israelites. If they are not, then where did all those millions of celts in Assyria come from the same time those millions of israelites in assyria disappeared? Your going to run out of millions there pretty fast!

277 posted on 11/28/2002 10:33:58 PM PST by PaulKersey
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To: PaulKersey
Why should that seem far fetched? both old and new were loosely based on the same hebrew.

You apparently have no idea what a family of languages is. The first such to be detected was the Indoeuropean family. I believe it was a Briton stationed in India in the 18th century who noticed that the languages of most of India, descendants of Sanskrit, shared surprising similarities with Latin, Greek, and the other major languages of Europe. It had been known for some time that the languages of Europe had similarities but that could be put down to their geographical proximity. Finding a relationship far off in India was something else.

Anyway, a number of such families have since been identified. Indoeuropean remains a major one. Another one, the Semitic family includes Hebrew, Arabic, Berber, and a number of ancient languages such Egyptian and Akkadian.

Note that Hebrew is Semitic. Celtic is in a whole different family, the Indoeuropean one. That's important because all the member languages of a family are more related to each other than they are to languages in any other family.

Now, that doesn't mean that families aren't related in superfamilies. The idea is not widely accepted, but a number of scholars have pointed out underlying similarities that point to these superfamilies. Even granting their existence, superfamilies don't make family relationships go away. That's what several people have tried to do on this thread when pointing out that, for instance, Hebrew has a word for earth that looks a bit like earth. That doesn't make everything Hebrew, sorry!

The problem is that a language in one family essentially will not drift across family boundaries. The Arabs conquered Persia in the 600s AD, bringing them into the emerging Muslim empire. The Persian language, Indoeuropean at root, started absorbing Semitic Arabic loanwords at a high rate. Today it has more Arabic words than Indoeuropean. For all that, the everyday core vocabulary is still after all these hundreds of years identifiably Indoeuropean. You typically don't start using loanwords for "father," "mother," "house," "daughter," "son," etc.

The closest thing to a shift across family boundaries happens when a small population is completely absorbed in a dominant culture. That's what has happened to most of the immigrants to America, at least until La Reconquista got started.

Let's take a migrant group that typically doesn't assimilate, however. The Gypsies apparently left India around 800 AD. They've been and still are everywhere. There are several variants of the Romany dialect in several parts of the world. But they're all not only still Indoeuropean, they're all still identifiably descendants of Sanskrit. It's still an Indian linguistic subfamily, all the branches, everywhere, no matter what the dominant culture or what loanwords have been incorporated along the way. That's just the way languages change. You don't obliterate your roots.

So here's the dilemma for saying that the Hebrews became the Celts. Celtic should be in the Semitic family, far more similar to Hebrew than it is to Latin. The reverse is true. It's far more similar to Latin (or Greek, or Russian, or German, or even Sanskrit) than it is to Hebrew.

You can say that a wave of Jewish migrants went to Europe and got completely absorbed in cultures that already existed there. It's a historically unimportant non-point which does not demand evidence as it would not be expected to leave any. It won't do for your thesis about Lost Tribes becoming this other group.

281 posted on 11/29/2002 6:53:40 AM PST by VadeRetro
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To: PaulKersey
Me, to William Terrell: So you're saying that, in advance of the collapse of the Northern Kingdom, a wave of Jewish emmigration went to Europe and underwent a language shift to Celtic.

You: I don't see that anywhere in this thread. You're just making that up.

No, I'm not making it up. I'm encountering an self-discrediting readiness to fling irresponsible charges.

When I pointed out to W.T. that the Celts were in Europe well in advance of the event which supposedly lost the Lost Tribes, he invoked a putative earlier diaspora and cited the one from Egypt as a good candidate. Never mind that Exodus says nothing about anybody splitting off from Moses to sail across the pond.

You have the bar pretty low. A reasonably athletic gerbil could jump over it.

284 posted on 11/29/2002 7:35:07 AM PST by VadeRetro
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