Celtic Found to Have Ancient Roots

NY Times ^ | July 1, 2003 | NICHOLAS WADE

[Pharmboy]

Did they hollow the heads out and put candles in them??

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

I don't know for sure. Probably some locale where the English landed, stayed a while, then left. Good question.

[Swordmaker]

Forster's area of expertise is genetics... and gene tree charts are an effective tool in that discipline. I do not know whether it is as effective in linguistics. That remains to be seen... and it might turn out to be very useful. However, it strikes me that Forster's expertise in genetics necessarily limits his expertise in linguistics. Both disciplines require completely differing fields of in depth study and it would be surprising if Forster could be expert in both fields.

On the other hand, interdisciplinary fusions of techniques and knowledge may result in completely new (and accurate) insights or uncover relationships that were heretofor unsuspected.

Words do not necessarily follow peoples... words can precede them. A trader from a people who do not use a word MAY bring it back from a trade expedition. The word may become popular and become adopted into the local language. Captives and slaves bring words and customs with them when they are sold, often at some distance from their roots.

There is also the problem that some words derive from common noises made by babies... mama, dada are prime examples... to assume that unrelated cultures are related based on such words would be falacious.

Sometimes words are coined in one culture and then provide a needed usage in another culture that lacked both the word and the concept. It is my understanding that the Japanese word for "Thank you," "Obrigato" is a transplant from the Portuguese "Obligato." Japanese culture did not include the concept of thanks... it was based on expected class oriented duties and privileges which not require any thanks... it was merely accepted as due. Interaction with a differing culture required a word for "thanks" and an already existing, foreign word was adopted. To then confabulate a familial relationship between Portuguese and Japanese would be erroneous.

[ZULU]

No.

As a matter of fact, in Ireland, where a lot of our Halloween rituals come from, hollowed out turnips with candles in them were used in place of pumpkins.

The heads taken by Celtic warriors were battle trophies and religious offerings.

Various ancient warrior people from Scythians to Aztecs took the heads of their enemies and used them as trophies.

Personally, I admire the Jivaro custom of producing Tsan-Tsans or shrunken heads from their dead enemies. That way you could hang them on the rear view mirror of your car - they take up less room than the entire skull.

[Cronos]

The article raises an interesting point: most people assume that languages spread by conquest, but that doesn't seem to hold so well. The Romans conquered the Greeks, but the Greeks still speak Greek and probably more Romans learned Greek than Greeks learned Latin. Likewise, the Gauls maintained their language for centuries after Caesar's conquest, but lost it after they successfully conquered back territory. The Germanic Franks conquered Romanized Gaul, but wound up speaking a language more Roman than German.

There are differences in each 'example' you raise --
The Greeks -- the Romans admired the Greeks and held them to be the founts of Culture, so the GReek language held sway as it was considered the language of culture.
The same thing happened for hte Franks and the Normans.
Int he case of hte Gauls, the Roman culture was more advanced so was adopted. Also, it was the language of Empire, of commerce and even more so, because Caesar carried out what was practically a genocide of the Gauls in the years 55 to 44 BC.

[Cronos]

Basketball does have some origins in Aztec games, soccer has origins elsewhere, but what matters was where they were codified.

[Cronos]

The blind poet Homer pretty well covered the destruction of the Milesian colony at Illium (Allium) by the more primitive Greeks. That Scythians adopted Celtic culture, weapons and words is beyond dispute

Helloo. Greeks more primitive than Celts????? When was this? Or are you talking aobut Doric Greeks who smashed the Mycenean civilisation in 1200 BC?

[Cronos]

The milesians.

Accorind got Irish Myths, the Emerald Isle was conquered by 5 (?) groups of invading people. The 3rd were the Fir Bolgs (probabaly the Celtic Belgae), the 4th were hte Tuatha de Danaan(the tribes of Dana) and the 5th were the Milesians, the sons of some Mil dude supposedly from Spain.

[Chris Talk]

In South Africa, to some degree, it looked like it would be replaced by Afrikaans, then by some Xhosa dialect, with Zulu of course in the Natal.

Only lately has it had a resurgence, since the black government wants to be able to scream to the West for aid in its own language.

[Cronos]

Sorry blam, maybe we should agree to disagree, but I've seen no real evidence or even proper reasoning to state that there was a Celtic culture distinct from proto-Aryan culture before 900 BC.

[Cronos]

When did the Celts ever conque territory back from the Romans? Rome fell to invading Germainc barbarians,not to Celtic invasions.

Ooh,, this is fast becoming my favourite piece of knowledge to disseminate. Seems that the term German is taken from the Latin word Germanus meaning authentic or genuine. The distinction between Germans and Celts in terms of physical structure is non-existant and the differentiation was givent ot hem by the Romans. tHe Romans considered the Germans to be the genuine Celts while those in the West were mixed with other tribes...

[Cronos]

Quite civilized Germans living within the Roman Empire attempted mightily to resucitate the place

That was in the years 400 AD. The Germans who entered imperial lands became civilised

[Cronos]

The Major Indo-European languages are considered to be:

The Major Indo-European languages are:

Subfamily	Group	Subgroup	Languages and Principal Dialects
Anatolian			Hieroglypic Hittite*, Hittite (Kanesian)*, Luwian*, Lycian*, Lydian*, Palaic*
Baltic			Latvian (Lettish), Lithuanian, Old Prussian*
Celtic	Brythonic		Breton, Cornish*, Welsh
Celtic	Continental		Gaulish*
Celtic	Goidelic or Gaelic		Irish (Irish Gaelic), Manx*, Scottish Gaelic
Germanic	East Germanic		Burgundian*, Gothic*, Vandalic*
Germanic	North Germanic		Old Norse* (see Norse): Danish, Faeroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish
Germanic	West Germanic (see Grimm's law)	High German	German, Yiddish
Germanic	West Germanic (see Grimm's law)	Low German	Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Flemish, Frisian, Plattdeutsch (see German language)
Greek			Aeolic*, Arcadian*, Attic*, Byzantine Greek*, Cyprian*, Doric*, Ionic*, KoinE*, Modern Greek
Indo-Iranian	Dardic or Pisacha		Kafiri, Kashmiri, Khowar, Kohistani, Romany (Gypsy), Shina
Indo-Iranian	Indic or Indo-Aryan		Pali*, Prakrit*, Sanskrit*, Vedic*
Indo-Iranian	Indic or Indo-Aryan	Central Indic	Hindi, Hindustani, Urdu
Indo-Iranian	Indic or Indo-Aryan	East Indic	Assamese, Bengali, Bihari, Oriya
Indo-Iranian	Indic or Indo-Aryan	Northwest Indic	Punjabi, Sindhi
Indo-Iranian	Indic or Indo-Aryan	Pahari	Central Pahari, Eastern Pahari (Nepali), Western Pahari
Indo-Iranian	Indic or Indo-Aryan	South Indic	Marathi (including major dialect Konkani), Singhalese (Sinhalese)
Indo-Iranian	Indic or Indo-Aryan	West Indic	Bhili, Gujarati, Rajasthani (many dialects)
Indo-Iranian	Iranian		Avestan*, Old Persian*
Indo-Iranian	Iranian	East Iranian	Baluchi, Khwarazmian*, Ossetic, Pamir dialects, Pushtu (Afghan), Saka (Khotanese)*, Sogdian*, Yaghnobi
Indo-Iranian	Iranian	West Iranian	Kurdish, Pahlavi (Middle Persian)*, Parthian*, Persian (Farsi), Tajiki
Italic	(Non-Romance)		Faliscan*, Latin, Oscan*, Umbrian*
Italic	Romance or Romanic	Eastern Romance	Italian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Sardinian
Italic	Romance or Romanic	Western Romance	Catalan, French, Ladino, Portuguese, Provençal, Spanish
Slavic or Slavonic	East Slavic		Belorussian (White Russian), Russian, Ukrainian
Slavic or Slavonic	South Slavic		Bulgarian, Church Slavonic*, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian
Slavic or Slavonic	West Slavic		Czech, Kashubian, Lusatian (Sorbian or Wendish), Polabian*, Polish, Slovak
Thraco-Illyrian			Albanian, Illyrian*, Thracian*
Thraco-Phrygian			Armenian, Grabar (Classical Armenian)*, Phrygian*
Tokharian (W China)			Tokharian A (Agnean)*, Tokharian B (Kuchean)*

[Cronos]

Although the Indo-Europeans may have originated in eastern Europe

The evidence rather poitns to Central Asia or to eastern Persia-Western India.

[Cronos]

all evidence indicates the Celts originated in central Europe, in what is now Austria and neighboring areas. They then spread south into north Italy (Cisapline Gaul, west into Switzerland and Gaul, southwest into northern Spain (the Celt-Iberians) and across the English Channel or Bay of Biscay into the British Isles. Another group spread south and east into Anatolia (see the Galatians in the Bible) and even as far as Egypt where they served as mercenaries

I concur. Also, about the relation between the languages, the Germanics/Italics/Celtics may have been originally one group before splitting with the GErmans giving rise to the Celts or vice versa. I do find similarities between German and Latin (but htat may be due to the influence of the latter on the former), but Polish is completely different.

[Cronos]

The Carthaginians never sacked Rome - though Hannibal certainly tried very hard. The Carthaginian language (Punic) was eliminated in Africa by eliminating its speakers through genocide (and a well-deserved genocide it was),

And pray tell, why was it a well deserved genocide? The Phoenicians were respected by the GReeks and Romans as great traders, maritime adventurers and the only one of the ancients who traversed beyond hte pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar and Jabl al whatever on the other side inMorocco).

The phoenician alphabet is the first phonetic alphabet in the world and the Greek alphabet is derived from the phoneician. How was it good to have slaughtered these wise ancients?

[Cronos]

Most of the barbarian invaders were seeking incorporation into the empire, not the destruction of the empire. Charlemagne himself had himself crowned a Roman Emperor.
you're combining 400 years in one sentence. THe early German barbarians wanted the riches of the Roman lands and conquered them. They then realised that this was a superior culture they captured (like hte Romans capturing Greece said 'Captive Greece encaptivated Rome', but even more so) and became completely Roman. Rome did not become Germanicized as the Germans had nothign culturally to offer Rome. The Germans became Romanized whether within or without hte Empire. Modern Western civilisation is nearly exclusively Roman with Christian morals.

[Cronos]

Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages form another

ARe you sure? Ancient Irani (Avestan) related to Slavic and Baltic languages)? But Avestan is very similar to Sanskrit, almost brother dialects in a way. I don't think the Slavic language is so closely related to these two more highly evolved Aryanic languages.

of course in a broader sense they are related, but on what basis do you say that the Slavic language is comparatively closer to Sanskrit-Avestan than German or Latin? I'd think the opposite was true.

Or maybe you're basing it on geography

[VadeRetro]

English is a Germanic language, with heavy influence from French (a Romance language, based on Latin).

It's very Latinate, not just from the French influence but from legal, medical, and scientific terms which since the Renaissance and the abandonment of the direct use of the Latin language have been creeping into common use. What happened in English which didn't happen to the same degree elsewhere in the Germanic community is that commonly-used Latin words were slightly anglicized but otherwise incorporated untranslated. ("Paternitas" became "paternity," etc.)

Pick up a dictionary and sample the derivations. Latin is very heavily represented now. It's probably the single most common source of word roots although the core vocabulary of the language is Germanic.

[Rytwyng]

You ought to read "Island in the Sea of Time" and its sequels, by S M Stirling. It doesn't go back to the Ice Age, but it does go back to the Bronze Age, which is almost as fun.