Posted on 07/01/2003 5:48:39 AM PDT by Pharmboy
This fellow needs to study creole languages a little before he makes that assumption. I hate it when linguists try to use genetic models on language. This whole "language is a living thing" is bogus. A geologic model would be far more accurate.
Yes. The best book on the subject is The Tarim Mummies, by Victor Mair.
Another good one is The Mummies Of Urumchi, by Elizabeth Barber.
Interestingly, all those words and phrases have been incorporated into English.
http://indoeuro.bizland.com/tree/celt/celtic.html
http://www.thezaurus.com/sloveniana/venetic_culture.htm
We are the anglos
Your language will be assimilated.
Your linguistic diversity will be incorporated into our own.
Your words will serve us.
Resistance is futile!
It is plausible that a Celtic people settled in that area but people make all sorts of claims on the Internet and I like to know the sources of strong claims like this. As a particularly wild example, Clyde Winters claims that Africans are the source of all great cultural achievements and then goes on to meticulously cite his sources -- which are often enough his own other works. I'm also curious about whether you are claiming that they were linguisticly or culturally "Celtic" -- or both.
Actually, the leading theory is that "(W)ilios" was the Hittite "Wilusa". Indeed, there are Hittite texts that talk about "Wilusa" (Illios), "Alaksandu" (Alexander), "Appaliunas" (Apollo), Taruisa (Troia or Troy), and war with the "Ahhiyawa" (Achaeans). Your interpretation and certainty is not mainstream, which is why I would like to look at the sources. Just saying that this is so doesn't tell me why you think so. It is broadly plausible that Celts had some role but, as I said, this is not a mainstream interpretation of the facts.
You still find the vowel substitution in Celtic languages that have lasted until modern times.
You can do vowel and consonant substitution between almost any two Indo-European dialects and get the same effect, which is why we are able to determine the relationship between languages and can apply theories like Grimm's Law to language changes.
I am going to have to assume the "ium" part is a Greek or Latin suffix (after all, the Greeks got to tell the story).
It was likely something like "Wilios" in the pre-Homeric Greek. What you need to remember is that Indo-European languages have actually lost a lot of complexity over time and Hittite actually retained a lot of the phonetic features that linguists had long assumed should be there based on various sound transformations in surrounding parts of the word. That's one of the things that always surprised me about language evolution -- many languages seem to be getting simpler over time (e.g., English no longer has a dual case, nominative and accusative noun forms in most cases, etc.) which seem pretty counter-intuitive to me. Who invented all of the complexity in the first place and why?
A recent archaeology article referenced in Science News noted that Stonehenge, properly viewed, is a diagram of the female reproductive apparatus. No doubt whoever built that temple worshipped the great goddess. Was it "Scota"?
That probably cannot be answered, but it was the "Three Brothers" who sailed from the Dead Coast in Galicia to Ireland to conquer the locals, take all the women, and roast a few cows here and there. I presume they arrived with iron weapons too!
BTW, students of the Celtic past who examine it from the vantagepoint of Galicia invariably note that the coast of the Bay of Biscay has been pretty nearly dominated by Celts of one kind or the other for many thousands of years. It has also seen Celts move from one part to another and back again. Some of the Milesians moved from Galicia to Ireland circa 500BC. The same folks moved to Great Britain somewhat later to become the people the Romans met. In the early part of the Dark Ages the very same people moved on to Brittany, and as the Angles and Saxons moved in, the Celts further South in Cornwall moved back to Galicia, this time as the founders of the kingdoms that took the entire peninsula away from the Arabs.
It's not like these guys stayed in one place all the time.
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