If Nordwestblock was a thing, a real thing, then what are the implications of Low Country Beakers storming the beaches of Britain?
I'll put money on the table that Islanders spoke a language akin to the big, Tang-colored area in the map below. Linguists studying the proto-historical Low Countries up to the Elbe don't seem too keen on it ever having been part of the Celto- or Germano-spheres.
Different solutions have been suggested, but the most plausible is something kind-of... Venetic-ish.
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The swift Urnfielders seem plausibly porto-celtic, or at least they roasted the European landscape in advance of the swifter Iron Age Celts. I would assume that the Celtic spoken in the Islands today has a heritage in that epoch, maybe as late as the LeTene era, but probably around the time cremation becomes the fad.
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| Nordwestblock via wiki |
It's always been strange to me that people try to explain away Caesar's distinction between Galli, Aquitani and Belgae. If the Belgae were a Gallo-German confederation, or just somewhat more belligerent Celts, why not just call them Galli. If they were basically cis-Rhenish Germans, why not just call them Germans, many of whom lived much closer to Caesar and would have been more familiar to his audience. Why would he need to make a special category for this most distant group. The Galli themselves were tribally distinct and subsumed much variation.
ReplyDeleteThe most parsimonious explanation of the written record is that the Belgae had a distinct background that led to significant linguistic and cultural differences from the Galli.
This make good sense.
DeleteYeah, thanks for commenting. I've been reading a little on the Hilversum Culture and its connections with Southern Britain in the Bronze Age.
ReplyDeleteI am convinced by the hypothesis that Celtic developed in the late Chacolithic/EBA, in situ in the British Isles, Ireland and Atlantic Europe (Atlantic France, northwest Iberia, minus the Basque-/Aquitanian-speaking regions). Arising from IE/ProtoCeltic developing on a substrate of Non-IE indigenous P-less languages of Basque/Aquitanian/Vasconic types, the most archaic being the Q-Celtic, existing in regions farthest from Continental IE language influences, of Ireland/NW Great Britain, and Iberia. Where Gaulic and British regained P (or in some places never lost P) from other adjacent Continental IE language influences. I would not confuse later Iron Age diffusion of Halstatt/La Tène material culture (being very spotty and limited in the British Isles and especially limited in Ireland and Iberia) with contemporaneous, initial Celtic language spread into these regions. Aside from the Belgae under Roman pressure crossing the Channel into SW GB, there's no evidence of an Iron Age Celtic invasion/replacment into and across the British Isles/Ireland/Iberia. There is evidence of R1b (mainly R1b-L21), and Steppe admixture invasion and replacement in the British Isles and Ireland in the late Chacolithic/EBA, and there is evidence of R1b (mainly R1b-DF27, and R1b-L21 in NW Iberia), and Steppe admixture invasion but much more limited, regionalized replacement in Iberia in the late Chacolithic/EBA.
ReplyDeleteSo Hallstatt and La Tene are possibly non-Celtic? I can't say either way. But Western Europe is just such a massive area that it would seem to have to originate in one area and then spread to another.
DeleteI think the process that you describe makes a lot of sense, but I have doubts about the timing. The factor that favors an Iron Age dispersal of Celtic rather than a late Chacolithic/EBA era one, is that linguistically, the Celtic languages look to similar to each other to have that kind of time depth. The fact that there is a shift in material culture at the right time depth for the great similarities between the Celtic languages that are observed also corroborates this even though, by itself, it isn't ironclad evidence.
DeleteStill, there almost certainly must have been some sort of language shift in the late Chacolithic/EBA era, given the great, migration driven, ultimately steppe sourced population genetic shift that took place at that time. But, it is hard to know just what legacy that left linguistically since it is not attested in writing.
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DeleteI think it depends on what one means by Celtic. I think Gaulish represents Italo-Celtic IE dialects that likely arrived during the Chacolithic/EBA, and developed during BA-IA across Transalpine, continental, western Europe, including that spoken by the migrating Cisalpine Gauls and the Galatians into Asia Minor.
DeleteI think the Insular Celtic and Celtiberian languages (Italo-Celtic IE dialects that likely arrived during the Chacolithic/EBA, and developed during the BA-IA in situ in their respective geographical regions) existed on a continuum of more or less, adjacency to, contact with, and influence by Gaulish languages, up to and including near or total isolation from Gaulish languages since those Italo-Celtic IE dialects arrived, likely during the Chacolithic/EBA, for instance in Q-Celtic speaking Ireland and NW Iberia.
There's certainly no "Celtic people." The autosomal admixtures and the Y-haplogroups (R-L21 formed 4900 ybp, R-U152/S28 formed 4900 ybp, R-DF27/S250 formed 4500 ybp, and including pockets of Old Europe Y-haplogroup survival and cultural assimilation, e.g. https://www.eupedia.com/genetics/britain_ireland_dna.shtml#frequency; https://www.eupedia.com/genetics/spain_portugal_dna.shtml#frequency; https://www.eupedia.com/europe/benelux_france_dna_project.shtml#maps) are not uniform or absolutely conforming to geographies, or languages spoken.
Cheers!
"The swift Urnfielders seem plausibly porto-celtic, or at least they roasted the European landscape in advance of the swifter Iron Age Celts. I would assume that the Celtic spoken in the Islands today has a heritage in that epoch, maybe as late as the LeTene era, but probably around the time cremation becomes the fad."
ReplyDeleteI agree strongly with this statement. I am somewhat more agnostic than you regarding the language family of the language that Celtic replaced in this area.
I also think that it is possible that what looks like a branch-like language family within Celtic, could actually reflect a branch-like structure of substrate languages in the same language family that led to modest differences in how a singular superstrate pre-Celtic language (perhaps in the Urnfield culture) interacted with a more diverse substrate in parallel to produce the Celtic languages, which all adopted some shared features of the substrate language family, but differentiated due to subtle differences in the substrate language families and random chance. The rapid spread of Celtic relative to the rate of which the substrate languages may have evolved and differentiated makes this a somewhat plausible explanation for how the Celtic sublanguages differentiated from each other as rapidly as they did.
Q Celtic could have been spoken in the Atlantic Bronze Age culture. Maybe the p shift was a Halstat innovation that came with iron. Ireland was the last place to transition from bronze, so maybe this why it retained q celtic.
ReplyDelete