More on the Celts

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>From John Davies (2000), "The Celts."

 

"thus. although there is a widespread recognition that the Hallstatt

archeolgoical zone is the heartland of a distinct Celtic material

cutlure, answers to the more general questions concerning the orings

of the Celts are in the state of flux. As has already been noted the

traditional view that the Celtic language or languages were spread

westwards by invaders in the centuries after 700 BC has largely been

set aside. Invasionism originally suspect on archeological grounds-

has been further weakened by studies comparing the genes of the

present people of wester Europe with those of the region's inhabitants

thoudsands of years ago. In view of the way in which simplistic

accounts of the prehistoric linguistic origins were used in the

twentieth centuries to underpind various racial theories, scholars are

understandably reluctant to place too much emphasis on biological

archeology (p. 32)."

 

"By the 1980s even the notion that the spread of the Beaker culture

represented a migration was under attack. The only undubitable major

migratory movement in European pre history, it was argued, was that

associated with the spread of agriculture which began in the seventh

millenniumm BC (p.29)."

 

"if undiffentiated Indo-European had spread throughout Europe between

the seventh and fourth millenia BC, IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO SEEK

LOCALIZED CRADLE FOF THE CELTIC LANGUAGE (p. 29)," emphasis mine.

 

kelkar: Therefore, invasion has been tossed out in the first para,

migration in the second, and the very concept of a homeland in the

third! So what do we have left?

 

If this is the situation in just one sub family of a larger family,

and what we call "India" today has SIX of these large families, where

does that leave the linguistic community? If they want to have their

way by constructing proto languages then they MUST make the

theoretical and untestable assumption that the PIE was spoken all over

the IE world all at once, thus eliminating the need to explain

movements with the helps of linguistcs alone.

 

kelkar