Re: CHAT: The etymology of (King) Arthur (was Re: CHAT: reign names)

Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:

> On Tuesday, September 21, 2004, at 12:32 , John Cowan wrote:
>
> > Wesley Parish scripsit:
> >
> >> Future generations of historians will say there was an Anglo-German
> >> Queen with the Corgi as her standard,
>
> _Anglo_? On her dad's side she was of the family Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (fairly
> Germanic sounding!).
If memory serves, the German is _Sachsen_-Coburg-Gotha, which is even more
neato.

> I still find it noteworthy that no ancient author ever referred to the
> inhabitants of Britain or Ireland as Celts, yet they knew Celts on the
> continent.
>
> Far too many assumptions are made IMHO about early Britain.
[snip]

I might be uncharacteristically uninfected by the whole ol' "Celtic Myth" for a
young westerner who spent much of his teens plowing thru Fantasy novels, but
when I hear someone question whether the ancient inhabitants of the British
Isles were "Celts", my immediate interpretation is linguistic - I take it as
questioning whether their languages belong to the same branch of IE as do the
continental Celtic languages (Gaulish and friends). Now, given the arguments
you put forth, it seems pretty clear you're rather addressing a question of
what might be called ethnic identity.

What I'm getting at is that this kind of question may be more fruitfully
discussed if it's clear at the outset if we by terms such as "Celts" refers to
a linguistic, cultural, racial or other grouping.

                                                          Andreas

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