Re: Celtic, semitic, etc.

At 22:15 27.4.2000 +0100, Raymond Brown wrote:
>I have seen it argued that one reason
>Gaul took to speaking Latin so rapidly after Caesar's conquest was that
>Gaulish was similar enough to Latin to make it relatively easy for traders,
>merchants etc. to adapt.  My own feeling has been that those so-called
>"Celtic" features of the modern languages were strictly insular
>developments.
Yes, the language of continental Celtic inscriptions is so close to Greek
and Latin, and especially early Latin -- or rather still as close to
(western) Proto-Indo-European -- that someone who has studied the
historical/dialectal phonology and grammar of these languages seldom has a
problem reading them.

Do a web-search on the word Larzac, and you shall hopefully still find the
text of one such inscription found in a place of that name.

>Yet there were tribal grouping in Britain that existed also on the
>continent; the Parisii, e.g. lived in the area where Paris (named from
>them) now stands and in what is now eastern Yorkshire in england; the
>Belgae living roughly in the area of modern Belgium and in southern Britain
>with its 'ciuitas', Venta Belgarum, on the site of the modern Winchester.
It has been argued that this coincidence of "tribal" names was more due to
cultic practice and structure than to ethnic identity.




/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson
mailto:bpj@netg.se
mailto:melroch@my-deja.com
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