Celtic Found to Have Ancient Roots

NY Times ^ | July 1, 2003 | NICHOLAS WADE

[Pharmboy]

In November 1897, in a field near the village of Coligny in eastern France, a local inhabitant unearthed two strange objects.

One was an imposing statue of Mars, the Roman god of war. The other was an ancient bronze tablet, 5 feet wide and 3.5 feet high. It bore numerals in Roman but the words were in Gaulish, the extinct version of Celtic spoken by the inhabitants of France before the Roman conquest in the first century B.C.

The tablet, now known as the Coligny calendar, turned out to record the Celtic system of measuring time, as well as being one of the most important sources of Gaulish words.

Two researchers, Dr. Peter Forster of the University of Cambridge in England and Dr. Alfred Toth of the University of Zurich, have now used the calendar and other Celtic inscriptions to reconstruct the history of Celtic and its position in the Indo-European family of languages.

They say that Celtic became a distinct language and entered the British Isles much earlier than supposed.

Though the Gauls were strong enough to sack Rome in 390 B.C., eventually the empire struck back. The Romans defeated the Celts, both in France and in Britain, so decisively that Latin and its successor languages displaced Celtic over much of its former territory. In the British Isles, Celtic speakers survived in two main groups: the Goidelic branch of Celtic, which includes Irish and Scots Gaelic, and the Brythonic branch, formed of Welsh and Breton, a Celtic tongue carried to Brittany in France by emigrants from Cornwall.

Because languages change so fast, historical linguists distrust language trees that go back more than a few thousand years. Dr. Forster, a geneticist, has developed a new method for relating a group of languages, basing it on the tree-drawing techniques used to trace the evolutionary relationships among genes. His method works on just a handful of words, a fortunate circumstance since only some 30 Gaulish words have known counterparts in all the other languages under study.

Dr. Forster and his linguist colleague Dr. Toth have used the method to draw up a tree relating the various branches of Celtic to one another and to other Indo-European languages like English, French, Spanish, Latin and Greek. In an article in today's issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they say that soon after the ancestral Indo-European language arrived in Europe it split into different branches leading to Celtic, Latin, Greek and English.

Within Celtic, their tree shows that Gaulish — the continental version of the language — separated from its Goidelic and Brythonic cousins, much as might be expected from the facts of geography.

The researchers' method even dates the fork points in their language tree, although the dates have a wide range of possibility. The initial splitting of Indo-European in Europe occurred around 8100 B.C., give or take 1,900 years, and the divergence between the continental and British versions of Gaelic took place in 3200 B.C., plus or minus 1,500 years, they calculate.

These dates are much earlier than previously estimated. "The traditional date of the Indo-European family has been 4000 BC for some time," Dr. Merritt Ruhlen of Stanford University said. Dr. Ruhlen said the new method "seems pretty reasonable" and should be useful in tracing back the earlier history of the Indo-European language.

Specialists have long debated which country was the homeland of the Indo-Europeans and whether their language was spread by conquest or because its speakers were the first farmers whose methods and tongue were adopted by other populations. The second theory, that of spread by agriculture, has been advocated by Dr. Colin Renfrew, a Cambridge archaeologist.

Dr. Forster, who works in Dr. Renfrew's institute, said in an interview that the suggested date 8100 B.C. for the arrival of Indo-European in Europe "does seem to vindicate Renfrew's archaeological idea that the Indo-European languages were spread by farmers."

Agriculture started to arrive in Europe from the Near East around 6000 B.C., much earlier than the traditional date proposed by linguists for the spread of Indo-European. This timing would fit with the lower end of Dr. Forster's range of dates.

Dr. Forster said that his estimated date of 3200 B.C. for the arrival of Celtic speakers in England and Ireland was also much earlier than the usual date, 600 B.C., posited on the basis of archaeological evidence.

Dr. Forster said his method of comparing groups of languages was unfamiliar to historical linguists, many of whom study how words in a single language have changed over time. Asked what linguists thought of his method he said: "To be honest, they don't understand it, most of them. They don't even know what I'm talking about."

The method has two parts. One is to draw a tree on the basis of carefully chosen words; the second is to date the splits in the tree by calibrating them with known historical events. This is similar to the way geneticists date their evolutionary trees by tying one or more branch points to known dates from the fossil record.

Dr. April McMahon, a linguist at the University of Sheffield in England, said that Dr. Forster's method "seems to me to be a good start" and that it was reasonable to base a language family tree on just a handful of well-chosen words. She had less confidence in the dating method, she said, because language changes in an irregular way based on social factors like the size of the speaker's group and its degree of contact with others.

Geneticists often assume that the rate of mutation will average out over time, so that if one or two branch points in a tree can be dated by fossil evidence, the timing of the other branch points can be inferred.

Dr. Forster says he assumes that the rate of language change can also be averaged over time. But Dr. McMahon says she thinks that historical time, being much shorter than evolutionary time, is less friendly to averaging and that linguists should not even try, at least yet, to put dates on language trees.

[ZULU]

"Furthermore, the migration of the Celts from Scythia through the Mediterranean, Egypt, Rome (where their presence is documented) through to Galicia in Spain and on to Ireland is pretty compelling."

Although the Indo-Europeans may have originated in eastern Europe, all evidence indicates the Celts originated in central Europe, in what is now Austria and neighboring areas. They then spread south into north Italy (Cisapline Gaul, west into Switzerland and Gaul, southwest into northern Spain (the Celt-Iberians) and across the English Channel or Bay of Biscay into the British Isles. Another group spread south and east into Anatolia (see the Galatians in the Bible) and even as far as Egypt where they served as mercenaries.

From what I have read, the Celtic and Italic languages are actually closest to each other, both are closer to Tocharian, and Germaic is closer to them than it is to the Balto-Slavic languages.

[ZULU]

What actually happened is that Indo-European split into a number of subbranches. One of these gave rise to the Italic Languages, another to the Celtic, another to the Germanic, another to ancient Greek and another to Tocharian.

The Italic Languages consisted of languages like Osco-Umbrian, Sicanian, etc. and were eventually entirely replace by Latin. Latin then evolved into the modern Romance Languages. Early Germanic split into Old Norse or North Germanic which became Icelandic, Norweigan, Swedish, Faroese, and Danish, East Germanic or Gothic (extinct) and West Germaic which comprised Frisian, Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Franconian, and Old High German among many others).
Celtic gave rise to the various languages mentioned above.

Somehow a subgroup called Tocharian spread into Central Asia and evolved into two separate languages, Tocharian A and Tocharian B and died out by the end of the first millenium as a spoken language.

[Sabertooth]

Though the Gauls were strong enough to sack Rome in 390 B.C

Oh.

Dr. Forster said that his estimated date of 3200 B.C. for the arrival of Celtic speakers in England and Ireland was also much earlier than the usual date, 600 B.C., posited on the basis of archaeological evidence.

Dr. Forster said his method of comparing groups of languages was unfamiliar to historical linguists, many of whom study how words in a single language have changed over time. Asked what linguists thought of his method he said: "To be honest, they don't understand it, most of them. They don't even know what I'm talking about."

Ah.

"It's only a matter of time," ping.

[ClearCase_guy]

I think the journalist had an imprecise grasp of language classifications. Indo-European is a "Language Family". It is broken down into 12 "Branches". Of those 12, four are: Celtic, Latin, Hellenic (Greek), and Germanic. The Germanic branch is then broken down into "Languages", one of which is English.

Saying that Indo-European led to Celtic, Latin, Greek, and English is not wrong, but it's sloppy and (I feel) a bit misleading -- since it lumps English in with Language Branches and makes English seem a bit more significant than it is (some the standpoint of linguistic history/genealogy).

It's also incomplete, since, as you point out, there are many other branches and languages that are not mentioned at all. Again, it is not "wrong" to provide an incomplete list of what Indo-European led to, but it is perhaps a bit misleading.

[ZULU]

Thats news to me. Where did they come from? The only independent Celtic tribes at that time I know of were living in Ireland and northern Scotland, and the Swabians came from western Germany.

[ZULU]

Atavism is its own reward! Carry on!

[VadeRetro]

Though the Gauls were strong enough to sack Rome in 390 B.C.

Actually, the cisalpine ("this side of the Alps") Gauls did sack Rome early on, very temporarily reversing the Roman ascendancy. A citadel in the center of town held out, but most soldiers and citizens fled. Many houses were looted.

It proved a temporary hiccup.

[wideawake]

the reason the greeks still speak greek is that they never sacked rome. The Celts and the Carthaginians did and the former were decimated and the latters were "delenda est".

The Celts sacked Rome in 295 BC. Yet they retained their language until they were conquered by the Franks 800 years later.

The Carthaginians never sacked Rome - though Hannibal certainly tried very hard. The Carthaginian language (Punic) was eliminated in Africa by eliminating its speakers through genocide (and a well-deserved genocide it was), not by a large pool of subjects learning the language of their conquerors.

Punic was still spoken in the Near East but was gradually replaced by Aramaic.

[blam]

"From what I have read, the Celtic and Italic languages are actually closest to each other, both are closer to Tocharian, and Germaic is closer to them than it is to the Balto-Slavic languages. "

The ancestors of the 4,000 year old Caucasian mummies found in the Chinese desert spoke/wrote Tocharian A & B.

[Cacique]

bump for later

[ZULU]

I agree with you. Theodoric wanted to resuscitate the Roman Empire. The fact that his people were Arian Christians and the native Italians were Orthodox western Christians frustrated his efforts, as did the machinations of Justinian which destroyed his successor.

The "Dark Ages" were dark realtive to the depth of our knowledge of them. The Goths, etc, were frequently highly Romanized by that time as the Romans had become Germanicized. What many scholars think really created the collapse of western civilization was the eruption of Isalm and the closing of sea routes between western Europe and Byzantium by Islamic expansion into Iberia, Sicily, southern Italy and the Mediterranean area.

Most of the barbarian invaders were seeking incorporation into the empire, not the destruction of the empire. Charlemagne himself had himself crowned a Roman Emperor.

As for the civlization of the Turks, I suggest you read about the sack of Constantinople. Murder, rape, desecration of religious places and mass enslavement of the population was the outcome.

[wardaddy]

Are those the Tarim Basin remains where Caucazoids are still found?

[wideawake]

Read the posts carefully. You're putting words in my mouth.

I never mentioned "independent Celtic tribes" from Scotland or Ireland - I mentioned the Celtic people known as Gauls, who collaborated with the Swabian invasion of Cisalpine Gaul.

My original post said that the Gauls reconquered some territory from the Romans - not that tribes from Ireland or Scotland invaded Roman territory.

[Conspiracy Guy]

What can I say? It's a genetic thing.

[Sabertooth]

Interesting. How early?

[muawiyah]

Once again, the most ancient place names along the Danube are Celtic. The culture originated in Central Europe and moved down the Danube river to the Black Sea. That's how they ended up at Illium ("Troy").

The Milesians are probably the sea-faring Celts who traded all around the Mediterranean for many centuries. By the time of the Punic Wars the Celts in what are now North Africa, Spain and France were allied with the Cartheginians.

Upon the defeat of Carthage the sea-faring Celts switched their sympathies to Rome. It remained for Julius Caesar to change the minds of those who lived inland. Obviously the Romans knew the difference since they left the sea-faring guys alone with their Irish possessions although Rome did rebuild the Galician lighthouse at Brigantia.

[ZULU]

Some of those branches are supposedly more closely related. Linguists once distinguished between the Satem and Centum languages. I don't know if they still do, but the Germanic, Italic, Celtic, Greek (Hellenic) and Tocharian languages appear to fomr one sub family while the Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages form another and the Anatolic languages another still.

Journalist unfortunately possess a superficial grasp of anything they choose to review, be it in the scientific or the political realm. Unfortunately, it easier to point out their shortcomings in the scientific areas.

[muawiyah]

Yes, all that and then some, but it could have been much, much worse.

[blam]

Italian Archaeologist: Anatolia - Home To First Civilization On Earth

[ZULU]

A good book on that subject is "The Mystery of the Sesert Mummies" or something like that. I think Discovery or the Hsitory Channel had a number of specials on these people. SOme of them had red or blonde hair and were over 6 feet tall and wore plaid garments woven in an ancient western European manner.