"Celt" Conjecture

[Phaichtos]

I was thinking of trying to dive in here to this debate since it is sort of one of my areas of research interest, but seeing as I'm new here I'm not sure getting into a heated argument is a good way to get the ball rolling... so maybe I'll "wade" in :mrgreen:

What I will suggest is that even if *kelt- is a reliable PIE root in the Celtic languages (my magic 8 ball says "all signs point to yes"), that does not necessarily mean it was any kind of ethnonym for the entire spectrum of peoples we now consider to be "Celts". In fact I would be careful about applying any such notion of cultural connectedness to any pre-modern (indeed, largely pre-literate) peoples. It is as likely as not that there was a whole spectrum of different "cultures" who fall into our grouping of "Celts", who if you had asked members of each tribe 2000 years ago, would claim to be entirely distinct from each other.

[cagwinn]

I was thinking of trying to dive in here to this debate since it is sort of one of my areas of research interest, but seeing as I'm new here I'm not sure getting into a heated argument is a good way to get the ball rolling... so maybe I'll "wade" in :mrgreen:

What I will suggest is that even if *kelt- is a reliable PIE root in the Celtic languages (my magic 8 ball says "all signs point to yes"), that does not necessarily mean it was any kind of ethnonym for the entire spectrum of peoples we now consider to be "Celts".

Just to clarify, that is absolutely not what I am suggesting. I think, as an ethnic name, it was restricted to parts of Gaul and Iberia.

[Phaichtos]

Just to clarify, that is absolutely not what I am suggesting. I think, as an ethnic name, it was restricted to parts of Gaul and Iberia.

Okay, fair enough! An argument I might buy, on the other hand, and what you might be suggesting, is that what was originally perhaps an ethnic name here and there (or even, indeed, a common enough personal name or even phrase) was extended by outsiders (Greeks and Romans) to peoples who may have bore some passing similarity to each other. This is documented fairly often in the later context of European expansion to other parts of the world.

[cagwinn]

Okay, fair enough! An argument I might buy, on the other hand, and what you might be suggesting, is that what was originally perhaps an ethnic name here and there (or even, indeed, a common enough personal name or even phrase) was extended by outsiders (Greeks and Romans) to peoples who may have bore some passing similarity to each other. This is documented fairly often in the later context of European expansion to other parts of the world.

Sure - this is pretty much how Strabo describes the situation in his Geography.

[Rumo]

:roll: I can't believe I am having this argument. "Greeks" in English is a loanword from Latin Graeci, which is itself derived from Greek ??????? (Graikoi), the name of the Greek colonists from Graia who settled in Italy. Thus, just as "Celt"/Celtus/Keltos is ultimately derived from an ethnic/tribal name native to Gaul and Spain, "Greek"/Graecus/Graikos is derived from an ethnic/tribal name native to western Greece.

You miss the point. In English "it is/sounds Greek to me" refers to something else. As such, the word "Greek" can be used in English with no relation whatsoever with real Greek language or ethnicity.
Besides what I've already said, as you point out, this word is not even borrowed directly from Greek.

So Caesar (and any other Latin speaker) could use the word "Celt" (and derivatives) without learning it from Celts, without even referring to real Celts.

You keep saying this, but you offer zero evidence to support it.

I don't have to. Let's draw a chronology. This word shows up
- first at some Greek authors
- then at some Latin authors
- and at last in some Roman inscriptions, sometimes referring to people speaking what we call today a Celtic language

The attestations suggest the Romans learned it from the Greeks. If you prefer extreme skepticism, then fine, we don't know where the Romans learned this name. Maybe they heard it from Carthaginians.
I thought that if I'm demolishing a theory it would be nice to put something in place. You don't want it, I don't really mind.

Well in a way, yes, since the author here translates keltis as "stele" by way of "raised up thing", from the Proto-Indo-European root *kel- "to tower/raise up" (which gives us English "hill"); it has been proposed that as an ethnic name. *Keltoi meant something like "Lofty (Ones)" (compare Germanic Burgundi).

Sorry, for me this is outdated scholarship. PIE is a reconstruction. It cannot be really used as a solid argument for anything. And *kel- is a monosyllabic root which can be used to support any kind of speculation.

I already gave you another one. There is also the"Celtica" graffito from Roanne (where other short Gaulish inscriptions have been found) listed in Recueil des Inscriptions Gauloises II.2, L-81a.

It's up to you to present inscriptions if they really support the case. It's hard for me to track something which is just "inscribed on a stone" even if you add Peñalba. You may refer to this. Or maybe to some short inscriptions from Clunia (Peñalba de Castro) - see my previous links for that.

According to RIG, L-81a is dated vers 40-30 avant J.-C. (after the Roman conquest). As for the text, mais la lecture est extrêmement douteuse. If even the editors of L-81a find that reading extremely doubtful, I rest my case.

And yet "slav" is a Slavic root word common to all the Slavic languages and commonly found in Slavic personal and tribal names - JUST LIKE "CELT". What is the problem here, people?

I'm glad you notice that, because mutatis mutandis what I'll be saying of the Slavs goes for the Celts.
Slavs are first attested in Roman sources in 6th century CE, under names like Sclaveni and Sclavi. Their leaders have names with un-Slavic sonority: Musokius, Peiragastus, Ardagastus, Dauritas, etc. Of one of them, Samo (7th century), we are even told he was a Frankish merchant.
Centuries pass, Slavs become Christians, they learn to read and write in Latin and Greek, and guess what? The -slav names start to pop up (maybe I'm missing some earlier mentions, but for now I can think of the Croatian duke Tomislav and the Rus prince Sviatoslav - both in the 10th century). It is only in the Russian Primary Chronicle (12th century) when we get the first unequivocal testimony of Slavs calling themselves Slavs when addressing a Slavic audience.

So if we leave aside the preconception that before everything there was a Slavic "proto-nation", isn't it likely that Slav comes from Sclav/Sclavene and not vice-versa? That it was the Roman label, a Roman construct, which only after a while and a substantial interaction between the two worlds, it became part of the medieval and then modern ethnic identity of those "Slavic nations?

[M. Demetrius]

Maybe they heard it from Carthaginians

...or from the Celts themselves?

[cagwinn]

You miss the point. In English "it is/sounds Greek to me" refers to something else. As such, the word "Greek" can be used in English with no relation whatsoever with real Greek language or ethnicity.

LOL - I am a native English speaker - you don't have to explain my own language to me.

Besides what I've already said, as you point out, this word is not even borrowed directly from Greek.

Sigh. It still comes ultimately from a Greek ethnic name.

Let's draw a chronology. This word shows up
- first at some Greek authors
- then at some Latin authors
- and at last in some Roman inscriptions, sometimes referring to people speaking what we call today a Celtic language

The attestations suggest the Romans learned it from the Greeks. If you prefer extreme skepticism, then fine, we don't know where the Romans learned this name. Maybe they heard it from Carthaginians.
I thought that if I'm demolishing a theory it would be nice to put something in place. You don't want it, I don't really mind.

The simplest and best explanation is that the Greeks learned it from people who called themselves Keltoi or Keltikoi. That these people were still employing this ethnic name centuries later is confirmed for us by Caesar, et al., and the numerous onomastic examples that I have cited.

Sorry, for me this is outdated scholarship. PIE is a reconstruction. It cannot be really used as a solid argument for anything. And *kel- is a monosyllabic root which can be used to support any kind of speculation.

Outdated scholarship?? LOL - what would be "current scholarship - give me a date. I am glad to hear that the entire field of Celtic historical linguistics can be demolished because it relies on monosyllabic Proto-Indo-European roots!!

It's up to you to present inscriptions if they really support the case. It's hard for me to track something which is just "inscribed on a stone" even if you add Peñalba. You may refer to this. Or maybe to some short inscriptions from Clunia (Peñalba de Castro) - see my previous links for that.

Peñalba de Villastar. See: Luciano Perez Vilatela, "Inscripciones celtibericas ineditas de Penalba", in "La Hispania prerromana", Universidad de Salamanca, 1996, pp. 256-257.

According to RIG, L-81a is dated vers 40-30 avant J.-C. (after the Roman conquest). As for the text, mais la lecture est extrêmement douteuse. If even the editors of L-81a find that reading extremely doubtful, I rest my case.

I have a picture of the inscription right here in my hands - it certainly looks like CELTICA to me. The people in this region were still speaking Gaulish at this time, by the way.

I'm glad you notice that, because mutatis mutandis what I'll be saying of the Slavs goes for the Celts.

The point remains, "Slav", no matter how it came to be used as an ethnic name, is linguistically a SLAVIC word, just as "Celt" is CELTIC word.

[Conal]

Maybe they heard it from Carthaginians

...or from the Celts themselves?

The most likely explanation but the least proveable

[Rumo]

Outdated scholarship?? LOL - what would be "current scholarship - give me a date. I am glad to hear that the entire field of Celtic historical linguistics can be demolished because it relies on monosyllabic Proto-Indo-European roots!!

Since my spare time is fragmented, the only I way I can reply in a timely manner is to fragment my answers as well.

"Outdated" means (according to dictionaries, I'm no native speaker) "old-fashioned" or "obsolete", so, at least in the way I put it, it's no matter of date (e.g. all materials published before 1980 are outdated), but a matter of perspective and methodology. In many fields actually there's a considerable amount of inertia, so seeking for such moments in time would be a fruitless exercise anyway.

In this particular case it's about inferring pre-historic realities from proto-language reconstructions, a method which was criticized over and over. Here's one of the numerous recent positions, Kathrin S. Krell's criticism of Gimbutas' theory in Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (eds.), Archaeology and Language, vol. II (1998):

• A further problem with [...] literal use of the proto-vocabulary is that it leaves no room for possible, and even probable, but unrecoverable semantic shifts. In fact, any semantic content (i.e. meaning) which may be associated with a phonologically reconstructed form represents no more than an educated guess on the part of linguists. We simply cannot be certain that PIE *p?-ro originally referred to the plant we now call spelt

In a slightly different wording and with different emphases, the problem is

• the virtual impossibility of precisely identifying the original referent of a reconstructed lexical item. Even an approximate reconstruction of its semantic content may be very difficult. It is imperative, in working on the problem of Indo-European origins, that the contents of the PIE lexicon not be treated too literally. Historical linguistics has shown numerous examples of how dramatically the meaning of a given word can shift in the course of a few centuries [my favourite example is nice], let alone several millennia. Any PIE form may have had different meanings at different points in time within the time-frame posited for the PIE language.

At the end of argument, the conclusion is predictable:

• The old, pliable crutch of linguistic palaeontology should certainly be abandoned, at least until the theoretical uses and limitations of the PIE lexicon have been more precisely defined.

That "lofty man" named *kel-t- falls in this array of speculative reconstructions which needs to be abandoned. No evidence, no possible evidence, it is just a dead end, a convenient assumption (convenient because it is constructed to support a position in the first place).

[Conal]

In a slightly different wording and with different emphases, the problem is

• the virtual impossibility of precisely identifying the original referent of a reconstructed lexical item. Even an approximate reconstruction of its semantic content may be very difficult. It is imperative, in working on the problem of Indo-European origins, that the contents of the PIE lexicon not be treated too literally. Historical linguistics has shown numerous examples of how dramatically the meaning of a given word can shift in the course of a few centuries [my favourite example is nice], let alone several millennia. Any PIE form may have had different meanings at different points in time within the time-frame posited for the PIE language.

And mine is funk

That "lofty man" named *kel-t- falls in this array of speculative reconstructions which needs to be abandoned. No evidence, no possible evidence, it is just a dead end, a convenient assumption (convenient because it is constructed to support a position in the first place).

Where you have a word alone you may have an arguement but wher you have a context maybe not;

Massilia ; The Greeks met a people they termed ??????. This used as a term to encompass them as a group. How big a group we can only pseculate.

Julius Ceasar; Said a group in the same area called themselves Celtae.

I would think it safe to assume that the meaning of Celts had not changed.

You are falling too far into the trap that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

[cagwinn]

Since my spare time is fragmented

Really? One would never guessed this to be true.

"Outdated" means (according to dictionaries, I'm no native speaker) "old-fashioned" or "obsolete", so, at least in the way I put it, it's no matter of date (e.g. all materials published before 1980 are outdated), but a matter of perspective and methodology. In many fields actually there's a considerable amount of inertia, so seeking for such moments in time would be a fruitless exercise anyway.

In this particular case it's about inferring pre-historic realities from proto-language reconstructions, a method which was criticized over and over. Here's one of the numerous recent positions, Kathrin S. Krell's criticism of Gimbutas' theory in Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs (eds.), Archaeology and Language, vol. II (1998):

• A further problem with [...] literal use of the proto-vocabulary is that it leaves no room for possible, and even probable, but unrecoverable semantic shifts. In fact, any semantic content (i.e. meaning) which may be associated with a phonologically reconstructed form represents no more than an educated guess on the part of linguists. We simply cannot be certain that PIE *p?-ro originally referred to the plant we now call spelt

In a slightly different wording and with different emphases, the problem is

• the virtual impossibility of precisely identifying the original referent of a reconstructed lexical item. Even an approximate reconstruction of its semantic content may be very difficult. It is imperative, in working on the problem of Indo-European origins, that the contents of the PIE lexicon not be treated too literally. Historical linguistics has shown numerous examples of how dramatically the meaning of a given word can shift in the course of a few centuries [my favourite example is nice], let alone several millennia. Any PIE form may have had different meanings at different points in time within the time-frame posited for the PIE language.

At the end of argument, the conclusion is predictable:

• The old, pliable crutch of linguistic palaeontology should certainly be abandoned, at least until the theoretical uses and limitations of the PIE lexicon have been more precisely defined.

That "lofty man" named *kel-t- falls in this array of speculative reconstructions which needs to be abandoned. No evidence, no possible evidence, it is just a dead end, a convenient assumption (convenient because it is constructed to support a position in the first place).

Sigh...and yet the fields of Celtic and Proto-Indo-European historical linguistics carry on unabated....to think of all the years wasted (not to mention the ink!) by these poor, befuddled ""scientists" on this lunacy!

[Alanus]

Personal names attested (in some cases multiple times) in inscriptions: Celtillus, Celtilla, Celta, Celtus, Celt?, Celtea, Celtiatis, Celtiatus, Celtinus, Celtitanus, Celtis, Celtilia, Celtius, Celticus, Cetligun, Conceltus (meaning "Your Fellow Celt"), Arceltus (meaning "Great Celt"). The vast majority of these are from Gaul and Iberia (where these names were particularly popular).

What names I can trace from this list they show up in inscriptions dated after the Roman conquest (with recognizable Latin morphology and even derivation, e.g. Celticus), therefore this onomastic sample may be entirely irrelevant to pre-Roman identities.

Names such as these did appear prior to the Roman conquest. We find a long list of personal names in the Thesaurus Linguae Gallicae, compiled by Pierre-Henri Billy, Olms-Weidman, 1993, in which many derive from older Greek sources.

It's my understanding that the major brunt of this thread revolves around the assumption that Caesar lied in claiming the Gauls called themeselves "Celts," either individually with personal names or collectively. At the time the BG was published Caesar had a slew of enemies in Rome itself, and certainly he would have been called to task on this point and many others, simply as an attempt to discredit his up-and-coming rise to power. What we get for critical rebuttal is silence.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not Will Durant, a Caesar-admirer. What Caesar did in Gaul was deplorable; and in the substrata of his glories we discover that his command was responsible for the deaths of 330, 000 German men, women, and children in a single day. The entire nobility of the Veneti had their throat cut. The defenders of Uxellodumun had their right hands chopped off. And everything living, from babies to dogs, was killed in the massacre of the Bituriges. The war and its aftermath accounted for some 2 million Gallic lives, including the terrible death of a starved Vercingetorix at the base of the Fora. Caesar was a deplorable human being, BUT he was not a blatant liar.

Today, people in varying countries consider themselves Celts-- the Irish, the Scottish, the Welsh, the Bretons, and maybe even some Spaniards-- and it seems ludicrous that they are a deluded and post-Caesarian product of a less than authentic tradition. To me, there is no "Celtic Conjecture." And obviously, I stand not alone. :roll:

[Rumo]

Sigh...and yet the fields of Celtic and Proto-Indo-European historical linguistics carry on unabated....to think of all the years wasted (not to mention the ink!) by these poor, befuddled ""scientists" on this lunacy!

You got it wrong. I quoted from a debate between PIE historical linguists. If you believe they "carry on unabated" there is much which you don't know.
Much effort was wasted in wishful thinking indeed. That is one of the several causes for that inertia.

Is there any evidence 'Celt' is inherited from PIE? No, none.
Is there any evidence 'Celt' is inherited from a PIE root *kel-t- ? No, none.
Is there any evidence what was the meaning of the PIE *kel-? No, none. Can we even be sure a *kel- root ever existed? No. It's just a theoretical prediction.
Is there any evidence of an IE speaking population in, say, 7th century BCE calling themselves Celts? No, none. Not even Caesar claims that.
Is there any reason to believe 'Celt' is not borrowed from a distinct, non-Celtic IE language or even non-IE language (which can be extinct and we'll never be aware of its existence)? No.

Will ever some evidence be found for any of the above? Most probably not. Maintaining such beliefs has therefore nothing to do with science.

The simplest and best explanation is that the Greeks learned it from people who called themselves Keltoi or Keltikoi. That these people were still employing this ethnic name centuries later is confirmed for us by Caesar, et al., and the numerous onomastic examples that I have cited.

Not really.

Apparently many on this thread have not read Strabo. I mentioned earlier how Strabo's position is opposite to Caesar's, and also referred to several passages in which Strabo says the name 'Celt' was actually given by others. I did not insist on the point, but since several of you choose to believe Caesar ad litteram and at the same time claim Greeks learned the word 'Celt' from actual Celts, I think we should read Strabo, 1.2.27:

• I maintain, for example, that in accordance with the opinion of the ancient Greeks — just as they embraced the inhabitants of the known countries of the north under the single designation "Scythians" (or "Nomads" to use Homer's term) and just as later, when the inhabitants of the west also were discovered, they were called "Celts" and "Iberians," or by the compound words "Celtiberians" and "Celtiscythians," the several peoples being classed under one name through ignorance of the facts — I maintain, I say, that just so, in accordance with the opinion of the ancient Greeks, all the countries in the south which lie on Oceanus were called "Ethiopia."

None of the onomastic examples (all from Roman times) can confirm they called themselves Celts, so we're left with Caesar's claim which applies to Gaul only.

The point remains, "Slav", no matter how it came to be used as an ethnic name, is linguistically a SLAVIC word, just as "Celt" is CELTIC word.

Untrue. 'Slav' is an English word, as well as it is a word in many other languages.

The first language where we have it attested is Greek, in 6th century CE: ?????????. However there's no evidence that those Sclavini were Slavic speakers (even though it's possible that some of them were). As I pointed out already, their leaders do not seem to have Slavic names.

In Slavic languages there's a homonymous word: 'slava' = fame, glory (which means, by the way, that some -slav- names may be related to that, and not to their alleged group identity). Some scholars bound the 'slav' ethnonym to 'slovo' = word, that is they defined themselves as those who can speak intelligibly (see the Greek definition of themselves vs barbarians), which is a likely scenario in the case of Slovenians or Slovaks. Nevertheless there's no evidence that Sklavinoi is a Greek rendering of 'Sloveni'.

Sigh. It still comes ultimately from a Greek ethnic name.

Not necessarily.

There are several theories to explain Graikoi, I'll mention two of them:

- Graikoi as inhabitants of Graia, a settlement or a region in Boeotia (for identification see M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielsen (eds.), An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, at page 434).
- Aristotle in Meteorologica wrote of the three names the Greeks had in Epirus (Dodona): Selloi, Graikoi and at last, Hellenes. Scholars like Hammond prefer to trust this account and connect it to a Greek origin in Epirus. At the same time, ancient Epirus was inhabited by other populations, as well (Illyrian tribes, for example), so we can't be sure in this scenario the name is of Greek origin. Nevertheless this myth shows how names can change, unlike in the story of those 'lofty men'.

However your objections (with Greeks, Slavs) do not really hold. The origin of an ethnic name is not always in the languages spoken by that ethnic group.

The name of the Russians is arguably not Slavic. The name of the Bulgarians is not Slavic, and probably not even Indo-European (the Bulgars were some steppe - probably Turkic speaking - tribes). The French speak a Romance language, the Franks didn't (at least not initially). The name of the Gypsies (speaking Indic languages) comes from the name of Egyptians, which we first have it attested in Greek. Probably we have it also in Linear B. Then is it a Minoan name? A genuine Egyptian one (related to Ptah)?

[cagwinn]

Well, one of the moderators has asked me to abandon this debate and my posts are being censored, anyway, so I have to bow out of this thread. I believe that all of the relevant facts have been laid out in support of my original contention that certain peoples in Gaul and Spain did style themselves as "Celts" (*Celti, *Celtas, or *Celtes in Gaulish; Hellenized nad Latinized as Keltoi and Celtae, respectively) in Caesar's time and that the most likely etymology for the name is a native Celtic one.

[M. Demetrius]

Fruit PIE or meat PIE? :roll: :wink: :lol: