Celt - No such thing !!!

[KaesoOtacillianus]

He made that assertion some years ago that the idea of 'celt' was invented in the 17th century, and never used in the ancient world

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quorum unum incolunt Belgae, alii Aquitanii, terti ei qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli apellantur....
(All [of] Gaul is divided into three parts, in one of which live the Belgians, another the Aquitanians, the third called by their own language "Celts", [but] by ours are called "Gauls"....) De Bello Gallico, Julius Caesar, who had first hand contact with these people. (Written from school memorization, could be spelling errors in the Latin.)

Caesar believed that the Gauls called themselves "Celts". I guess I'd pick his testimony over Simon James, but that's just me.

As far as languages are concerned, my limited knowledge agrees with some of the "not the same language, but perhaps the same linguistic family" statements above. Portugese (Lusitanian + Latin) is not the same as Spanish (Celtiberian + Latin and Iberian + Latin, hence Castillian and Aragonian), French (Gaulic + Latin) are all examples of "Celtic root languages", their differences preserved by the common Latin connection. A Lusitanian would not have been able to converse directly with a Northern Gaul, unless the one knew the other's language, then, or spoke some common language. Am I thinking correctly?

Since anal retentiveness has been brought into discussion, here is the Caesarian text:

Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur. hi omnes lingua, institutis, legibus inter se differunt.

As for Portuguese being different from Spanish because of the Celtic substratum, I believe this is somewhat far fetched. The differences in terms of grammatical structure between the two modern languages are minimal. The most obvious are related to pronunciation, and these only evolved in the Middle Ages.

The linguistic unity of Latin over the entire space of the Roman empire is attested by the documents of Vulgar Latin (which cannot be suspected of learned artificiality), and this means the importance of Celtic in determining the course of future Romance languages is not decisive.[/quote]