"Celt" Conjecture

[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"Outdated" means (according to dictionaries, I'm no native speaker) "old-fashioned" or "obsolete", so, at least in the way I put it, it's no matter of date (e.g. all materials published before 1980 are outdated), but a matter of perspective and methodology.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!