Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[Alanus]

Hello, Cagwinn

This whole notion that there was a close linguistic connection between Northeastern Iranian languages (Alanic, Sarmatian, et al) or Tocharian (the language that was likely spoken by the Indo-European people of Western China who produced those fantastic mummies) and Celtic is simply false...

Thanks for that. However, I think we know that Northeastern Iranian-- used by the Saka, Massagetae, Alans-- was not closely related to Celtic. I am an old fart, not a linguist, and made the brash claim that Tocharian had affinities with Celtic... which it does in some ways. Aside from language, if the Urumchi mummies were Tocharian then they had some cultural similarities with the Celts, particularly their weaving, actually using the identical type of loom.

At best, the Tocharian languages show some shared IE archaisms with Celtic, mainly grammatical in nature (languages on the periphery of the geographic spread of a language family often do show shared archaisms that are not present in the center of the spread), but they do not share much in the way of vocabulary (according to latest research, Tocharian is much closer to and shares most of its core vocabulary with Greek, Armenian, Balto-Slavic and Germanic, which makes sense, as it is believed that the Tocharians' ultimate roots lie in Eastern Europe).

Also, we should remember that Celtic roots also lie in Eastern Europe.

A good summary of the current state of knowledge about the Tocharian language family is available here: http://www.oxuscom.com/eyawtkat.htm .

I can't sneak into Jestor. But I found http://www.oxuscom.com an interesting read, especially this:
"Based on the similarities between Tocharian and the Italic and Celtic branches... he (Lane) postulates 'rather a long period of close contact..."

Interestingly, while the Greeks, Thraco-Phrygians, Armenians, Balto-Slavs, and Germans are all mentioned repeatedly in the above article, nowhere do we find a geographical position of the pre-Halstadtt Celts, who evidently lived in a void far from the Germans and proto-Slavs, yet strangely somewhere between the steppes and Britain.