Dating the final IE unity

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>I do find him saying the precise same thing about "an early Indoeuropean
>language."  I suspect the difference is critical.

-- no, it's trivial.  Celtic was widespread in the last centuries BCE.  If it
didn't spread by migration (which Renfrew denies), then it must have evolved
_in situ_ across its range.

"It is most improbable that the (proto-)Celts were able to maintain parallel
linguistic development from Ireland across western continental Europe from
the beginning of the Neolithic to the historical period, a time-span on the
order of 4000 years.  For this reason, linguists have generally confined the
search for the Proto-Celts to the later Bronze Age (c.1200 BCE onwards) or
the Iron Age.

As the Celtic languages spread in the early historic period, they provide us
with cautionary evidence concerning the relationship between the process of
linguistic expansion and visibility within the archaeological record.  Even
where we can trace in time the course of Celtic movements, such as the spread
of Goidelic speakers from Ireland to Scotland in the first millenium CE, such
a migration is in no way supported by hard archaeological evidence."

-- Encylopedia of Indo-European Culture, p. 101.

>Nor will you find it in Ireland (where there is history, folk memories and
>other evidence of a series of migrations from the continent ABOUT OR AFTER
>this time.

-- now you're agreeing Celtic was brought to Ireland by Iron Age migrations
from the Continent?

I agree, but Renfrew doesn't.

>I am willing to be corrected. I believe we have fragmentary evidence of
>Gallic Celtic, Lepontic and Celtiberian and many centuries later we have the
>more substantial evidence of the Celtic of the British Isles.

-- the Ogham inscriptions are about on the same order as the evidence for
Continental Celtic.  Insular Celtic later has much more abundant written
sources.

There's more than enough, however, to show that Insular Celtic developed its
peculiarities _after_ the period of the Ogham inscriptions.

The Celtic languages, when first encountered, lack all the stranger features
of, for example, Old Irish -- augmentation of verb forms, for instance.

>You are saying that here is Celtic was unchanging for 700 years.

-- no, I said saying that the Gallic form of around 100 CE is identical to
that of the Ogham inscriptions 200-300 years later.

>Well perhaps literate observers would have observed the same rate of change
>earlier, but they weren't there and we have no record of them.

-- you're missing the point completely.  Renfrew's hypothesis requries that
either _all the Celtic areas_ changed not at all, or identically, across 4000
years.

When we can observe them, the Celtic languages undergo distinct and
_different_ changes in each of their areas... which is exactly what one would
expect from a relatively recent dispersal from a small nuclear area.

When a language is both widespread and uniform, that means that it spread
recently from a single core area.  If it's widespread, it can't stay uniform.

>as being Volcae and from the tribe of the Gallic Volcae

-- you are aware that "Gallic" simply meant "Celtic-speaking" in Classical
times?  That any area where Celts lived would be called "Gaul"?  (Hence
"Galatia" in Anatolia).

Incidentally, Celtic tribal names were widespread.  Many of the tribal names
in Gaul, Britain and Ireland were the same, and the Boii lived in both
Bohemia and northern Italy, and so forth.

>I don't know if I agree with Renfrew but it is not hard to see that a lot
>could have gone on between "an early Indoeuropean language" and pre-Celtic.

-- not uniformly, over 4000 years, and across half of Europe.  Which is
exactly the point.

Of course Celtic evolved from an earlier IE form _somewhere_.  Renfrew's
theory requires that it do so across the entire area from Ireland to Austria.

Which is just not the way things work.

>And of course Celtic had to turn into Celtic somewhere - what is the
>difference between IE>Celtic in the Danube or in France?

-- It can't turn into Celtic _simultaneously_ in the entire area between
Austria and Ireland, is the difference.

>And 4000 years versus 3000 years or even 2000 years would not seem to solve
>the problem of the this telling striking uniformity in 275BC, would it?

-- striking uniformity in 275 BCE is exactly what one would expect if the
Celtic languages had been confined to a small area and then spread rapidly,
not long before first being observed.

>Myceanean records are after all just over 3000 years old but there are plenty
>of folk comfortable calling it not pre-Greek, but Greek.

-- it's not "Greek" as spoken today.  You're using terminological quirks to
cloud the process again.

Mycenaean, Classical, and modern "Greek" are distinct languages, as different
from each other as modern English is from Proto-Germanic.

>If we had no intervening evidence of Greek until modern Greek in the
>year1999AD in the same location - what would we make of the difference
>between the two languages?

-- there would be no problem.  That one was ancestral to the other would be
perfectly obvious.

>Why is "an early indoeuropean language" turning into the Celtic
>languages with no record of the intervening years expected to perform so
>differently - if an early indoeuropean language analogous to Mycenaean
>existed in 4000BC?

-- an early IE language turning into Celtic simultaneously, across half of
Europe, is the problem.

Greek evolved in one place and spread from there.  So, of course, did
Celtic... except in Renfrew's opinion.