Celtic Germanic relationship

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/27/00 11:53:49 PM Mountain Standard Time,
rayhendon at satx.rr.com writes:

<< I am confused about the linguistic relationship, if any, between Celt and
 German.

-- they're independent branches of Indo-European, northwestern variety.

Also, Celtic and Proto-Germanic were in contact (as were Proto-Germanic and
Balto-Slavic) and lexical items moved across the boundaries.

Eg., the PrtGrmc word for "iron" is a Celtic loan, as are several other terms
(ruler and servant, for instance) and the form of these loans indicates that
they were borrowed before the first Germanic sound-shift, since it underwent
that change. (PIE *t, *d, and *dh ==> *th, *t, and *d, and PIE *p, *t and *k
==> *b, *d, and *g., etc.)  This is the most notable feature immediately
distinguishing Germanic from the other IE languages.

Since we know from archaeological sources that iron technology spread to the
early Germanic areas about 700-500 BCE, this dates that change quite
precisely -- it came afterwards, towards the end of the 1st millenium BCE.

Before that, pre-Proto-Germanic must have been strikingly conservative, much
closer to PIE. (And the ancestral Balto-Slavic.)  This in turn raises
interesting questions as to the possible influence of a pre-IE substrate on
proto-Germanic, since the Germanic urheimat in Scandinavia and northern
Germany had presumably been indo-europeanized for a very long time at that
point.