Proto-Celtic & Proto-Fenno-Ugric in Herodotus and C. Ptolemy

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 7/14/01 2:00:28 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
g_sandi at hotmail.com writes:

> Research indicates that there was some shared geographical areas in Central
> Europe

-- well, if you're referring to Magyars when you say "Hungarian", it would be
extremely difficult for them to cross paths with the prehistoric Celts, since
the Magyars didn't arrive in Europe until the 9th century CE.

There were certainly Celts in what later became Hungary, but the inhabitants
at the time were Thracian, Sarmatian, and later Germanic and Slavic.  The
area was largely Slav-speaking when the Magyars showed up in the 800's CE.

There is clear evidence of PIE contact with proto-Ugrian, and of course later
contacts between Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Baltic, and Germanic and various F-U
languages, but the Celts are about as unlikely a candidate as you could find
for such interaction, since they were a south-central European group and
their extension eastwards in historic times didn't come anywhere near the F-U
speakers of their time.