Taranis
Elite member
Sure, many tribes were considered (part of) Picts, Herodian wrote the most extensive documents about them and the Teutonic Caledonii were ONE of them. Tacitus was a Gaul that wrote the monumental work GERMANIA, so he would know.
So you basically say that they were Germanic just because Tacitus says so? Have you ever even heard of Grimm's Law, for starters?
Because Caledonii wasnt their chosen name to begin with, it was a LATIN name from the Romans. Thats just how the Romans called them, and good to know (thanks Mrs. Forsyth) that the Romans had the CELTIC root *kalet = 'hard' in mind.
Extracting CELTIC roots from LATIN names/words does not make the Caledonii any Celtic, especially not when Tacitus considers them to be Teutonic. I think you wasted your money on that 1997 book.
That's amazing. You're basically throwing over board every piece of data (bear in mind that even names recorded by the Greeks and Romans qualifies as linguistic data), and ad-hoc dismiss it. If we go by that point of view, there is zero evidence - one way or another, mind you - about what language the Picts spoke. I still ask you, where is your evidence? You just assume - by foregone conclusion - that the Pictish language is somehow related with Iberian - without any linguistic data.
To be fair, Bede never applied such nonsense. But Bede was a Contemporary of Britain at a time where Pictish and Gaelic and Brythonic (Cymric) was still spoken and his clear testimony was that Pictish is a diff. language to Gaelic and Brythonic.
Bede's statement that Pictish was different from Gaelic or Brythonic makes no statement about how different it was. Mind you, Gaelic and Brythonic (obviously both Celtic languages) are very different from each other. The same would apply to a third Celtic language (eg. Pictish).
And as for "My Evidence", unlike Mrs. Forsyth, i have not found the Scottish-Rosetta-stone. So i will content myself with Bede who clearly knows better than Mrs. Forsyth from the 90s.
What linguists do when they have no samples of written texts available of a language is that they use a field of linguistics called onomastics, that is the analysis of names. This is precisely what Forsyth did. In case you didn't notice, for the majority of names analyzed by her she provides Celtic etymologies. It would be a different situation if you were to provide Iberian (or Basque) etymologies for the Pictish names in question, but you instead claimed that these are foreign names and their real names are unknown...
But thats just the Picts, and again, i was asked about Iberians in Britain and my answer was Tacitus and the Silures and Caesar's vague statement about the immemorable natives being distinct of the Belgae. Hardly any other classical author bothered with Britain, so the rest is a guessing game.
But Archaeologically speaking, you do know that it wasnt the Celts [Indo-Europeans] that build Stone Henge, the Megalithic structures of Cornwall or had anything to do with the Bell Beaker culture.
Those people were clearly PRE/NON-Indo-Europeans, whether you want to call them Natives or any other name is your choice. British scholars of the 19th cen. termed them Iberians due to the Classical Historical refs. and Archaeological (anthropological) evidence.
Classical History and Archaeology are pretty solid grounds.
Well, let me play things backward for you: we don't know what language people spoke (this certainly holds true for the Copper Age or the Neolithic, since people in this time period in Europe were illiterate). By what arguments (or lack of arguments) couldn't the Bronze Age or Neolithic inhabitants of Britain have already been Celtic? Unless you get into linguistics in earnest instead of your insistence of the outermost credibility of classical sources, even asking the question is pointless in my opinion.
at Sparkey
the fundamental dilemma (concerning R1b) in all of this, is obviously the timeline. But than again, how clearly is the LGM theory debunked? and how clearly is its recent arrival established. Because if it is fully established (recent arrival) than its simply a dilemma and R1b (spread) can not be explained. One can not simply model the NON-Indo-European Bell Beaker cult. Complex into an Indo-European one. The Corded ware was the first massive Indo-European culture complex and it collided with the Bell-Beaker cult. complex in Central Europe, with the subsequent Indo-European Bronze age cultures (Urnfield) pushing it back to the Atlantic.
Even your catalyst theory goes bust given the fact that Iberia has on average ~80% R1b (today). Now thats not a catalyst effect thats a full (dominating) migration. yet apart from the Celto-Iberians (mixed and only in certain regions) there is nothing Indo-European about Iberia. The Iberians being clearly (confirmed) NON-Indo-Europeans, And Iberia itself along with Aquitania were well into Roman times still largely IBERIAN (NON-Indo-European) with the Bsaques til this present day.
Sorry, but your statement about Iberia is just plain wrong. The Iberian peninsula was, by place names, roughly divided into two parts, by characteristic naming conventions: in the northeast and south, you have the prefix 'ili-' (this, by the way, is taken as possible evidence that Basque and Iberian are indeed related, as 'ili-' may be a cognate with Basque 'hiri', meaning city). In the entire rest of the Iberian peninsula, you have Celtic place names (the most common ones are with the ending '-briga'). As you can see, over half of the Iberian peninsula was, by the time the Romans conquered it, firmly Celtic. Now the point is that this cannot be linked in any sensible way - especially not in the West of the Iberian peninsula - with the Central European cultures (La-Tene, Hallstatt, even Urnfield). Instead, there is a clear continuity from the Atlantic Bronze Age. In any case, the statement that the Iberian peninsula was "largely Iberian" or "largely non-Indo-European" is completely false. Even the Lusitanians, who's Celticity is debatable, were firmly Indo-European.