Romans, Alpine Celts and Belgae : close cousins ?

[Angela]

I just have one question
The Romans are probably the second biggest ethnic group in France after the Gauls. The Celts are described as tall, pale, fair haired, and bigger than the Romans, who are smaller, dark skinned haired and eyed. If the Romans were so closely related to the Celts, then why is there such a substantial amount of Mediterranean blood in France? That blood being widely regarded as Roman. Shouldn't France be twice as Celtic genetically instead of Gallo-Roman?

The Romans, the Gauls and every other ancient population in Europe is made up of differing proportions of three main ancestral populations.

Read Lazardis et al 2014 or the preprint from 2013 including all of the supplement

See:
View attachment 6711

Also read any of the Lucotte et al papers on pigmentation.

It's a good idea to use the search engine here too.

 

[PHXHawk]

Do we know with certainty what the original Romans looked like, as far as stature and complexion? What effect on their appearance did the migration of people from all over the Empire to Italy have? Then there is the fact that the army eventually became largely Germanic. It seems that we might be wrong to think of Caesar looking much like a present day Italian.

 

[Angela]

Here we go again.

These Romans don't look Italian to you????? What do they look like? Germans?

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[Jovialis]

Do we know with certainty what the original Romans looked like, as far as stature and complexion? What effect on their appearance did the migration of people from all over the Empire to Italy have? Then there is the fact that the army eventually became largely Germanic. It seems that we might be wrong to think of Caesar looking much like a present day Italian.

Actually, we have a good idea of what Caesar looked like. I'm not exactly referring to that idiotic recreation, per se. But we learned that he indeed had dark eyes and hair, which is obviously more characteristic of Southern Europeans. Julius Caesar, a Roman patrician, was not a Germanic.

Moreover, light features does not necessarily indicate the person is "germanic".

Personally, my guess is that the Romans, are more or less similar to the people of Central Italy. Their ethnogenesis is probably a merger of SBA and ABA, along with the previous inhabitants of the area (i.e farmers)

 

[gandalf]

Historical linguist Brigitte Bauer has brought up substantial evidence* that Gaulish and Latin were highly similar languages.

Nicholas Ostler has argued** in the same sense, saying that Latin could only have replaced Gaulish so quickly if the grammatical structure was (nearly) identical and the two languages shared enough similarity in vocabulary to allow for a word-to-word replacement, as was the case with the replacement of Aramaic by Arabic. Iberian and Dacian Celtic were probably also close to Latin, perhaps all derived from a Hallstatt Celtic mother tongue.


* you can read about this in Archaic Syntax in Indo-European: The Spread of Transitivity in Latin and French and The Emergence and Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French: Diachronic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives

** in this great book on diachronic sociolinguistics Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

At last this evidence is coming out , that Gaulish tongues and Latin where very close :
just an exemple with Rex in Latin and Rix in Gaulish .
Furthermore if you listen to the sound of the Latin language , it sounds dark like a language from the north .
So my conviction is that actual french is in fact gaulish that has been latinized , as the latin had the advantage to be written .
From all the so called romance languages the French is the one that sounds the most like Latin , because it latinized Gaulish ,
and Latin was a close cousin to Gaulish .
Then it destroys the awkward theory that Gaulish languages disappeared , and the Gauls got rid of their langages to adopt the Latin .
No group of people abandon their language unless they are overwhelm by superior numbers .

And I would add another hypothesis ; it is well known that English is the closest germanic language to the Romance languages .
The mainstream explanation is it's because of the latin and the french conquests .
It could be also because the celtic tribes in England where speaking the same Gaulish languages ,
as an example the word "car' probably derive from the gaulish " Char" .
( In England at this time you could find tribes with the same names found in France : the Parisii , the Catalauns , etc )

 

[gandalf]

The prononciation of gaulish ( obvious links with french and latin ) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0haiE3U-Rk