--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> Norman Davies thinks all southern Poles are undercover Celts :)
Well, there may be a grain of truth in that. At the time when the
southern two-thirds of modern Poland was Vandal territory, there were
still Celtic enclaves in the south, one of them in the area round
Kraków. The local Celts had their own distinctive culture, which only
partly absorbed Przeworsk culture influences (they even struck their
own gold coin, which suggests the existence of a political centre)
and maintained contacts with the Boii and other peoples on the other
side of the mountains. The enclave seems to have been engulfed by the
Przeworsk culture in the early Roman period (1st c.).
>
> Kraków occupies a very convenient location on the upper Vistula and
has attacted human settlers since the Palaeolithic; it has an almost
continuous record of settlement since the fifth millennium BC. It is
also a place easily reached by cultural and political trends from the
south. The Slavs (White Croatians?) possibly reached it about the 5th
c., and by the 8th it had become a fortress of the Vistulans and a
local political centre.
>
> Several questions can be asked at this point: What language was
spoken in the area of Kraków when the Slavs arrived? Truth is, we
don't know. It could be some form of Germanic, or a residual
Carpathian language related to Dacian, or (improbably) unassimilated
remnants of a Celtic language.
Perhaps Pannonian?
Tacitus: Germania 43,1
"
Behind the back of the Marcomanni and the Quadi the Marsigni, Cotini,
Osi and Buri close up. Of these the Marsigni nand Buri are similar to
the Suebi, while the Gallic language of the Cotini and the Pannonian
language of the Osi plus the fact that they tolerate taxes, prove
that they cannot be Germanic.
...
"
I assume that this means North of the Marcomanni who lived in
Bohemia, the Czech lands, then.
Osi again:
28, 3:
"
But it is uncertain whether the Aravisci have emigrated to Pannonia
from the Osi, who live in Germania, or the Osi from the area of the
Aravisci, since they both have the same language, rites and customs.
...
"
So perhaps Pannonian *as- > *os? Or *as-w- > araw + isk? Are these
part of the As-people, who immigrated to Germany with Odin? Any
possible connection with Yaz?
Torsten