> About the Belgae it is difficult to
> know if Oppenheimer is right or not. There are perhaps less celtic
> toponyms east of the Rhine than west, but Germany has nevertheless
> many celtic toponyms too.
Oppenheimer sticks to the received wisdom that the Belgae were
Germanic., cf. from
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7817
"
The problem is that the English resemble in this way all the other
countries of northwest Europe as well as the Frisians and Germans.
Using the same method (principal components analysis, see note below),
I have found greater similarities of this kind between the southern
English and Belgians than the supposedly Anglo-Saxon homelands at the
base of the Danish peninsula. These different regions could not all
have been waiting their turn to commit genocide on the former Celtic
population of England. The most likely reason for the genetic
similarities between these neighbouring countries and England is that
they all had similar prehistoric settlement histories.
"
Now if we take as scenario Kuhn's proposal that the Germanic language
originated in the east of Germania (Poland, then Thuringia, sez I),
then moved down the Elbe to the Hamburg area (map 7 in the Kuhn maps
in the Files area), then 'converted' the old tribes of Anglians and
Frisians to speaking Germanic and expanded with them along the coast
to Belgium (map 8, 15), Oppenheimer's argument for "similar
prehistoric settlement histories" becomes an argument for a
pre-existing NWBlock (=Belgic) speaking community encompassing also
Eastern Britain, which would all have made the same language switch to
Germanic, probably over an extended period of time, say, some centuries.
Torsten