> O. Uenze left the old thought patterns in a different manner. He
> observed, that the North Hesse group of the early Latène period
> could not with any certainty be called either Celtic or Germanic.
> According to him, they were a tribal group with local
> characteristics [O. Uenze, Vorgesch. der hessischen Senke (1953)
> 26]. By that he implied that the scheme delivered by historical
> linguistics doesn't always correspond to what actually happened,
> but didn't yet find the nearest solution.
This I found to be the most interesting part. What is this
non-Germanic, non-Celtic local group in Northern Hesse? The Chatti:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudensberg (search Chatti and Maden)
More precisely, their original area was the Fritzlar-Wabern lowlands
and the valley around Kassel,
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatten
or, in other words, the catchment area of the rivers Fulda and Eder
http://de.wikipedia.widearea.org/wiki/Hessen
Here's a nice topographical map of the area.
Note also the Wetterau valley. Thuringia is off to the right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesse
Tacitus' remarks that they prepare for war, not just for battle seem
also to suggest that they were not newcomers like Ariovistus'
Germani.
The reason this is interesting to me is that I've gotten this idea
that gemination in Germanic is a substrate phenomenon, and now it
seems that gemination was a phenomenon connected to the Chattic
language somehow, cf.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/55551
whereas more traditional linguists want to explain it all by Kluge's
law: *-Tn- > *-TT- for any stop T, or by expressiveness. Maybe what
they wanted to express really was that they were Chatti?
But perhaps I should translate some of Kuhn's 'Chatti und Mattium,
Die langen Tenues des Altgermanischen' before people are convinced.
Torsten