Re: Lusitanian --Bell Beaker?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:

>
> At 4:25:38 AM on Wednesday, May 28, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > I noticed that Lauran Toorians has been the editor of a
> > book named 'Kelten en de Nederlanden' which means "Celts
> > and the Low Countries". You didn't misunderstand Dutch
> > 'en' to mean "in", by any chance?
>
> He's also co-editor (with Rijckof Hofmann and Bernadette
> Smelik) of _Kelten in Nederland_, described at
>

<http://www.cs.ru.nl/~bsmelik/keltische_draak/fondslijst/Kelten-in-Nederland.htm>

> as '[a] collection of essays substantiating the claim that
> Celts lived in the Netherlands in the first centuries of the
> Christian era'.

In it he is the author of the Foreword and the article 'De Kelten,
taalgroep of volk', Schrijver of the article 'Keltisch of niet: twee
namen en een verdacht accent'. That doesn't sound like a lot of
conviction.

> At <http://home.zonnet.nl/postbus/kelt3.html> is a report on
> 'Lezing Archeologische studiedag Boxtel 28 maart 1999' in
> which he is quoted as follows: 'We hebben genoeg taalkundig
> materiaal gevonden dat bewijst dat heel Nederland
> Keltischtalig was in de loop van de ijzertijd en later,
> vanaf de Romeinse tijd vanuit het noordoosten
> Germaanstalig'.

Yes, I saw that too. He continues:
'Dit kan misschien veroorzaakt zijn door een "taalmode".
Als taalkundige mag je in Nederland maar teruggaan tot ongeveer 25
jaar voordat Caesar hierover schreef. En dan kan je met enige
zekerheid zeggen dat er Eburonen woonden in Zuid-Nederland. Caesar
schreef namelijk dat hij hen op die plaats had uitgemoord.
Eburonen wordt verklaard als:
eburos=taxus on=gewijd, heilig (vaak voorkomend in namen van goden)
Er waren 2 leiders [Ambiorix en Catuvolcus, duo-leiderschap kwam vaker
voor destijds...ed.] waarvan de ene zelfmoord pleegde door van de
giftige bessen van de taxus te eten.
"Volgens mij zijn Kelten Keltischtalig en dan woonden er dus Kelten in
Nederland. Maar de archeologisch-Keltische vondsten mag je er niet aan
koppelen". Aldus drs. L.Toorians.'

So the 'genoeg taalkundig materiaal' seems to be Caesar's mention of
Belgian tribes in Belgica.

> Footnote 12 of the short paper by Luc van Durme at
> <www.multilingual-matters.net/jmmd/023/0009/jmmd0230009.pdf>:
>
> According to Schrijver, continental dialects like Dutch
> and German were subject to strong `Celtic influence from
> the Flemish-Dutch-Frisian coastal area'. He presumes that
> this area, just like southeast England, was Celtic
> speaking in the early Middle Ages (Schrijver, 1999).
>
> The reference is to P. Schrijver (1999) The Celtic
> contribution to the development of the North Sea Germanic
> vowel system, with special reference to coastal Dutch.
> NOWELE 35, 3–47.
>
> <www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/staff/alexwoolf/Apartheidandeconomics.pdf>
> has more from this paper:
>
> Schrijver's basic premise is that Old English and Coastal
> Dutch (OCstDu.) share a number of phonological innovations
> with each other and with British Celtic, which mark them
> out from the other Germanic languages as a whole and even
> from other Ingvaeonic dialects such as Old Saxon. His
> study focuses on the vowel systems of these languages and
> comprises a survey of the fate of each of the
> Proto-Germanic (PGm.) vowels within North-Sea Germanic
> (NSGm). His conclusion is as follows:
>
> The earliest of the common developments of the NSGm.
> languages (OE, OFris., OCstDu.) show the hallmarks of
> being adaptions of the PGm. system to the system of
> British Celtic or a closely related Celtic dialect on
> the Continent around the fifth to ninth centuries A.D.
> The presence of a British Celtic substratum or a
> substratum closely cognate to it, in early Medieval
> Britain, along the Dutch coasts and in Frisia would
> account for the observed phenomena. The most specific
> phenomenon that receives an explanation is the
> difference between Kentish, CstDu. and OFris. on the one
> hand and the other OE dialects on the other in the
> treatment of rounded front vowels, which appears to
> follow an isogloss separating West British [i.e
> proto-Welsh] from South-West British [i.e. proto-Cornish
> and Breton].

Interesting. Unrounding of rounded front vowels took place in two
related Danish dialects,
Northern Samsisk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sams%C3%B8
and Molbo-mål
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mols
both geographically good candidates for the status of refuge areas.
Both areas have Viking times, possibly earlier portages
http://www.scribd.com/doc/46757/mitologia-nordica
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanhave-Kanal
(sorry, nothing in English)
Samsø was until recently sociologically divided, not much social life
between the northern and southern part, divided at the Kanhave canal.
The southern dialect was related to that in Eastern Jutland directly
to the West.

Now, if there is a substrate connection between Kentish, OCstDu and
OFris and possibly even with these Danish Coastal dialects I have a
problem with seeing them as Celtic. The Celts were not water people,
they were land people. The fact that Welsh goes down that path too
with the OE dialects in question, but not Cornish seems to suggest
that if this was substrate-induced, that substrate was substrate to
Welsh as well as those OE dialects. Which makes me think of all the
words in p- in Welsh which shouldn't be here I discussed earlier.

>
> Brian

Thanks, Brian, also for the reference. I'll get it from the library.


Torsten