FYI-
From 1 July 2003, New York Times:
"Celtic Found to Have Ancient Roots" by Nicholas Wade
"In November 1897, in a field near the village of Coligny in eastern
France, a local inhabitant unearthed two strange objects.
One was an imposing statue of Mars, the Roman god of war. The
other was an ancient bronze tablet, 5 feet wide and 3.5 feet high. It
bore numerals in Roman but the words were in Gaulish, the extinct
version of Celtic spoken by the inhabitants of France before the
Roman conquest in the first century B.C.
The tablet, now known as the Coligny calendar, turned out to
record the Celtic system of measuring time, as well as being one of
the most important sources of Gaulish words.
Two researchers, Dr. Peter Forster of the University of
Cambridge in England and Dr. Alfred Toth of the University of Zurich,
have now used the calendar and other Celtic inscriptions to
reconstruct the history of Celtic and its position in the Indo-
European family of languages.
They say that Celtic became a distinct language and entered the
British Isles much earlier than supposed. .....
....The researchers' method even dates the fork points in their
language tree, although the dates have a wide range of possibility.
The initial splitting of Indo-European in Europe occurred around 8100
B.C., give or take 1,900 years, and the divergence between the
continental and British versions of Gaelic took place in 3200 B.C.,
plus or minus 1,500 years, they calculate"
Any comments?
Full article at
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/science/01CELT.html>
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Ned Smith