Yes, Oppenheimer puts the Celts in Aquitania and N.
Spain --R whatever chromosome. The agricultural wave
would have had J2 chromosome, which is pretty much
spent by the time it gets to Britain --and if I
remember correctly, it hits a barrier around the Alps
in that it's very common SE of the Alps, maybe
indicating an agricultural invasion but at the Alps,
it seems to have become a difusion.
The Celts were in Spain and Trask mentioned on a
posting that many toponyms from the Basque Country are
of Celtic origin BUT the trajectory of Celtic doesn't
seem to cooperate with Oppenheimer. Hispano-Celtic is
definitely an outlier, as is Goidelic and neither is
close to the other. Hispano-Celtic probably entered
Spain c. 1000 BCE or later and Goidelic split off from
Continental Celtic a bit later, maybe 700 BCE. I
wonder if Goidelic was also originally in Britain and
was overrun by Gaulish --given that Brythonic and
Gaulish seem very, very close and that the
resemblances in syntax, etc. are due to a Gaelic
substrate in Brythonic, although this doesn't seem to
show up in the vocabulary, so maybe Goidelic innovated
after it arrived in Ireland and was isolated enough
that it didn't pick up /q/ > /p/.
In any case, for me, the most controversial of
Oppenheimer is the remark that traces of
pre-Anglo-Saxon Gmc show up in English.
So what you all know of Peter Forster and his
evidence?
". . . Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul
"the language differs but little."
"The common language referred to by Tacitus was
probably not Celtic, but . . . a Germanic-type
language could already have been indigenous to England
at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this
inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary)
evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter
Forster and continental colleagues. They found that
the date of the split between old English and
continental Germanic languages goes much further back
than the dark ages, and that English may have been a
separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language
before the Roman invasion. "
--- tgpedersen <
tgpedersen@...> wrote:
>
> > A trail from Anatolia to Italy, France and Spain
> implies that
> > Oppenheimer's hypothetical (pre-)Proto-Celtic
> agriculturists would
> > have passed through the south-east of Europe (=
> the Balkans) as
> > Michel pointed out.
>
> OK, got it now.
>
>
> Torsten
>
>
>
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