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'.
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'.
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, 347.
<www.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/staff/alexwoolf/Apartheidandeconomics.pdf>
has more from this paper:
Schrijvers 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].
Brian