Conference tallis::celt

    I'd better say hello, as well, I'm an east coaster as well , from
    Fife. I'm in Ayr at the moment (Robbie Burn's neck of the woods).
    We're inclined to scoff at colonials (incl. Americans) hankering
    for the old country ! However having spent 2 years in Calgary,Canada
    I found that I did miss Scotland, well truthfully it was more the
    Barr's Irn BRU, Maceroon bars, Tunnock's Carmel Wafers,Scotch Pies,
    ,Processed Peas, Sunday Post (joke), etc. I sure any exiled Scots
    will understand. Never happy though, I"m trying to get back over
    to N. America.
     Drew
    

    How many DEC plants are in Scotland?  Also, what do they produce?
    
    George

    
    
    	Care to tell this "Burns" a little bit about "Robbie Burns"
    
    	My parents were born in Ireland, but maybe I'm related to "Robbie"
    

    Re .0: Hazel,
    	"Scots not Celtic" is quite difficult to figure. Originally,
    Scots was the name given to the Irish Gaels. When (in the 7th and
    8th century), they conquered Alba, the country became known as
    Scotland. So the Scots are Celts, but even if by Scots you meant
    the Picts they overthrew, the Picts themselves were Celts, of the
    Britonnic branch, closely related to the Welshs. So, Pict or Scot,
    you're Celt anyway.
    		I hope this wasn't boring,
    			Denis.

    
    
    Re .0:  Here's a 'not-truly-Irish' las that is interested in this
    file. . .  I'm American, but have a lot of Irish background. . .
    my great-grandparents came to America in the Potato Blights and
    worked the mills in Lowell Massachusetts. . . (that's the McClure
    side of the family. . .)  There were also the Gill's.  But I also
    have German decent. . . maybe they too could be considered Celts
    since it was the people from the Germany that wandered over to the
    islands! (???)  
    
    Well, enough said. . .
    I do enjoy this file, though!!  
    
    -heidi  (yes, I know that's not very Celtic, but my real name by
             birth is Mary (from the Irish) and Hilda (from the German)
             but my brother's called me Heidi!!!)

    Re .5: The origin of the Celts can be traced to circa 1500 B.C.
    in Bavaria and Bohemia where the people known as Italo-Celts split
    into Italiots who soon migrated south and became (among others)
    Latins, who were later at the origin of the Roman Empire, and Celts
    who stayed there first and then migrated East to the Danube valley
    for some of them and, for the biggest part, West to Belgium and
    Gaul, then to Britain, Spain and Northern Italia. The first Western
    wave, known as Gaels or Goidels can be found today in Ireland, Scotland
    and Man. The 2nd Western wave known as Britons, can be found today
    in Scotland (partly), in Wales, Cornwall and French Brittany. This
    is the general idea and lacks many details. For those of you who
    have studied Latin at school, an interesting thing is to look at
    the similarities between Latin and the various Celtic tongues, there
    are many of them, and it's often easy to find the common roots between
    Latin and Celtic words (e.g. Lat: liber, Ir: leabhar, meaning book
    although the Irish word may have been borrowed to Latin along with
    writing, or more sure, Lat: rex, Ir: ri, meaning king). English, being
    a German language, is more loosely related to them.
    	As for a Celtic origin in Germany, it's possible in the South,
    but Northern and Mid Germany have never been Celtic lands.
    				Denis.
    

    
    
    	It's no wonder I had trouble tracing my family tree.   :-)
    
    
    
    	keVin

	re. 10.6
    
    	Often, a Latin V can be replaced by an Irish F to get the
    	same word.  i.e.  vir (men in Latin) and fir (men in Irish)
    	Indeed, many roots are common.
    
    	George

    According to my own reading, there is still a considerable amount
    of controversy on the origin of the Celts.  Gerhard Herm (_The_Celts_)
    seems to lean toward the Caucausus theory, although he does give
    some credence to the Jutland=Atlantis theory.  It is obvious that
    the closest non-celtic races to the Celts are the germanics (Saxons
    might be something like 32nd cousins - but don't tell my grandfather
    I said that...), and that both groups borrowed heavily from the
    Romans on their "excursions" through there.  However, the timing
    of the contacts with the Romans differed enough that the Celts seemed
    to have actually borrowed heavily from the Etruscans, while the
    germans got there much later.  The origin of the Pipes seems to
    be in the Caucausus, but whether its origins and those of the Celts
    are the same is still in dispute.  It seems much more likely that
    the Celts picked them up in the period as the Romans were driving
    the Celts out of Italy - most went East into Greece (some into Turkey),
    while a few went north or west.
    
    For more information on this time, the History Book Club frequently
    offers Herm's masterwork mentioned above.  While you would not think
    a german could write an authoritative book on Keltia, I can assure
    you that he does and excellent, and quite scholarly, job.
    
    Elizabeth a-e

    Re .9: I haven't read Herm's book, but this seems to be quite
    surprising, Elizabeth. As far as archaeology and linguistic studies
    can tell, the closest kin to the Celtic group is the latin one:
    the Celts and the Italiots parted from each other (previously they
    formed what is called by the linguists the Italo-Celts) approximately
    in 1500 B.C. in a region which is now known as Bohemia and Bavaria.
    The Italiots headed right south to what was to become Italy while
    the Celts first stayed there and then spreaded East and West, East
    through the Danube valley, and West to Gaul, then Spain, Britain
    and northern Italy.
    What are the Caucasus and Jutland=Atlantis theories? As far as I
    know, no Celts reached the Caucasus before the Galatians settled in
    central Anatoly (roughly 4th or 3rd century B.C., if I'm not mistaken,
    but I should check), and not Celtic tribe ever went to Jutland (though
    Celtic traders went there and even farther north, I think I mentionned
    the Gundestrup Cauldron in another note). As far as Atlantis ever
    existed, it was in fact the Minoean Crete, and the Atlantis legends,
    which all come originaly from the same source, Plato's Critias, are
    caused by a reading error from Plato's informer, the Athenian
    legislator Solo who wasn't very fluent in reading the Aegyptian
    hieroglyphs. During the time when he had been exiled from Athen, Solo
    went to Aegypt where he had access to the archives of the temples in
    Heliopolis. There he read about the Atlants, who had been destroyed by
    a cataclism 10.000 years before, and got some descrption of Atlantis,
    which was a much too big island to be situated in the Mediterranean
    sea,so later people came to think it was beyond Heracles' columns
    (Gibraltar), in the Ocean which was later called, for that reason,
    Atlantic. The basic fact is that the Aegyptian numbers were similar in
    principle to the Roman ones and that through a minor mistake, Solo
    multiplied all the numbers he read (time, distance, surface, etc...) by
    10. Now, look at what powerful traders the Aegyptian knew, that were
    destroyed 1.000 years before by the eruption of the Santorini volcano
    (circa 1500 B.C.): the Minoean Cretans. All the descritions in the
    Critias perfectly fit to Crete once you divide the dimension by 10.
    Archaeological evidence of that have also been found. But I've never
    heard of protocelts in Crete, neither in Jutland.
    As far as the Germans are concerned, they too belong to the Indo-
    European group of tongues but their relation to the Celts is a much
    more distant one that the one between the Celts and the Latins.
    			Denis.

    re: .10
    
    It is certainly wonderful that you _know_ that Atlantis was Crete.
     Plato's figures on the subject rule that island out entirely, saying
    that you had to sail a thousand miles past the pillars of Hercules
    to reach Atlantis.
    
    Also, when an ethnic group moves into an area at an early stage
    and adopts a language, modifying it to their own ends, some linguists
    will then call this part of the local language group.  This is not
    always (and frequently is not, although sometimes the subject is
    not examined further) an indication of kinship.  Just because there
    is an Italo-Celt language group does not, by any means, indicate
    either that (a) the Celts originated there, or (b) this is the original
    Celtic tongue.
    
    I do *not* know everything, but when something has been
    well-researched, I frequently pay close attention.  When something
    has not, I usually ignore it, regardless of how much truth there
    may be in the surmisal.
    
    Elizabeth a-e 

    Sorry to ignore your points on the distance and size of Atlantis
    from Aegypt.  However, I hardly find it likely that Critias would
    have multiplied anything by 10, as this was just not a good number
    in the Greek mathematics of the period.  Twelve I would believe;
    but why would he have made these errors?
    
    And Plato is not the only historian to mention this whole Atlantean
    thing; many before, and a few after, did the same thing.  (Why are
    all my names evading me?  I know over half of these guys
    [personally?].)  If this is the case, then Plato's researcher cannot
    have been the only one to make this abject mathematical error.
    
    Still, read what Herm has to say on the subject.  It will certainly
    get you thinking, even if it doesn't change your mind on Atlantis.
    
    BTW, should this really be discussed here?  Why don't we move it
    to another topic?
    
    Elizabeth a-e

    Re .11, .12: Elizabeth, as far as Atlantis is concerned, *I* do
    not know anything. What I said was first theorized publicly in the
    early 60's by a Greek archaeology professor (can't remember his
    name at the moment) who had spent most of his professional life
    researching the subject and has since been consistently supported
    by the archaeologic works (by quite a number of people from various
    nationalities) done in investigating the validity of the theory.
    	Critias didn't multiply anything as he comes here only as the
    character in Plato's dialog. The mistake was made by Solo, in the
    Aegyptian numbering, which, as I said, is similar in principle to
    the roman one, on a decimal basis: he confused the signs for 1 and
    10, for 10 and 100, etc... (BTW, as far as I remember from my Greek
    course at school, classical Greek numbering was also based on the
    same principle and also on a decimal basis, not duodecimal). The
    reason being that Solo was a learned Greek, but not very fluent
    in reading hieroglyphs (try it, even if you're fluent in Greek and
    you'll understand why the mistake isn't surprising ;^) ).
    	As for sources for the Atlantis legends before Plato, or rather
    before Solo, who predated Plato by some years, I haven't heard of
    any, but I'd be happy if you could point me to some of them.
    	And the whole point of my first answer was to ask you the references
    of Herm's work, which I said I haven't yet read. Could you place
    them here, please?
    	As for what I said about the Celts, it comes mostly, but not
    only, from the Celtic archaeology course taught at the Ecole du
    Louvre in Paris (that is to say, the course given by the archaelogical
    section of the Louvre museum which is one of the world best reference
    in archaeological teaching). Nothing comes from me personally.
    			Denis.

    Sorry, Denis, but it went in the split with my previous SO.  Still,
    I should be getting it again any time (if I can find an intro offer
    for History Book Club).  It is almost invariably one of the books
    offered in the intro offers.
    
    Also sorry my mind wasn't into your note enough to note the difference
    between Critias and Solo.  But Egyptian math (probably) did not
    use decimal, which of course could only serve to further confuse
    poor old Solo.
    
    Elizabeth a-e

    Re .14: Thanks, if you happen to get the book's ISBN or publisher'name,
    I'll probably be able to get it easily even in France.
    	As for the Aegyptian numbering notation system, it was definitely
    decimal in principle: one sign for 1, one for 10, one for 100, etc...
    I don't remember (but it mustn't be very difficult to find it in
    any Aegyptian archaeology book which describes the hieroglyph system)
    wether there were signs for 5, 50, 500,...
    	I also noted that you mentionned the pipes in .9 as an instrument
    specific to the various Celts. Pipes and bagpipes are the second
    commonest type of music instruments in all the primitive cultures
    after the harp type (derived originally from the bow): you can find
    bagpipes not only in the Celtic cultures (BTW it seems to have come
    quite lately to Scotland, somewhere in the middle age, but this
    is heavily discussed), but in the Latin, Germanic and Slavic cultures
    in Europe, as well as in the Caucasus, in Mongolia, in Northern
    Africa, and in Ghana to name only a few. Bagpipes are definitely
    not proper to the Celts even if they eventually came to use the
    most complicated type of bagpipe ever devised (the Irish Uilleann
    pipes), but the evolution from the war pipes to the Uilleann pipes
    through the penal laws times belongs to another topic.
    				Denis.

    re 10.6, .7, .8
    
    There are plenty of French words that resemble Irish ones too. Sugar
    - Fr. Sucre, Ir. Suicre,  Boy - Fr. Garcon, Ir. Garsoon (sp.) probably
    Norman influence from invasion of 1166.  But the Latin influence
    could also have been traced from the "golden age" of learning, when
    Ireland was peppered with monastaries, all diligently trying to
    convert the "illiterate pagans" and replace their culture with a
    "Christian" one.  There's an interesting book by Patrick C. Power
    called " Sex and Marriage in Early Ireland" (at least I think that's
    the title).  Mercier Press, but I'm not sure.  We lent the book
    to someone and have never seen it since.  But it deals with the
    Brehon Laws on marriage, divorce, fostering, concubines, etc.  Highly
    civilized culture.  Interesting to reflect on the contrast between
    current Irish marriage laws and those of old.
    
    

      Hi, I relatives  came to the US from Wales to James Town when it was
    first settled.  My last name is Welch.  Watkins.  I have never been to 
    Wales, but I am very interested in learning my own native background.
    
    
                                  Marshall Watkins
                                  Welch by blood