From: mike@fionn.lbl.gov (Michael Helm)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.celtic,soc.history,sci.archaeology
Subject: Re: What's Celtic?
Date: 13 Apr 1992 04:50:21 GMT
Organization: N.I.C.E.
Reply-To: mike@fionn.lbl.gov (Michael Helm)
NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.3.128.60

[I've crossposted this to see if any others have anything to
contribute ... the discussion has been about the meaning
of "Celt", the origin of the word, & so forth -- see the
refs in soc.culture.celtic]

Here's a little extract from "Early Ireland" by Michael O'Kelly.
Not everybody shares these opinions.

(P 247):
From the close of the 6th century BC, mention of a barbarian people
corresponding to the Celts occurs in the works of historians & enthographers, 
1st from Greek sources and later from Roman.  While many of the accounts
best known today are late, they rely to a great extent on older sources
& so take us back several centuries, before the date at which they
were written.  Even Julius Caesar, whose descriptions mite be expected
to have relied on contemporary if not actual 1st-hand experience, often
took his information from older authors.  From about the mid-4th century
BC the accounts must be reasonably accurate as owing to their incursions
beyond the Alps into the civilized world of the south & southeast, the
Celts had by then literally entered upon the stage of history.  TGE 
Powell (1958,52) has put forward the interesting hypothesis that the
name _Keltoi_ which was used by the Greeks when speaking of a barbarian
people to the north of them, was actually that of the dominant or royal
tribe of the Hallstat waggon-grave people & that it gradually became
adopted by the inhabitants of the North Alpine cultural & linguistic
province & its extensions.

The name _Keltoi_ has generally been equated with the Celts as a
whole, tho David Greene (1964,14) pointed out that:
  we cannot even be sure that Celtic-speaking peoples are meant
  when classical writers use the names _Keltoi_ or _Galatae_, for
  these ethnic names were used with looseness -- indeed, we do
  not know what _Keltoi_ or _Galatae_ meant originally but there
  is no evidence that they are Celtic words or that any Celtic-
  speaking peoples ever called themselves by those names.

Nevertheless the balance of probability must lie in favour of the
equation of these names with the Celts....  
----
Sorry for any typos above.

Early Ireland, Michael O'Kelly, Cambridge Press 1989, isbn 0 521 33489 6
Greene, D "The Celtic Language" in _The Celts_, ed by J Raftery, Cork,9-21
Powell, TGE _The Celts_, London

Incidentally I went to a local talk by Daniel Melia on the Berkeley
campus last week, about I Celti exhibit & the linguistics issues
in it.  He makes the point that the "Celts" as such in Roman times
really did not appear to have, or at least leave much evidence of
having, a strong pan-Celtic identity like, for example, the Greeks
had.  The word "Celt" has been (re-)introduced back into all the
extant Celtic languages.  If I understand ritely, he doesn't believe
that Keltoi & Galat- are necessarily related words; he says that
"Gael" ultimately derives from Welsh "Gwyddel", "wild men".
Not everybody shares these opinions either!

==mwh
Newsgroups: soc.culture.celtic