Germanic - Celtic relationship?

LamaGT said:

We do however have many archaelogical artifacts that testify the existance of those populations. My knowledge on the subject mostly comes from recent school teachings, so it may be heavily biased and with many assumptions but I think that they wouldn't teach of populations that never existed. I know there was no Italic culture as a whole, sure, but there were many smaller cultures or populations that were living in Italy and are refered to in Italian as "Italic" which actually is the name of a specific population that lived in Calabria

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You are confusing several things.

"Italic" languages do exist. They are a fairly notable ancient and classical language family, the speakers of which at one point were settled throughout most of Italy.

Material culture is different. Not everybody who used items of, say, the Villanovan material culture spoke the same sort of Italic language, kinda like you don't have to have spoken Greek to have used a pot that looked like this. It's not even a very good metric for that sort of thing.

Neither material culture nor the language one spoke correlates all that well to other aspects of culture, like the gods one would've worshiped or the stories one would've told. In southern Italy, something of a mixing bowl of languages in the early classical period but mostly populated by people who spoke Italic languages like the Sabellian languages, you could easily find people who a) were natives of the city of Rome, b) spoke Latin, c) employed chiefly Greek-associated material culture, esp. pottery and statuary, d) worshiped "new import" gods like Isis or Sarapis from places that weren't even in Italy, and e) still had an interest primarily in the myths and tales of the local Sabellians.

And none of that has anything to do with genetics. You can't tell if a man was a Roman senator or an Auernian bondsman by looking at his DNA any more than you can tell if I'm German or American by looking at mine.

Dachs said:

You are confusing several things.

"Italic" languages do exist. They are a fairly notable ancient and classical language family, the speakers of which at one point were settled throughout most of Italy.

Material culture is different. Not everybody who used items of, say, the Villanovan material culture spoke the same sort of Italic language, kinda like you don't have to have spoken Greek to have used a pot that looked like this. It's not even a very good metric for that sort of thing.

Neither material culture nor the language one spoke correlates all that well to other aspects of culture, like the gods one would've worshiped or the stories one would've told. In southern Italy, something of a mixing bowl of languages in the early classical period but mostly populated by people who spoke Italic languages like the Sabellian languages, you could easily find people who a) were natives of the city of Rome, b) spoke Latin, c) employed chiefly Greek-associated material culture, esp. pottery and statuary, d) worshiped "new import" gods like Isis or Sarapis from places that weren't even in Italy, and e) still had an interest primarily in the myths and tales of the local Sabellians.

And none of that has anything to do with genetics. You can't tell if a man was a Roman senator or an Auernian bondsman by looking at his DNA any more than you can tell if I'm German or American by looking at mine.

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In that case, how would it be possible to define ANY type of ethnic group?

LamaGT said:

In that case, how would it be possible to define ANY type of ethnic group?

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Any sort of identity construct is a sort of collective insanity. To a very significant degree, ethnicity is about self-identification: "I consider myself to be a Manchu citizen of the People's Republic of China". But identity can also be imposed, implicitly or not, by others: take Dave Chappelle's story about his blind father, whose skin was very light for an African-American man, taking the bus in DC after Martin Luther King's assassination and being derided as a honky. (A story which he turned on its head in a few skits on his TV show, with the blind black man who exhibited racism against black people and tried to join the Klan, etc.)

Identity is also a layered thing. For instance, I consider myself to be first and foremost an American. But I also consider myself to be, by turns, a human being, a Louisianan, a German, a Virginian, a resident of the Washington DC metropolitan area, a fan of the New Orleans Saints football team, an Army brat, and an Orthodachsal (not Orthodoxal), among many other things. Some people prioritize different layers of ethnicity over others: for me, my American identity is more important than anything else. But for some people who live in the American South, their state identity - say, Georgian - is more important to them than the fact that they are American. It doesn't mean that they don't consider themselves to be American at all, just that that identity takes a different priority. Immigration can alter identity layers: my ex used to prioritize her Vietnamese identity above all else, and later came to consider herself first Australian, then American, too.

And this is all stuff that we can tell from looking at a real live person and talking to her. Now imagine all the difficulty involved in figuring out ethnic identity for people who've been dead for two millennia. A gravesite with little but a skeleton, a headstone, and perhaps some disparate items won't tell us very much, if anything at all, about the many layers of its inhabitant's identity when he or she was alive. The material culture might offer some clues, but usually it doesn't; most interpretations of classical material culture that assign it a definite identity are badly colored by textual evidence - they fail to let the archaeology speak for itself. (Take, for instance, the francisca, a throwing axe associated in some late antique sources with the Franks. When grave sites were found in northern France with throwing axes in them, archaeologists immediately assumed that these were the graves of Frankish soldiers, despite the fact that they appear in northern France long before the Franks are known to have inhabited the area from the sources. Further research has indicated that the Roman military used such throwing axes in much larger quantities than did the Franks, and for a longer period of time, casting doubt on precisely who is in these graves anyway.)

If we know much at all about ethnic identification under the Roman Empire, it is from the aristocracy, who were kind enough to build houses that were well preserved to the modern day, who wrote letters to each other that allow us to try to figure out how they thought, who were the main focus of the histories that other members of the aristocracy wrote, and whose life stories can, in general, be pretty damn well reconstructed. And it is from these aristocrats that we have our best understanding of Roman identity, of Romanitas (not quite the same thing as "Roman identity", but close enough). It is from them that we can pull cases like the one I did above: the Roman aristocrat who moved to southern Italy, worshiped the likes of Isis, spoke Latin, bought copious amounts of Greek statuary, and was enamored of the local Sabellian myths and legends.

Stepping slightly off-topic, but, @Dachs, what's your opinion of the "imagined communities" conception of nationality?

Ethnicity is definitely not primarily about self-identification. A large numbers of ethnic groups don't "know" they even are ethnic groups, or were never aware of this fact about themselves until foreigner visitors or rulers decided/told them.

Traitorfish said:

Stepping slightly off-topic, but, @Dachs, what's your opinion of the "imagined communities" conception of nationality?

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I know of it, and I have a vaguely positive opinion of it, but I'm not really conversant in it, and I haven't read Anderson's book. Most of what I know about modern concepts of ethnicity comes from Barth and responses to and against his thesis.

Pangur Bán;11449963 said:

Ethnicity is definitely not primarily about self-identification. A large numbers of ethnic groups don't "know" they even are ethnic groups, or were never aware of this fact about themselves until foreigner visitors or rulers decided/told them.

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While ethnic identity is primarily performative and therefore implicitly chiefly about self-identification, I did note at the very beginning that many ethnic categories are imposed by others: take, for example, black American identity, especially before the late nineteenth century, or, alternatively, "Roman" or "Chinese" identity as defined in opposition to everything around them.

Sure, that's a fair point. But a significant thrust of Anderson's thesis is that these external - macro-level - observations were internalized and helped to generate those identities. It just shifted their level of self-identification up from a smaller macro-level focus - village, valley, lineal- to a larger grouping - people, polity, collateral.

Masada said:

Sure, that's a fair point. But a significant thrust of Anderson's thesis is that these external - macro-level - observations were internalized and helped to generate those identities. It just shifted their level of self-identification up from a smaller macro-level focus - village, valley, lineal- to a larger grouping - people, polity, collateral.

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Is this a response to what I said or to what calgacus said?

Calgacus.

It's true we trace origins through linguistics, but there are other ways, too, like archaeological discoveries of artistic styles in pottery and weapons and the distinct ceremonial behavior toward the deceased. From all this historical evidence, we know today the people "generally understood as Celts" originated in central Europe and expanded to "other areas" including, but certainly not limited to, the modern British Isles. A good reference for this is "Hallstatt culture".

The people to which we modernly refer as "German" or "Germanic" were earlier called "Saxons" and before that, I suppose they were called "a lot of things". This culture's lineage permeated virtually every aspect of Europe over the course of millennia.

To answer your question in a generalized sense, these groups all had a common origin in what we today call the "Urnfield culture". They're all very much related in language, custom and heredity.

Adjuvant said:

The people to which we modernly refer as "German" or "Germanic" were earlier called "Saxons" and before that, I suppose they were called "a lot of things". This culture's lineage permeated virtually every aspect of Europe over the course of millennia.

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I always thought they were originally called Germanic but then some tribes were later called Saxons?

Either way, it's fairly obvious to everyone that "Saxons" is interchangable with "Scythians" and "Sarmatians", thereby confirming that the truest of European brotherhoods lies with the English (Anglo-Scythians) and the Polish (a.k.a. the Sarmatians!)

Lord Baal said:

There can't be "interbreeding" between the same species, let alone the same genotype (though sometimes the term is used, such as if one were to say that wolves were interbreeding with coyotes, even though both are the same species, canines. I've long thought that there needs to be some intermediate term, but damned if I know what to use). The correct term is 'intermarriage,' which certainly occurred, and always has.

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The correct neo-nanni term is "rase treasoniering". And if it itsn't then it should be because that phrase looks hilarious.

Adjuvant said:

The people to which we modernly refer as "German" or "Germanic" were earlier called "Saxons" and before that, I suppose they were called "a lot of things". This culture's lineage permeated virtually every aspect of Europe over the course of millennia.

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"Saxon" refers to a region within the geographical area known as Germany, as well as a group of languages within the Germanic tree. We really don't know what the original Germanic Speakers were called. We aren't even particularly sure when the Germanic speakers arrived. Archaeologists have identified three distinct cultures inhabiting the area identified as the homeland of the Germanic speakers (Southern Part of Scandinavia, Jutland, and Northern Germany between the Weser and Oder rivers) during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. These groups are: the food gatherers, the megalithic builders, and the battle-axe peoples. Although it is commonly accepted that the "battle axe peoples" were the most distinctly Indo-European (referring specifically to the language family) of the three groups, it is naturally impossible to be sure which one truly was the "originator" (by which I mean oldest Germanic speaker we know of) of the language family.

The language family itself is typified by a number of interesting departures from the IE language family as a whole, including the elimination of variable inflection (many IE languages use inflection as means of distinguishing words from each other), and instead switching to always placing inflection on the root of a word (interestingly enough this created in Germanic languages an obsession with alliteration which isn't really present in other IE languages). Germanic is also typified by a very distinct and unique method for creating the past tense, specifically in the "strong" verbs of the various languages in words such as sing-sang and give-gave, called Ablaut which, although existing in other IE languages such as latin, was developed into a complete, regular system for distinguishing past and present. Germanic is also identified popularly by the infamous "German sound shift" which sets it off very distinctly from other IE languages. In this sound shift, voiceless stops (p, t, k) became voiceless fricatives (f, θ ,&#967, as in pater-father, or três-θreis. Voiced aspirated stops (bh, dh, gh) became voiced fricatives, eventually emerging as voiced unaspirated stops (b, d, g), and Voiced unaspirated stops (b, d, g) became voiceless unaspirated stops (p, t, k), such as Lat. decum - Gothic taíhun (ten), or Lat. genu - Gothic kniu (knee). Germanic is interesting in that approximately a fourth to a third of the Modern German vocabulary is uniquely Germanic in origin, with no IE cognates having been found, including words such as Beere, Dung, Brot, Fleisch, Lamm, Kalb, Herd, Rabe, Wiesel, Bogen, Helm, Schild, Netze, Schiff, schwimmen etc., specifically words relating to Agriculture, Animal husbandry, Hunting, Warfare, and seafaring, as well as many legal words such as König, Volk, Dieb, Ding, and Herr.

The Germanic family tree has been divided in many ways, the jury is still out on which is actually the correct one. Waterman draws it up with the original "Proto-Germanic" being subdivided into West Germanic, North Germanic (Old Norse) and East Germanic (Gothic and its ilk). From West Germanic we get groups such as Anglo-Frisian and Proto-German, with Proto-German further subdivided into Old High German and Old Low German (Old Saxon and Old Low Franconian). Well, that's a very very brief overview of the Germanic language family.

So you have officially announced your candidacy for Vice-Dachs yet?

@Dachs
Let's say you have a group of people, which share a common collective culture. With culture I don't mean conveniently tangible stuff like religion, cloths or other visualized customs, but rather common but not even (necessarily) articulated particular ways to perceive thinks. I am talking of the stuff that makes Americans seem overtly confident, Bavarians (relative to other Germans) laid back, Japanese people sort of shy and (through the eyes of Eastern Germans and relative to them) West Germans arrogant.
Now lets say, that this group does not identify itself as an ethnic group. Does this mean it isn't one? Would it be one if it started to identify itself as such?

Dachs said:

While ethnic identity is primarily performative

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What does this mean?

The Romans did indeed use the term "Germania" but to them it was an all-emcompassing term for pretty much "anything north of us". For all intents and purposes, they could have called it "Celtland". I'm not trying to argue semantics, and I need to admit I "cut to the punch" quickly in narratives, so I'm not a good story-teller. Let me reiterate a few points.

a) Modernly (that which we are today understanding), "Germany", was what was previously known as "Saxons". Maybe my syntax wasn't clear. I'm not inferring a classification as "Saxons" existed in 300BC, although also "we are not Romans" and "we are not Ptolemy". We actually have "better information now", archaeologically, than first or second century historians having "met and killed a few".

b) Those people shared Celtic origins, not only in indo-european language classification (although I always appreciate reading learned material) but also in arts, crafts and customs. I understand your argument about languages. These simply are not, however, enough to athropologically classify cultural dissemination. Many factors need be involved so we know the "witness" or "historian" didn't simply meet "some group of mercenaries with tales of coming from this place".

c) "Saxons" were not "Scythians" and "Sarmats" were not "all Slavic". "Scythia" and certainly even "Sarmatia" were pretty huge places with no defined borders. You could scrawl big arcs with a crayon and say "Here be Scythians" and it wouldn't really mean anything other than "people different from ourselves we don't really know". Scythians, as mentioned in another thread, were were generally indo-iranian speaking, "hodge podge" cultures more akin to the "Huns" that displaced them during "massive human migration" of the 5th century, although slavs lived on the "far western end" of Sarmatia and became prolific later. These cultures were generally nomadic and had "melting pot" influences from any exterior culture with whom they traded. You could argue "eastern ones" were "more Turkic" or "western ones" were more "indo-european". The truth is somewhere in the middle. They were "all things".

d) "Saxon" is not just a "region in modern day Germany". It was a cultural identification for centuries of peoples all over Europe, and "loosely still can be today" albeit diluted. The "Saxons" from "Germany" probably had ancestors there "as far back as 8000bc" with the advent of proto-agriculture. We trace these people archaeologically as the "Urnfield" culture, not because of the random and sundry languages they spoke be because of the style and manner of their ceremonial burial traditions, from their "levels of technology" and from their art.

e) The question was not, "Did Celts speak Slavic", nor at all "What language did they speak." I feel the original question, "Were the Celts and Germans related" is becoming convoluted with tertiary details and fragments of misinformation. The answer I gave, as much as you don't agree, was the most concise I could muster at the time and thank you for letting me clarify it.

The (Anglo-)Saxon/Scythian and Polish/Sarmatian claims were tongue-in-cheek.

Virote_Considon said:

The (Anglo-)Saxon/Scythian and Polish/Sarmatian claims were tongue-in-cheek.

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oh. ok. Because of my response in the Huns/Mongols thread?

Traitorfish said:

So you have officially announced your candidacy for Vice-Dachs yet?

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Haha, well, Dachs doesn't really get very much into the linguistics stuff, that's more Bill3000's game. You can call me Vice-Bill3000 if you really want to...I guess. *sigh*

Adjuvant said:

The Romans did indeed use the term "Germania" but to them it was an all-emcompassing term for pretty much "anything north of us". For all intents and purposes, they could have called it "Celtland". I'm not trying to argue semantics, and I need to admit I "cut to the punch" quickly in narratives, so I'm not a good story-teller. Let me reiterate a few points.

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I honestly have no idea what you're talking about here.

a) Modernly (that which we are today understanding), "Germany", was what was previously known as "Saxons". Maybe my syntax wasn't clear. I'm not inferring a classification as "Saxons" existed in 300BC, although also "we are not Romans" and "we are not Ptolemy". We actually have "better information now", archaeologically, than first or second century historians having "met and killed a few".

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Nor here. You're being rather scatter-brained. You may have a point, but I'm having trouble identifying it. What are you trying to say with this?

b) Those people shared Celtic origins, not only in indo-european language classification (although I always appreciate reading learned material) but also in arts, crafts and customs. I understand your argument about languages. These simply are not, however, enough to athropologically classify cultural dissemination. Many factors need be involved so we know the "witness" or "historian" didn't simply meet "some group of mercenaries with tales of coming from this place".

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When did I talk about any of this? I was talking about "Germanic" purely from a linguistic standpoint, which, by the way, is really the only way you can truly talk about "Germanic" and "Celtic". I mean it isn't like x tribe used y pottery and spoke z dialect of IE language. Of course there is a lot of bleeding between cultures and language groups. One of the most things to remember when you get into historical linguistics is you absolutely have to separate the notion of a language as being tied to a "state" or "nation", as it appears to be today (it isn't, but that's a subject for another thread). When I say Proto-Germanic speakers or Germanic peoples, I am referring to a group that could represent hundreds of tribes or kingdoms, some of whom certainly would have had elements of Celtic culture and language, owing to geographic proximity, but these language trees are really done purely as an abstract method of classifying, categorizing, and comparing languages. It has very little to (oftentimes) no bearing at all on historical, archaeological realities. Hell, languages like Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indoeuropean aren't even real languages. They're just an arrangement of hypothetical vocabulary, syntax, and grammar based on how other languages in the "family" are composed. It's purely an academic experiment.

d) "Saxon" is not just a "region in modern day Germany". It was a cultural identification for centuries of peoples all over Europe, and "loosely still can be today" albeit diluted. The "Saxons" from "Germany" probably had ancestors there "as far back as 8000bc" with the advent of proto-agriculture. We trace these people archaeologically as the "Urnfield" culture, not because of the random and sundry languages they spoke be because of the style and manner of their ceremonial burial traditions, from their "levels of technology" and from their art.

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Saxon, as, I guess I didn't make clear enough in my earlier post, can represent a very wide array of things, and a helluva lot of people. The point I was trying to make was that I really didn't have any idea what you meant when you used the word "Saxon", especially in the context of the thread, which really would have no bearing beyond the linguistic. Again, see my above post about language families.

e) The question was not, "Did Celts speak Slavic", nor at all "What language did they speak." I feel the original question, "Were the Celts and Germans related" is becoming convoluted with tertiary details and fragments of misinformation. The answer I gave, as much as you don't agree, was the most concise I could muster at the time and thank you for letting me clarify it.

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As I've said previously, you really can't use the terms "Celtic" and "Germanic" outside of the linguistic (unless you are some sort of nationalist). When you ask how are Germanic and Celtic related you are going to get language-related answers because these are linguistic terms, just like "Italic" and "Slavic" and "Indic" are. Information on these language families aren't tertiary details, they're the very crux of the question. If you wanted archaeological information about the people who inhabited the various regions of Central Europe, or who probably spoke languages within these various families, you might want to try rephrasing your question.

Parts of that post address both you and Virote, Owen.

"I mean it isn't like x tribe used y pottery and spoke z dialect of IE language."

This statement intentionally has too many qualifiers because of the word "tribe". In a general sense, the statement is false. If we look at "said region", at "x elevation of strata", with "x surrounding artifacts" "crated of x material" "in x style" we can, and legitimately so, garner enough information to begin "painting a more detailed picture" of "which people" from whom said remnants originated. Skeletons don't talk, yet with time and a large number of "samples" ultimately we can generally deduce "who put this here", "when they put this here", "why this is here", many times "how this got here" and further, hopefully, ultimately, "what's the bigger picture".

You can qualify "things" or "objects" without any "linguistic qualifiers" as being the "manifestations of a certain people". These objects give us a better perspective of "said people" whether the nearby human remains were those of a "Germanic speaker" or a "polyglot". We do it all the time. I'm sorry it upsets you.

Will your next question be, "If I find female remains in a smooth cremation urn with fluted decoration in a barrow in Switzerland at a level of strata surrounded by glass beads and copper tools of a specific craftsmanship, how do we know she spoke a Keltic dialect"? I guess for all we know she had no tongue. Language is not the only way we identify groups of people.

SiLL said:

@Dachs
Let's say you have a group of people, which share a common collective culture. With culture I don't mean conveniently tangible stuff like religion, cloths or other visualized customs, but rather common but not even (necessarily) articulated particular ways to perceive thinks. I am talking of the stuff that makes Americans seem overtly confident, Bavarians (relative to other Germans) laid back, Japanese people sort of shy and (through the eyes of Eastern Germans and relative to them) West Germans arrogant.
Now lets say, that this group does not identify itself as an ethnic group. Does this mean it isn't one? Would it be one if it started to identify itself as such?

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For me to answer that honestly, I would have to share your assumption that this is how culture operates - that part of 'being American' is overconfidence, that part of 'being Japanese' is shyness, and so on and so forth. But I don't think that culture has that sort of identifiable impact on individual personalities in a meaningful way.

That said, your question is sort of going in two directions, here, and there's a sort of nugget in there that is worth answering - namely, whether ethnicity is wholly based on self-identification or not. In this post I said that it is not wholly based on self-identification, but primarily.

SiLL said:

What does this mean?

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That ethnic identity is primarily related to stuff that you do that either gives you a claim to a certain identifier, or makes other people believe that you have such a claim to that identifier. For instance, the language you speak, especially in the modern era, has a very strong connection to your ethnic identity both as you and other people perceive it.