David Harley wrote:
> Francine Nichols wrote:
>
Excuse me--my name is Francine Nicholson.
> It might be appropriate to enquire who these "Celts" are supposed to be.
> Clearly not the Celtoi from the Adriatic who visited Alexander the Great,
> and whom he described as great braggarts because they told him during the
> course of a drinking session that they feared only the sky falling on
> their
> heads. Could they be the people invented in the early eighteenth century
> by Edward Lhuyd? Certainly, nobody in Western Europe knew that they were
> supposed to be Celts at any time before then.
>
I use the term Celts in the same way as Barry Cunliffe, Miranda
Green, Rees & Rees, J.F. Nagy, M. Tymoczko, and numerous others do: to
denote the various groups that shared culture and language derived
ultimately from a common source that modern scholars have agreed to call
"Celtic."
> Cultural transmission, by trade and travelling craftsmen rather than by
> waves of racially pure invaders, seems a likelier explanation of most of
> the similarities of language and artefacts as one sees among the peoples
> of
> Europe.
>
In your opinion.
> In a comparable manner, the idea that a few thousand Anglo-Saxon
> invaders could exterminate or expel the Romano-British population,
> numbered
> in millions, is clearly absurd.
>
> We need to avoid parroting, if only through our terminology, the
> discredited ideas of an older (often racist) historiography.
> Anachronistic
> terms need to be clearly flagged as such.
>
Excuse me, I do not recall suggesting that the Celts were a racially
pure group of any kind. You jumped to that conclusion and attributed to me
opinions that are not mine.
What is anachronistic or inappropriate about using "Celtic" to
denoite groups that spoke Celtic languages?
Francine Nicholson
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