Celts descend from Spanish

[sarahsean]

There was a program on RTE (Irish national channel) about two years ago about the origins of Irish people from the west of Ireland. As some of you may know around the Galway region there are some people who have very dark hair and are very Spanish looking in appearance. They did some DNA testing and found that people were related to people in the Basque country.

Also the Gaelic language and Gaeilge are so similar. My knowledge of Irish comes from my children`s homework and they are not great at it but even I can notice the similarities between them it is incredible.


Very  interesting.

Sarah

[Mike in Cumbria]

Also the Gaelic language and Gaeilge are so similar.

What do you mean? Gaeilge is the Irish form of Gaelic, and as such is closely related to Scottish and Manx Gaelic - nothing to do with Basque.

These three languages form the Goidelic branch of the Celtic family tree. The other, Brythonic, branch includes Welsh, Breton and Cornish but again, is nothing to do with Basque.

[Old Bristolian]

Surely archaeological evidence makes plain that the Celts came from central Europe/southern Russia and spread into western Europe in early historic times. Any link between the Iberian peninsula and the Celts of Britain is surely a product if the respective tribes moving west into those regions. The names speak for themselves (remember G=W) Gaul, Galicia, Wales, CornWALL. By the way, what happened to the Angles Saxons and Jutes in the Professor's list of oriigns of the British race?

Steve

[Mike in Cumbria]

Surely archaeological evidence makes plain that the Celts came from central Europe/southern Russia and spread into western Europe in early historic times. Any link between the Iberian peninsula and the Celts of Britain is surely a product if the respective tribes moving west into those regions.

Yes, that's right.

Although, the extent to which there really was a spread of "Celtic people" across Europe is now being questioned. There was certainly a spread of the Celtic languages, and Celtic culture, but some historians now suggest that this didn't imply mass movement and displacement of people. It could be analogous to the Norman conquest of England and Wales - ie the elite at the top changed, but the mass of peasantry pretty much stayed where they were.

[Mike in Cumbria]

A form of Euskara or Basque, therefore, has been in western Europe longer than any other current language.  That much is certain, but the question remains as to where it came from.

The best guess (in the absence of hard proof) is that it originated there, and is the last survivor of what were probably hundreds of indigenous  European languages.  All the others were gradually replaced by the spread of the Indo-European languages (Latin and its derivatives, the Celtic group, the Germanic languages, Slavic etc).

In its roots, it is totally unrelated to any other language. Of course, over the years, loan words have gone back and forwards between it and its neighbouring languages, such as the Spanish "izquierda" for left, but that doesn't alter the fact of its uniqueness.

[mike175]

I am often amused, sometimes annoyed, by discussions of ancestral homelands. In every case it can only relate to a particular, often relatively short, period of history (or prehistory).

There seems little room for doubt that we all originated in Africa and various groups took different migratory routes to populate the rest of the World, probably during the last 60,000 years. If that is the case no group can truly lay claim to any particular area as their ancestral home, other than for a given period of time.

Since the last Ice Age it seems likely that there was re-population northwards along the western side of the British Isles from the Iberian peninsula, meaning most of these people shared a common ancestry, but whether they were Celts is open to question. As many others have said, the term is probably a recent invention drawing on a romantic interpretation of history.

[Sinann]

There was a program on RTE (Irish national channel) about two years ago about the origins of Irish people from the west of Ireland. As some of you may know around the Galway region there are some people who have very dark hair and are very Spanish looking in appearance. They did some DNA testing and found that people were related to people in the Basque country.

Also the Gaelic language and Gaeilge are so similar. My knowledge of Irish comes from my children`s homework and they are not great at it but even I can notice the similarities between them it is incredible.


Very  interesting.

Sarah

I don't think this program was claiming the celts came from the Basque region just that the first people to land in Ireland were from the Basque region.
The Celts were later.

The DNa results across the country basically match the various 'invasions' through history as each new group pushed the previous one west, so the remaining Badque DNA is mainly in the west and for years was thought to be from the Spanish Armada survivors.