Talk:Tartessian language/Archive 3

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Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3

Koch's latest paper, "On the Debate over the Classification of the Language of the South-Western (SW) Inscriptions, also known as Tartessian"

It seems to me after reading his latest paper, he is about ready to concede defeat on the Celtic issue. I am still not convinced of the Indo-European-ness of Tartessian yet, though the narkenti comments are interesting. - A.Tamar Chabadi (talk) 23:31, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

I agree, he's finally starting to make sense and narketi/narkenti is finally approaching an actual argument. Locating Proto-Celtic in Bronze-Age Portugal and the whole Celtic from the West/Atlantic Fringe Bronze-Age seafaring business is just hard to take seriously. He's only undermined his own credibility with that nonsense. On the other hand, the identification of Tartessian as merely Indo-European is not incompatible with consensus opinions and – in view of the nature of Lusitanian as either Para-Celtic (i. e., not Celtic but closely related to it), Italic (P-Italic, i. e., not necessarily Sabellic, as the change /kʷ/ > /p/ is quite trivial) or an independent branch of Indo-European – not that far-fetched at all. Lusitanian makes the possibility of a pre-Celtic Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age immigration from Central Europe or the Padanian Plain to Iberia attractive anyway, which is compatible with Urnfield finds in Catalonia. So why not? That said, the phonology of Tartessian appears to resemble the non-Indo-European Paleohispanic languages Iberian and Aquitanian-Basque more closely, so a cautious approach remains a good idea.
I would be interested to know when the first onomastic material appears – in the South-Western/"Tartessian" inscriptions – that exhibits clear Celtic traits (/gʷ/ > /b/, /p/ turned into some kind of fricative or lost, development of the long vowels, typically Celtic lexemes). It is traditionally thought that Celtic-speaking tribes first entered Iberia ca. 500 BC, but the 7th or 8th century is not excluded. Keep in mind that Proto-Celtic is traditionally dated to ca. 800–750 BC. Whatever language the inscriptions may be in themselves, if they are no older than the 7th century, the presence of Celtic names even from the beginning wouldn't be as unexpected to traditionally-minded scholars as Koch makes it out to be. On the other hand, the inscriptions from ca. 825 BC do not seem to be readable nor of Koch's concern. Celtic language material (whether names/loanwords or matrix language) in the late 9th century BC would be surprising, but only marginally off and thus not necessarily completely incompatible with the traditional "Out-of-Hallstatt" view. I think this is the main problem with Koch and his followers, they make grand claims of disproven paradigms from very little if at all. The consensus view is not as fixed, inflexible and rigid as they make it out to be; it doesn't depend on an extremely narrow window for the dating of Proto-Celtic, meaning that it doesn't all hang by a mere half-century earlier or later.
Let's keep in mind that the oldest unambiguous Celtic material is found in Lepontic inscriptions from as early as the 6th century and appears still quite close to Proto-Celtic as traditionally reconstructed.
This is particularly the uvamokozis inscription of Prestino and the pelkui inscription of Vergiate, although both are actually dated to the end of the 6th or the beginning of the 5th century BC, therefore not strictly clearly from the 6th. The χosioiso inscription of Castelletto sopra Ticino on the other hand is dated to the middle of the 6th century and generally identified as Lepontic but not clearly identifiable as Celtic in isolation: it's mainly the context that prompts the identification as Lepontic. The only inscriptions dated to the 7th century (but to its very end), the iunθanaχa inscription of Sesto Calende and the transalpine (hence not Lepontic) priś inscription of Montmorot, do not allow any linguistic identification at all – again, it is the context that makes us believe they are Celtic, not the content. At least, χosioiso can be plausibly interpreted as Indo-European, unlike the 7th-century inscription. On balance, however, we can say that in Central Europe, Celtic is plausibly attested as early as the 6th century and possibly as early as the 7th.
Actually, Schumacher prefers to date Proto-Celtic as early as the 13th century based on the apparent continuity between the Canegrate and Golasecca cultures, but I do not find this reason convincing as arguments from continuity are generally not particularly strong, and probably never really compelling. Canegrate could very easily have been a culture speaking an Italic or some other Indo-European language closely similar to Proto-Celtic that therefore could be Celticised very easily and without a noticeable break in material culture. There's even the possibility that Proto-Celtic was not spoken in the Urnfield culture north of the Alps, but in the Canegrate culture, and developped into Lepontic in situ, which would allow retaining the traditional later dating. But this shows how flexible the traditional view is. If we date Proto-Celtic to the 13th century, we are already in the context of the Urnfield culture and any incompatibility even with a Celtic language in 9th century BC Iberia evaporates. Therefore there is absolutely no need to assume a western location of Proto-Celtic. There are far too many possibilities that Koch does not even seem to consider; he is, or used to be, so monomaniacally fixed on his idea of a Western European origin of Celtic. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:49, 13 July 2014 (UTC)
Sure, Tartessian can't be Celtic, but what about Gallaecian? The traditional view is unable to explain the existence of two different Hispano-Celtic varieties, namely Celtiberian and Gallaecian, which linguistically speaking are worlds apart from Gallo-Brittonic. On the other hand, and as pointed out by Karl Horst Schmidt (quoted by F. Villar), Proto-Celtic shared isoglosses with Eastern IE languages (Indo-Iranian, Greek, Phrygian, etc.) such as the relative *jo- and inverted "thorn" clusters as in e.g. *gdon- 'earth', *gdonio- 'man'. At the same time, it had an Italic substrate/adstrate which accounts for the shared isoglosses (in other words, there's no Italic-Celtic node). On the other hand, placing Proto-Celtic south of the Alps is out of the question. As I explain in my blog, Cisalpine Gaulish karnitu and Lepontic karite are similar verbs with the meaning '(he) made/built' but with no Celtic etymology at all (despite so, Koch uses them as comparanda) but Etruscan correspondences, in my opinion from a satem reflex of IE *kʷer- 'to make'.
Koch's "Para-Celtic" (although he doesn't like that term) view of Lusitanian is nothing more than a modified version of "Italo-Celtic" located in Western Iberia. I agree with Villar that Lusitanian is an Italoid (rather than Italic) language, a group which Coromines called "Sorothaptic" (on its purported relationship to Urnfields) and was attested on several votive inscriptions on lead foils (now lost) from the thermal station of Els Banys d'Arles (Amélie-les-Bains). On the other hand, these authors (Villar and Coromines) also identified a Baltoid (i.e. Baltic-like) substrate language which they tend to merge with Italoid/Sorothaptic, although I'm not quite sure whether they're actually the same or different languages (for example, Lusitanian and Italoid have a/o while Baltoid only has a). I've been myself able to identify several Gallo-Romance words with no satisfactory Celtic etymology such as *borwā 'sludge', *komboro- 'heap, accumulation', *santikā 'scoop, laddle' (think of Panoramix in Asterix & Obelix) but clear Baltic parallels, which I regard as Baltoid loanwords in Gaulish. Talskubilos (talk) 10:22, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk pages are not here for people like you to push your fringe theories. Keep them on your blog and away from here.Cagwinn (talk) 17:28, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia's talk pages aren't for childish and impolite people. Grow a little bit wiser and kinder! Talskubilos (talk) 20:55, 22 July 2014 (UTC)
Boys, boys, there is no need for fighting. I have 3 responses to Mr. Koch's most recent work if anyone is interested. Pretty much all 3 are disagree with Mr. Koch. One of the authors points out an interesting connection between Iberian and "Tartessian" beyond what has already been tentatively pointed out by several authors...it looks to me to be a solid morphological connection. A.Tamar Chabadi (talk) 18:55, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
So what? There are also responses that either defend Koch's hypothesis, or at least treat it as a viable alternative to the older models of the development and spread of Celtic languages in western Europe. See, for instance, Paulus van Sluis, "The ‘Atlantic Fringe’ hypothesis for the Celtic homeland and the Tartessian inscriptions". Cagwinn (talk) 21:03, 17 December 2014 (UTC)
Jembana is gone now. There is no fight anymore - all we were doing was making sure his view of the truth of Koch's theory, still a minority view, wasn't being presented as the One True Way which has overthrown all alternative models for all time. Paul S (talk) 21:29, 17 December 2014 (UTC)


Some decent references: Catfish Jim and the soapdish 13:54, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

  • Mallory, J.P. (2014), "Editor's Note: The Indo-European-Tartessian Debate", Journal of Indo-European Studies, vol. 42, pp. 332–334
  • Koch, John T. (2014), "A Decipherment Interrupted: Proceeding from Valério, Eska and Prosper", Journal of Indo-European Studies, vol. 42, pp. 487–524

Nice set of articles there... I reckon it covers a fair chunk of the debate. Linguists and Philologists are sceptical. For the most part those writing in this issue consider there to be insufficient data to convincingly classify Tartessian as Celtic. I don't think it constitutes outright rejection by the academic community... but we need to moderate language to accurately reflect the debate. Catfish Jim and the soapdish 14:04, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Cagwin etc, are there any more positive publications from linguists etc that balance these? Catfish Jim and the soapdish 17:04, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

I haven't really been following the topic as of late. Cagwinn (talk) 22:02, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

As there seem to be too interest on quoting books on Koch on the alleged Tartessian-Celtic thing, but too little on the criticisms, let us quote Sims-Williams "The location of the Celts according to Hecataeus, Herodotus, and other Greek witers" in Études Celtiques XLII-2016 who in note 47 lists publications by 13 researchers: CLACKSON, HOZ, ZEIDLER, SIMKIN, NOCENTINI, GORROCHATEGUI, LUJÁN, ESKA, PRóSPER, SCHRIJVER, MIKHAILOVA, RODRÍGUEZ RAMOS, and himself "against the Celticity of 'Tartessian'" (published between 2007 and 2015). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.19.145.183 (talk) 17:48, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Have a read of this fully referenced article - there is support from a number of prominent linguists for John T Koch's argument that Tartessian is Celtic:

https://www.academia.edu/29569963/Common_Ground_and_Progress_on_the_Celtic_of_the_South-_western_SW_Inscriptions

Hope this help you with your debate.Askatuga (talk) 01:17, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Found some more in support:

http://www.jies.org/docs/monojpgs/Mon62.html

https://www.academia.edu/27329868/Some_Southwest_Iberian_Inscriptions

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=KeL3CAAAQBAJ&pg=PT264&lpg=PT264&dq=tartessian+alice+roberts&source=bl&ots=px2bT-0weL&sig=W3WLFArWz9a-2R4MxL0VD94LE0k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjTl4T3lrnSAhUHUbwKHT23AucQ6AEIKjAD#v=onepage&q=tartessian%20alice%20roberts&f=false

Seems like a substantial body of support for John T Koch's position to me.Askatuga (talk) 01:30, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the deletion of my comment Doug, but to say that this article is very biased towards Koch points of view is not a forum question, but a very very serious quality problem. But in one thing you are right: that quality problem is not MY problem. Thanks again. Have a nice day!. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.21.157.180 (talk) 09:56, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Put that way it is acceptable. Doug Weller talk 13:26, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
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