How does Germany feel about its Celtic history and heritage? How much is it and how is it studied in Germany? What do the genetic examples show?
My mother has mostly Irish background and she really loves Celtic heritage and culture, and I remember when I was a kid she told me Celtic peoples came from Germany, and although linguistically we can't really make connections between German and say, Irish or Scots of Welsh, they do have some of the same sounds with the throaty -ch.
Any interesting academic articles to read for someone interested?
http://m.dw.com/en/archeologists-revise-image-of-ancient-celts/a-16528844
>>1007218
>celts
>germany
>>1007226
>>1007226
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1f/Celts_in_Europe.png
The word Celt is just about meaningless. Not totally meaningless but just about.
>>1007242
...go on.
>>1007242
This is pretty much true unfortunately. In antiquity it was an extremely vague stock name for some group of barbarians that had their origins in southern France, but it's hard to say exactly what was meant by it. In modern archaeology it began to be taken as synonymous with the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures that seem to have spread from southern Germany to France, northern Italy, and Spain, while at the same time linguists came up with a notion of Celtic languages once spoken in France and probably elsewhere, now found only in the British Isles and Brittany. These days it's casually used to refer to the "native" population of the British Isles, who were specifically NOT one of the groups of barbarians that the Greco-Roman civilization referred to as Celts. Add to that a whole bunch of popular myth and nationalist wank and you wind up with a word about as loaded as "druid".
OP, the Celtic urheimat is not widely agreed upon for the precise reason that it's difficult to define what is meant by Celts and Celtic. The Hallstatt culture of southern Germany is generally thought to be related to later cultures unambiguously defined as Celtic, but there is no evidence that every culture within the Hallstatt culture zone spoke a Celtic language (though some, particularly in northern Italy, certainly did), or that they all had anything in common with the people we think of as Celtic today. Similarly, the best known La Tene cultural sites, in France, were certainly home to Celtic-speaking people, but the nature of their relationship to other Celtic-speaking peoples simply isn't clear and probably never will be. In light of this, I think it behooves us to be cautious about making grand claims about the origins of the Celtic people or the Celtic heritage of anything in particular. Celtic and Germanic languages are both Indoeuropean and that's about as much as can broadly be said about their commonalities.
>>1007272
OP here. Thanks for such a good response. I too have felt like "Celt(ic)" is such a loose and foolish blanket term which poorly defines the peoples we're currently discussing.
By "The Hallstatt culture of southern Germany is generally thought to be related to later cultures unambiguously defined as Celtic" do you mean like the British Isles celts?
Also I'm curious as to what they think the southern Germany "Celts" spoke. Any clues?
>mfw celts take credit for the star maps of the glorious engineers
Seriously, David deserved to be reeeeeeeeed simply because his protoindoeuropean epa accent was so atrocious
>>1007351
How about actually reading my post? There's an ancient and a modern sense in which the name is used, these senses aren't whatsoever the same, and the word is commonly known enough that people bring their own bullshit to the table over and above these things.
>>1007354
Hallstatt art like pic related is generally agreed to be related to later La Tene culture art found in Gaul, which we know was made by Celts because Caesar wrote about the Celts and how he fucked their shit up in Gaul. And similar pieces can be found in some parts of the British Isles. But while the British in antiquity spoke what is now called a Celtic language, and they were definitely influenced by Celtic art and culture, antique writers did not consider them Celts and there is no evidence that they were strongly related to the populations that were considered Celts in antiquity.
>Any clues?
No, and it could well have been a Celtic language. We just don't know because they didn't write shit down and there was nobody nearby them who wrote shit down either.
>>1007727
Doesnt caesar go on about how the gauls and belgae and other celts are related to the britons, and even supply military aid to them?
Also, wasnt there a belgae tribe in britain before the roman occupation?
>>1007727
OP again.
Gotcha. So by that logic, the Irish, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons should perhaps have a different ethnic/linguistic/cultural name?
Thanks again for such good and thorough answers.
>>1007242
>The word Celt is just about meaningless.
It's about as meaningless as the terms Slav, Italic, Germanic or Indo-Iranian, which is to say not meaningless at all.
>>1007218
I'd imagine the average German doesn't care
>Celts? Like Asterix?
>>1008222
I think he means amongst German historic academics and the like. That seems quite obvious considering the topic is history and heritage, and that most people in general don't care for either anyway.
