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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Pre-Celtic Britain & Ireland
In-Reply-To: dragon@netcom.com's message of Fri, 4 Nov 1994 11:49:46 GMT
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Date: Fri, 4 Nov 1994 20:56:14 GMT
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In article <dragonCyqrIy.49G@netcom.com> dragon@netcom.com
(David Swanson Millians) writes:

>What were the languages spoken in the British Isles before the arrival of the
>Celtic tongues in the first millenia BCE?  Obviously we have no written
>records of these, but has there been any meaningful speculation on the nature
>of these languages or their relaitonships to any surviving tongues?

Without some record, there is no way to know anything about any actual language
spoken in the past.  (NB:  Reconstructed proto-languages are not "actual
languages spoken in the past," but tools used by historical linguists.)  Thus,
there cannot be, by definition, "any meaningful speculation" regarding such
languages.

Records here can be taken to include such things as place names, river names,
and the like.  I don't know if much has been done about pre-Celtic place names
in the British Isles; you might try one of the journals on Namenforschung, or
the _Journal of Indo-European Studies_.

If even place names are unknown...
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
