File talk:Celtic Expansion.svg
Comments
[edit]Inaccuracies
[edit]I like the concept and appearance of this map, but a number of its details seem to be inaccurate. (1) The shaded areas for 'modern Celtic speech' are wildly off, showing Celtic languages in the Orkneys, Upper Brittany, and the northern Scottish Lowlands; in Ireland, County Tipperary is shaded whereas County Donegal is not. (2) The dates of the Celtic invasions of Britain are surely open to debate. (3) There were at least two waves of Celtic penetration into the Iberian peninsula, the latest of which brought La Tène material culture with it. (4) Bracketing together the "Etruscans, Romans etc." as a single category is not valid linguistically; it also glosses over a major cultural gulf. Rome, to be sure, was more deeply influenced by Etruscan civilization than other Italic peoples were, but this is as one would expect for a city on the border between the two civilizations. (5) "Celtiberian" refers to only one of several Celtic peoples of the Iberian peninsula; others further west were Celtic but not Celtiberian, while the Lusitanians were probably neither. Regarding language, the scholarly consensus seems to be that Lusitanian might have descended not from proto-Celtic but from a reasonably close relative of proto-Celtic (cf. Ligurian for a similar situation). (6) "Scythes" are agricultural tools; the ethnonym should be "Scythians". If some or all of these inaccuracies could be corrected, I'd be delighted! QuartierLatin1968 (talk) 19:30, 17 October 2014 (UTC)