Comments by "" (@jboss1073) on "Celts vs Germanic Tribes: Origins & Earliest Sources" video.

No on in history ever called any British Islander "Celt" so what makes you a Celt? Linguistic academics from 1582? Who named your language "Celtic" only because he though it came from the Celtici from Spain?
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12:38 - "Romans conquered almost all of Celtic lands relatively easily" - No, only Gauls was easy (8 years). Iberia was hard (200 years) and Strabo and Siculus also noted as much.
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11:00 - Julius Caesar is not the most detailed source of the Celts by far... he was peddling on disinformation according to his closest allies who wrote as much.
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@jp16k92 It didn't happen. The Romans were engaged in negative propaganda against its adversaries. This is widely known. Almost none of the Roman accusations against the tribes they deemed barbarians has any historical validity.
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The Celts were not a nordic people. The name "Celt" is not found natively anywhere in the British Isles, nor in Ireland, nor in northern France. It is only found in southern France and Iberia in items of native peoples. The northern French people and the British Islanders knew themselves probably as Belgae, as that tribe carried its name to both England and Ireland. Otherwise, northern peoples do not have any connection to the name "Celts".
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@gandolfthorstefn1780 The Silures and the Picts were possibly the two farthest people from the Romans; no wonder they could not beat them; this is hardly to their credit but rather a large component of this is due to their remoteness and their poverty which was not interesting to the Romans.
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11:27 "we just don't have any written sources calling Brits Celts" well then you can't say "but we know they were Celts", can you? No, you cannot.
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10:00 In Geographica, book 3, chapter 2, section 15, line 3, he says clearly that the Celts were of the same ethnicity ("kinship") as the Turdetani who were ethnically southern Portuguese. In 4.1.1, 4.1.14 and 4.4.1 he explains that Celts in Gallia are only the Narbonensis, those who live in the extreme south by the gulf. Everyone else in Gallia, he says, are Gallians, not Celts. Diodorus Siculus (V.32.1) agrees with him exactly. Also Augustus, after Caesar, correctly denominated Gallia Narbonensis as "Gallia Celtica" taking that name away from "Gallia Lugdunensis" which had been given to it incorrectly by Caesar.
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Unfortunately this is not correct. Celts were not nordic peoples, they were southwestern peoples. Herodotus first located the Celts beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which means they can only have been originally from western Iberia. Indeed that is the only place where people calling themselves Celts are found through their artifacts. Then Diodorus Siculus and Strabo both said "Celts in Gallia are only in the south; everyone else is Gallic (Gaul)", so the Greeks knew that "Celts" were not a nordic people.
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@FaithfulOfBrigantia "Romans also describe the Caledonians (Sctoland) as having nordic features, and then assume this must mean they were of Germanic origin, implying they associated Nordic features with Germanics not Celts. They do the same with the Belgae, who are considered Gallic, but NOT Celtic, and also sometimes argued to be of Germanic origin or at least heavy Germanic mixture." Yes, that was Tacitus in Agricola, Chapter XI, "The reddish (_rutilae_) hair and large limbs of the Caledonians proclaim a German origin". "They do the same with the Belgae, who are considered Gallic, but NOT Celtic, and also sometimes argued to be of Germanic origin or at least heavy Germanic mixture." Yes, that was Caesar in Bello Gallico, Book II, Chapter 4, "that the greater part of the Belgae were sprung, from the Germans, and that having crossed the Rhine at an early period, they had settled there, on account of the fertility of the country, and had driven out the Gauls who inhabited those regions;". Also note that Strabo in Geographica, Book 3, Chapter 2, section 5, line 3, agrees with Polybius in saying that the Celts were ethnically like the southern Portuguese: "in the case of the Turdetani (southern Portuguese), and with the Celtici on account of their proximity, as Polybius has stated, due to their consanguinity and kinship." Pliny also says the people who actually call themselves Celts were ethnically central Portuguese: "Mirobrigenses qui Celtici cognominantur" (meaning "the central-Portuguese people of Mirobriga, who call themselves Celts by surname"). (Source: Pliny, Natural History, Book IV, paragraph 118, confirmed independently by epigraphic evidence "CAIUS PORCIUS SEVERUS MIROBRIGENSIS CELTICUS ANNORUM LX" inscription found in Mirobriga, Portugal) And finally, that same Pliny reiterates the idea of Celts being ethnically Portuguese by saying "Celticos a Celtiberis ex Lusitania advenisse manifestum est sacris, lingua, oppidorum vocabulis, quae cognominibus in Baetica distinguntur" (Source: Pliny, Natural History, 3.13.5), meaning "It is obvious that the Celts originate from those Celtiberians out of Lusitania, on account of their religion, language, city names and surnames which distinguish them in Baetica".
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@ce5894 "Other than the Gauls (whom the Greeks recorded as referring to themselves as Celts) there's no evidence to suggest other tribes did, or did not. " Oof, you're very uninformed. There are hundreds of ancient tombstones only in western Iberia with the names "Celti", "Celtiati", "Celtici", "Celtigun", etc. It is quite silly to see people who have no right to use the name of the Celts and no direct inheritance of the name of the Celts wanting to use the name of the Celts instead of the names of their own ancestors. But the truth is only Lusitanians and Galicians called themselves Celts (yes, even though everyone wants to believe Lusitanian was not a "Celtic language", whatever that means, since "Celtic" was never a language in ancient times, this only started in 1582 among British scholars). Go ahead and do your own research but your ancestors are laughing at your confusion around their names. They never saw themselves as Celts. There is some evidence they saw themselves as Gallians and as Belgians (yes both Irish and British used the name of the Belgians natively, look up "Builg"). "Neither did the Anglo-Saxons or Jutes and other tribes refer to themselves as German." That is right, and they are not German. Do you see English people saying "I'm German"? No. You are confusing linguistic designations. The only people who called themselves Germani (and those people did exist) were the western Germans (there is an entire paper on that called "Developing the Germani in Roman Studies"). The others had their own names. What is so hard to understand about this? Look at the case of the Illyrians which happened throughout Greek chronicling: the Greeks first said the Illyrians were a specific people, then later said they were an entire country, then later they were all Balkanic peoples. The term European was also first only referring to Macedonians, then to Balkanic peoples, then to all Europeans. All terms went through that path, or most of the commonly used ones that became famous, at least. The same happened to Celts. Strabo even says so, saying the Greeks generalized the name of the Celts of southern France to all Galatians of France due to the fame of the Narbonese Celts who of course lived right next to colonizing Greeks. I could go on and on but I recommend you start loving your own ancestors, their history and their name, and honor those things, instead of trying to adopt foreign history.
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That is correct. Ancient Greeks and Romans despite noticing some Celts being blonde-and-blue eyed, when they saw a people who were mostly blonde-and-blue eyed they assumed they were originally Germanic, not Celtic.
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@Cornflakes-sr3nq The whole of Spain is between 29% and 31% Yamnaya directly from Switzerland and southwestern Germany from 2,500 BC to 1,800 BC when the Corded Ware Eastern Bell Beakers mixed with the Iberian Maritime Bell Beakers. So even the Iberians who are the "least Germanic" of the Celts are still almost a third Germanic. The others even more so as expected from being closer to Germany. Keep in mind the most Germanic people are 53% Yamnaya so that is the "upper limit" of current Europeans. Given that, 31% is not little.
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@brutalisaxeworth3024 Britons were never Celts - they never called themselves by that name nor did anyone else call them that name.
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This is now no longer speculation but the standard theory in academia, with Patrick Sims-Williams, a Celtoskeptic, being the current President of the International Congress for Celtic Studies which regulates all academic Celtic Studies programs. The "Hallstatt = Celts" theory died after he published his pivotal paper "An Alternative to Celtic from the East and Celtic from the West".
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@MattieK09 "Which paper?" "An alternative to Celtic from the East and Celtic from the West" by Patrick Sims-Williams. It comprehensively explains why Hallstatt and La Tene were not Celtic.
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I'm way more on the right politically than you and I'm here to tell you De Bello Gallico is completely inadequate as a historical source. A close source to Caesar wrote that he put that together without any care for reality or truth. And indeed both Strabo and Siculus after Caesar corrected his description of the Celts, saying there were only Celts in southwestern Europe and not in the north, and that Caesar did not know anything about ethnography, much less Geography.
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 @FaithfulOfBrigantia Now that you edited your post, I am proud of how well-informed you are, and I bet you will enjoy my well-cited post corroborating everything you said.
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The Scottish people never historically called themselves Celts nor were they ever referred to as Celts by anyone in history. They are not Celts. Only linguists call them that, and that is because of a misconception at the time of naming those languages that Breton was the survival of Gaulish.
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@ce5894 "Brythonic tongues in Strathclyde, Gwynedd, Cumbria and Breton, not to mention the P-Celtic tongue of their Pictish cousins = Celtic. The beautiful Goedelic lilts of my Dalriadan ancestors = Celtic. All of which had developed from the proto celtic of the Atlantic seaways. " Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Many Celtic academics (like John Collis) have already pointed out that languages were historically named after the people who spoke them, not the other way around. This thing of saying "the Irish are Celts because they speak a Celtic language" only started in the 1900's. Before that, the language you spoke was always called a name derived from the name of the people who spoke it. So only a people called "Celts" (as in actually called that by themselves, like the Celti in Lusitania and the Celtici in Galicia did, not by Greeks or Romans) could have spoken "Celtic". In fact so much so was the naming of languages after the people, that Tacitus once said that the Galatians spoke "Germanice", betraying that languages were named after the ethnicity of the people who spoke it; no people has ever been named historically after the language they spoke: a clear example of that is the Romans who spoke Latin (a language started by a specific tribe called Latini) and yet the Romans never dared to call themselves "the Latins". Only you and other misinformed people by linguistic academics are going around daring to call yourself by the name of the people who happened to have originated the language you currently speak. Also consider that if you are "Celtic" because of your language, well, most Irish and Scottish people no longer speak "Celtic", so that means you should stop calling yourself "Celts" and now call yourself "Germans" instead. See how that doesn't make any sense?
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11:17 - not true that only Gauls were called "Celts" by the Romans. Pliny said clearly there were people who called themselves Celts in Mirobriga (modern-day central Portugal).
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Hence the history you are reading cannot possibly be true. Those were just smears by the Romans against the people they sought to conquer. Obviously Germanic peoples were always the most liberal, started health care and socialism, etc.
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@tutenhamon9625 "Germanic are mix of Scandinavian Celts and Baltic people" Yes but that hides details. Germanic people are a Beaker-like EEF component (like the Celts) plus a Yamnaya component (like the Germanics) and a small amount of Baltic.
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@gcanaday1 "That isn't what he said." Don't think I'm going to follow up on such a low-effort contribution to the conversation that I can barely understand who the "he" is or what you're referring to at all.
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Then why is there no social trust in many places in Africa such that they can barely start any group enterprise? Farmers are constantly pillaged over there.
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@brutalisaxeworth3024 "One of these that split off would go on to become the Celtic culture. For the majority of their history, the Celts actually dominated much of central Europe. Eventually they made their way to the British isles and completely wiped out and replaced the hunter gatherers there. The Celts living on the islands then split into different tribal affiliations like the Picts, Welsh, and, you guessed it, THE BRITTONS." This is a fantasy and there is no documentary evidence linking the word or name "Celts" historically to the Britons nor to the Welsh, Picts, Irish, etc. There's no such thing as "Celtic culture", that is a Romanticist invention of British academics - not the whole world is British and most of the Celtic academics do not accept this association between Britons and Celts, including the current President of the International Congress for Celtic Studies, Patrick Sims-Williams, which regulates all academic Celtic Studies programs. There was never any association between the name of the Celts and anything in Central Europe nor in the British Isles nor specifically in Ireland. If there were you would simply show it.
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@jp16k92 No such thing as "British Celts" , the name "Celts" never occurred natively historically in the British Isles nor in Ireland, until George Buchanan in 1582 called your languages "Celtic" because he though they came originally from the Celtici of Spain.
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@Dovahkiin0117 People are people and the Romans were interested in conquering Iberia and they were spending their ink and paper on that and only that, not on any inspiration to make an encyclopedia of those people.
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Celtic is not Hallstatt anymore. Read the paper by Sims-Williams.
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@Bcfcuklhpwalker Yes Sims knows about that. Do you know about the Builg in Ireland and the Belgae in England? The British Islanders had an association with the name of the Belgae, not with the name of the Celts.
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The Portuguese are the only people truly "Celtic" as they are the only ones who called themselves "Celts" in their own personal items and tombstones. And indeed Herodotus said the Celts lived beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar) which narrows Iberia down to Portugal and Galicia as being the home of the Celts. Everyone else, according to Strabo and Siculus, were not Celts but "Gallians" which we today call "Gauls". Don't let Germanic people take your exclusive Celtic ancestry from you.
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Forget the Alps, the Celts are not associated with the Alps. Read Patrick Sims-Williams "An alternative to Celtic from the East and Celtic from the West" where he explains why Hallstatt and La Tene were not actually Celtic and should not be associated with them. Otherwise you are correct that Celtic languages come from standardized Bell Beaker dialects.
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The Irish were never known as "Celts" historically until 1582 a linguistic named their languages "Celtic" because he thought they came from the Celtici in Spain. So if anyone is "Celt" it is the Spaniards who are descendants of the people who called themselves Celts, not anyone from Ireland who never called themselves Celts.
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The Irish and Scots are not Celts, they never called themselves Celts, and this only started linguistically because George Buchanan in 1582 decided to call Irish and Scottish languages "Celtic" because he thought and he said those languages came from Spain where the Celtici lived. So the only reason The British Isles have anything to do linguistically only with the term "Celtic" is due to their supposed connection to Spain.
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@BrianBorumaMacCennetig367 "The term British isles is problematic." I understand that, however Ireland was indeed called "Britannia Minor" by the Romans, so the name "British" does belong historically to Ireland. Compared to Ireland's inexistent historical relationship with the name "Celt", the name "British" at least was used to refer to the Irish historically. And if you really think British Isles is problematic then please from not on refer to the Iberian Peninsula as the Celtiberian Peninsula - there aren't just Iberians there.
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@CelticHound357 "Used as it's intentions. An umbrella term. And yes, I know they never called themselves Celts. But to say the Scots and Irish Gael didn't mix with the, "Celts." If you say so." Why use an umbrella term? Just use their own name. They had their own names. The Irish called themselves Gaels, Goidels, Hibernians, Fenians, etc. No need to go stealing the name of western Iberians and southern French just because you like it and then acting like they can use that name because they might have mixed with the Celts. Don't do that. Let each people have their own name. The people who called themselves Celts in their own names as inscribed in their own personal pottery and tombstones lived mostly in western Iberia with colonies in Narbo and Massilia. Everywhere else, other tribes had their own names that did not use the word "Celt". The Greeks knowingly generalized the name of the Celts to all Galatians as Strabo explains in Book 4.
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@BrianBorumaMacCennetig367 "Not really british in modern use is a nationality thus it can't be used. " Who cares what things are today? What matters is what they were originally. If you disagree, we will never agree. Today anyone can give any meaning to any word. Back then words meant something. Hence the original meaning rules. "I doubt the Irish would ever call themselves little Britain anything. " Well, Britannia simply means "shapeful" so I can see the Irish calling two islands "big shapeful" and "little shapeful" without that implying anything little about them as a people. "So the term was never used by the Irish themselves and thus doesn't exist as a term in historical records in ireland, Éire does which the greeks called Irene - Ἰέρνη." Would you look at that, when the Irish don't want a name they certainly know how to argue against it - "the term was never used by the Irish themselves and thus doesn't exist as a term in historical records in ireland" - well guess what, the same exact thing can be said of the term "Celt" in Ireland and Britain: "the term was never used by the Irish themselves and thus doesn't exist as a term in historical records in ireland". "The Irish aren't british stop trying to push your nationality onto people, that's called imperialism." That's not where I'm coming from. I'm coming from "if the Irish can use something as arbitrary as the 19th century name of their language 'Celtic' to refer to themselves as 'Celts', then certainly by that measure they should be called British since they were actually called that by the ancient Greeks - who by the way never called the Irish 'Celts'.". That's where I'm coming from - all of a sudden you are an expert in researching which names the Irish used for themselves, but when it comes time to use "Celts" for yourselves you never seem to remember how to do that research! Unbelievable.
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@BrianBorumaMacCennetig367 "by the greeks and the romans is the key bit of information here, not by the Irish themselves. The term celt was never used by the Irish nor was the term british it's the same argument." Well okay if you accept that then fine, but you must admit most of your compatriot Irish people have been skirting this rule and only closely revising against their being called "British" but never quite applying that same level of revision against their being called "Celts". In my opinion the Irish have practiced military impostorship against the western Iberians and southern French who actually were called Celts and who are the people the Greeks and Romans had in mind when they mentioned Celts - as most of the citations about the Celts being about tribes in Iberia goes to show.
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@BrianBorumaMacCennetig367 The Greeks did not invent the term "Britannia", it is a native name to the British Isles, potentially including Ireland. "The Irish and celts are far to independent and prideful to do such a thing." Then show that independence and help Irish people stop calling themselves Celts which "Last of all we have no evidence of the term little britian within ireland if such a term was used by the Irish it would survive into modern times like Éire or Irene does, yet no such term exists within ireland and never has."
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@BrianBorumaMacCennetig367 "This is incredibly unlikely as I told you, show me evidence that the greeks didn't invent it." Gladly. The linguistic consensus as you can see by going to Wiktionary and looking up Britannia and clicking on the Etymology until you get to it, is that Britannia is ultimately derived from a Celtic language ethnonym (hence right there it can't have been Greek), reconstructed as early Brythonic *Pritani, perhaps from a Proto-Celtic *Kwritani, whence Welsh "Prydyn" meaning "Picts", Old Irish "Cruthne", "Cruithen-túath" meaning "Picts" (so if the Greeks had invented it, it would be very unlikely for those peoples to adopt those names for themselves and the Picts), all from PIE *kwer "to do, to make, to shape". In fact this is why basically "Picts" and "Brits" are the same meaning from different roots, both meaning "shapes" or "the people of shapes" due to the drawings they made on their bodies. On the other hand there is no plausible theory for the Greeks having come up with the term "Britannia", not to mention it was not usual of the Greeks to invent names of other peoples they referred to, but instead to use the names of those peoples in order to make their references useful in the real-world.
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@BrianBorumaMacCennetig367 You're right, maybe British was strictly Welsh at first. However Ireland does have the name Builg there, from the Belgae, as per O'Rahilly.
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@BrianBorumaMacCennetig367 "O'Rahilly has been heavily debunked by modern historians his theories are questionable.. " Agreed. However I never said "Listen to everything O'Rahilly said", I only said he identified, correctly so, that the Belgae went to Ireland and called themselves Builg there. The linguistic derivation makes sense here. "Belgae were related to the Gaulish people was it not?" Well, I don't mean to be pedantic, but "Gaulish" is a modern term. Greco-Romans used either "Celts" a name which was "Galli", "Gallo", in English "Gallians" by the Romans, and "Galates", "Galatas", in English "Galatians" by the Greeks. People usually translate "Galli" from the Romans and "Galates" from the Greeks as "Gaulish" but it's important to understand "Gaulish" was never a word in the mind of any ancient peoples. To answer your question, Strabo and Diodorus Siculus both said that the Galatians were the same people as the Belgae, and that Galatians lived all over Gallia except in the southern shore where the Celts lived. Therefore it seems the two most well-informed ethnologists of the ancient world agreed that the Gallians were coethnic with the Belgae but neither was coethic with the southern Celts.
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Forget bagpipes, Portugal is littered with ancient artifacts bearing the names of the Celts (Celti, Celtiati, Celtici, etc), something no other place in Europe can say about itself.
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@FaithfulOfBrigantia I just saw your comment. Thank you for the kind words and happy birthday. I am glad I could contribute to your day. I actually thought the same you just said - that it's good to know there are people who still know some history out there - and even showed your comment to my brother. I have been working on a project about this for a while now and will be releasing some significant material soon. The memory of the Celts shall live on. Best regards, brother.
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@FaithfulOfBrigantia I stand by my statement that they were ethnically Portuguese. Portugal definitely did exist at the time - it was the Port in Cale. Also, their composition has not varied as compared to the Portuguese of today, hence it is valid to say they are anachronistically like their descendants. Finally, if I said it the way you did, it would be incorrect as the peoples you cited indeed form an Atlantid-Alpinid continuum however the Portuguese and the North Italians being at separate ends of that spectrum were and are still separate ethnicities, so it would not be correct to say the western Iberians who called themselves Celts were akin to the Northern Italians as they were on the Portuguese side of that spectrum. I am very careful with my words and I have seen your objection before but if they had a genetic composition identical to that of their future descendants then I do believe it is valid to say those ancient people were genetically like those modern people. It is more important to be precise, and your alternative is less precise by attributing an entire genetic spectrum to a people that only belonged to one of its ends.
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@FaithfulOfBrigantia However, allow me to thank you for bringing up this point to my attention, that the Greeks and Romans associated Nordic features with Germanic peoples and not with the Celts. That is very valuable to me and the research I am conducting. Thank you.
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@FaithfulOfBrigantia Let's connect, then. It's hard to share contact info here. I will try. It's magnetfreak, and then the rest is that at sign, and then of course yepmail, and then a dot of course, and then you can write net, and I hope to hear from you soon.
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Also because, as Fintan O'Toole, Literary Editor of The Irish Times, once noted in a famous published article, the Irish were never "Celts" and so should drop that name association altogether.
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