10-04-2006, 03:47 PM
The problem with stating categorically that "all you Brits" are Spaniards is that it ignores centuries, if not millennia, of migration and conquest. Assumedly, we are trying to identify a cultural and linquistic, if not physiological and genetic type for the Britons who lived in what is now the British Isles before the Roman invasions.
Angus Konstan offers the following analysis, in his Historical Atlas of the Celtic World:
In the southeastern corner of Britain a succession of Belgic tribes had established themselves [by mid-first century BC], at the expense of other Celtic tribes who were displaced further north. These were Gauls, driven across the Channel by a combination of a population increase in northern Gaul, and by pressure from the Germans to the east.
Differientiating the Belgic tribes from "other Celtic tribes" may explain some of the cultural and genetic variance identified among the resulting populations. (Julius Ceasar may have been a better soldier and politician than ethnologist.)
This multi-step dispersion of Celts into Britain, Spain, Turkey and elsewhere on the fringes of the Celtic world, of course, has long been credited with the variations among the languages spoken by those Celts, especially between Brythonic and what became modern Irish and Scot.
Angus Konstan offers the following analysis, in his Historical Atlas of the Celtic World:
In the southeastern corner of Britain a succession of Belgic tribes had established themselves [by mid-first century BC], at the expense of other Celtic tribes who were displaced further north. These were Gauls, driven across the Channel by a combination of a population increase in northern Gaul, and by pressure from the Germans to the east.
Differientiating the Belgic tribes from "other Celtic tribes" may explain some of the cultural and genetic variance identified among the resulting populations. (Julius Ceasar may have been a better soldier and politician than ethnologist.)
This multi-step dispersion of Celts into Britain, Spain, Turkey and elsewhere on the fringes of the Celtic world, of course, has long been credited with the variations among the languages spoken by those Celts, especially between Brythonic and what became modern Irish and Scot.
"Fugit irreparabile tempus" (Irrecoverable time glides away) Virgil
Ron Andrea
Ron Andrea
