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In the south-west of the Iberian Peninsula, there is a corpus of inscriptions, now totaling about 100. Some of these are at least as old as the 7th century BC. It is widely recognized that this material contains fairly numerous Indo-European onomastic elements, many specifically Celtic. It has more than once been proposed that the SW language as a whole is Indo-European, and a specifically Celtic classification has been offered repeatedly. In recent years publications by the author have favored this explanation, both for the onomastics and a recurrent epigraphic formula, which seems to show the preverb ro. The present paper takes as its point of departure objections raised by Joseph Eska in three reviews where he offered an alternative explanation of a non-Indo-European matrix language. It is argued here that the recognized Celtic names have similar implications for European cultural history, whatever one decides about the matrix language, and that the one-language hypothesis (Indo-European/Celtic) is on balance stronger than that of Celtic names in a non-IE matrix language.
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I. Three and a half theories
§1. Many linguists will be interested in Eric Hanrp's 2012 revision of his 1989 Indo-European family tree (both in Hanrp 2013). For the present subject, the node called Northwest Indo-European1 is most relevant. The older and newer versions of this branch are redrawn in Fig. I.2
§2. The biggest change in this section of the tree is that what had been Northwest Indo-European in 1989 has become two sibling branches in 2012: (I) Northwest Indo- European and (II) Northern Indo-European ("mixture with non-Indo-European"). The latter branch (not included above) comprises: (1) "GERMANO-PREHELLENIC" (whence the siblings Germanic and Prehellenic (substrate geography)3); (2) Thracian, Dacian (as a single node); (3) Cimmerian; (4) Tocharian; and (5) "Adriatic-Balto- Slavic" (wh ence the siblings (a) Balto-Slavic and (b) "Adriatic Indo-European" (the latter being the parent of (i) Albanian and (ii) "MESSAPO-lLLYRIAN").4 Thus, one way in which the 2012 tree is different is that Phrygian alone is now seen as forming a subgroup with Italo-Celtic, whereas the 1989 tree had Italo-Celtic, Tocharian, Phrygian, Messapic, "Illyrian", and Germanic, all as first-generation descendants of Northwest Indo- European, together with an "EASTERN NODE" (as a sibling in the same generation as Italo-Celtic...