A fascinating academic dispute between @thecelticist (@MaynoothUni @MU_Research) & Dr Lara Cassidy (@tcddublin) in a BBC History blog (@DJMusgrove) about how to interpret the "Newgrange incest story" that broke last week.https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/do-early-medieval-irish-texts-shed-light-prehistoric-incest/ …
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Can there be memory continuity over 4000 years? Is there language continuity in Ireland from the Bronze Age to the High Middle Ages? I am sure I have said this before here, from a comparative linguistic point of view it is inconceivable that the Celtic precursor language...
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...of Irish (basically Proto-Irish or Primitive Irish) arrived in this island much earlier than the last few centuries BC. I do not contend that there may have been waves of Indo-European immigrations into Ireland before this (and genetic studies suggest this very strongly)...
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...but Indo-European does not equal Celtic. This or these lost IE language(s) may or may not have been closely related to Celtic. We just don't know. But we can be sure that they are not the ancestor of the Irish language, but a different, submerged branch of the language family.
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Replying to @ChronHib
Not a linguist but given that the genetic evidence does not support a migration in the Iron Age, but it does show a Neolithic one, is it possible that they adopted the precursor to archaic Irish as a result of cultural change/spread?
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @ChronHib
If I recall, Britain shows similar migration patterns, and I think that Gaul was similar, namely that the last large migration was in the Neolithic. So would this maybe suggest that language shift does not have to be the result of direct migration?
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Replying to @AdmiralHip
Language shift is ALWAYS the result of some sort of migration. Languages DO NOT TRAVEL, it is humans that travel. The question is only what the exact sociolinguistic conditions were that favoured or disfavoured a language change. One possible scenario is that a small elite...
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Replying to @ChronHib @AdmiralHip
...came into the country and replaced (vulgo: snuffed out) the previous elite, and then exerted structural violence that in the long run led to the language shift. Like it happened in Ireland in the 2nd mill. AD.
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Would perhaps be comparable to 5th century southern Britain. Small scale migration but there was a shift in elites: whether it was violent or based on intermarriage, it seems it may have been both.
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