Puzz and I have both mentioned the Northwestblock a couple of times:
http://www.citizendi...g/Nordwestblock
But here is a site I linked to earlier, and also deals with this Northwestblock:
The Celtic Origin Revised: the Atlantic View and the Nordwestblock Blues
http://rokus01.wordp...-origin-revise/
Some quotes:
This feature tends to correlate the Nordwestblock substratum geographically to the group of languages in the North European Plain rather than the Atlantic, thus to the archeological horizon that also includes the northern Dutch group, referred to by Louwe Kooijmans.
The emerging Atlantic view and the potential exclusion of the Celtic origin from the North European Plain is screaming for a new assessment that relates Celtic and Germanic from the perspective of a western contact zone. The Germanic vocabulary might owe more from the west than previously conceived. Visualized by some examples, the Cornish/Welsh word lann or llan occurs frequently in place-names. Originally meaning “land”, it gradually came to mean “churchyard” and then “church” and “parish”. But how strong this original meaning ‘land’ can be confirmed to be embedded in the Celtic language? It could have been a Belgic loan, closely related or equal to Germanic “land”. In the Atlantic view the reverse might be true.
The Dutch river mouth mentioned by Pliny the Elder was called Helinium in accusitivus, what would probably indicate a Latin river name Helinius, consistent with the Latin ending -us that generally applies to rivers. Normally, -ius instead of simply -us would imply a derivation of a region called Helinus. In Frisia numerous toponyms feature the hel element, what Clerinx translates into “low lands, marsh” and subsequently connects to Brythonic “marsh” or “estuary”. Other Celtic etymologies have been proposed, like “salt” – probably inspired by now obsolete ideas that involve a Hallstatt origin of Celtic.
The Friso-Brythonic etymology does a much better job in addressing reminiscent Celtic features in Frisian, or the Ingvaeonic hemisphere as a whole. The implication would be that the -lin suffix might as well have been Germanic, distorted by Latin transcription issues. This intertwining of ancestral Celtic heritage and west Germanic loans and culture could be extended to the puzzling etymology of local goddess Nehalennia (also transcribed as Neihalennia), that now from a mixed local heritage easily translates to water-ghost (nikker ~IE *neig, to wash) of a region called Halennia – not unlike the latinized form Helinus deduced above. Since the description of the region delimited by Pliny between Helinium ac Flevum neatly corresponds to the historic region of Holland, I wonder if this is mere coincidence or that Holland indeed represent the ultimate indication of a lost Celtic heritage. This mixture could be symptomatic for the almost intangible potpourri that is might be implicated by the Nordwestblock or “Belgae” denomination. This may have been nothing but emerging West Germanic from a shared heritage.
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If we take Cunliffe and Koch seriously, the Celtic influence along the North Sea was a lot older than conventional wisdom that stems from migrational La Tène or Hallstatt theories and the Roman interpretation: Late Bronze Age at least, in a Bronze Age Atlantic context. In the Low Countries such an unequivocal Atlantic period is very likely to be of an even older date. Some Celts might have lingered in the swamps for a longer period, but increasing continental contacts from the North German Plain and returning native styles seriously challenge the survival of an unequivocal Celtic ethnicity up to Roman times.
The change from Celtic to Germanic, and especially the Ingvaeonic part, could have been much more gradual. A Celtic world strongly suggests the feasibility of an adjacent non-Celtic world, and the Low Countries is where both worlds met. It would be silly to suggest a unified Celtic world that existed since Bronze Age, but deny any consistency of a non-Celtic world in the North German Plains that was attested largely contemporaneous. A shared development at the contact zone for over at least 1000 years opens up the possibility of thorough Celtic influences on Germanic vocabularity and linguistic features in the north that ultimately were be no means confined to the Ingvaeonic hemisphere.
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The next is from a link at the bottom of the webpage I linked to, and it's about the (linguistic) influence of the Etruscans on the Celts:
An Etruscan Solution to a Celtic Problem
Martin Counihan
University of Southampton
23 January 2009
Abstract: It is argued that what used to be called
"P-Celtic" arose because Etruscans could not pronounce properly the Indo-European languages which they encountered in and around Italy. Etruscan influence can neatly explain not only the phenomenon of P-Celtic but also the corresponding phonological transition in Oscan and Umbrian. This scenario tends to support a relatively short timescale for the dissemination and diversification of the Western Indo-European languages.
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In conclusion: the significance of the Etruscans in the development of European civilisation has probably been underestimated in the past. They brought the Iron Age to Italy and to the Celts, who in turn took it westwards into France and the British Isles. The Roman conquest of Gaul and Britain can even be regarded as a mere repetition of what Celtic surrogates of the Etruscans had already achieved some centuries earlier. The purpose of this paper has been to argue that the Etruscans also left a linguistic mark across Western Europe and to explain the previously-mysterious division between "P-Celtic" and "Q-Celtic". The most striking phonological difference between Irish and Welsh is a consequence of how proto-Celtic was pronounced by the influential Etruscans.
http://eprints.soton.../1/etruscan.pdf
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Edited by Abramelin, 13 November 2012 - 04:32 PM.
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