Jump to content

Talk:Celtic nations

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Racism?

[edit]

I'm concerned this is a little racist. The Celtic 'thing' is controversial, and DNA studies seem to indicate something very different: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31905764 We are all descended from somebody, but this whole thing smacks of 'White' and possibly supremacist, and I really think Wiki needs to open this article up to include other evidence. There are a number of pages on Wikipedia relating to Britain and Ireland which are becoming more and more fictionalised to support a notion which is, in fact, only a few centuries old, and begun by a couple of academics. The UK is a modern, inclusive nation and I find the biased endorsement of the white Celtic ethos very worrying indeed. (86.159.147.77 (talk) 06:28, 14 July 2020 (UTC))[reply]

Not really sure about the jist of your complaints but the entire Celtic thing is largely logically incoherent. It's a grouping of peoples based almost entirely on language much like Germanic, Slavic, Romance etc. etc. Now that's absolutely fine and a simple, objective way to categorize and group peoples. I'd say honestly it's the only remotely sensible way to categorize and group peoples in any remotely objective sense. We do it all over the world with Afro-Asiatic and Bantu and so on and so forth...
The problem is of course 99% of the people claiming to be Celtic (or more often than not that other people are claiming are Celtic, unbeknownst to them) don't speak Celtic languages, at all. Not even as a second language, the vast vast majority of people in these areas have absolutely zero ability in a Celtic language, they couldn't even hold a 5 minute conversation.
So where does that leave us? With blood. Genetics. That's already a very shaky peg to solely rest an identity on to begin with (after all do we need to take DNA tests to prove our 'Celticness' now? Is there going to be bizarre Native American tribe style blood purity quotas where those of 25% 'Celtic blood' or higher are permitted to call themselves Celtic? And how do we establish what Celtic genetics even are in the first place considering Celtic peoples historically had all different genetics??).
Recent genetic studies have basically destroyed the notion that the peoples who spoke Celtic languages historically were even closely genetically related. In fact the Celtic peoples of the British Isles were far closer genetically to peoples in the Proto-Germanic homelands than they ever were remotely to people in other Celtic parts of Europe.
So again, where does that now leave us? Because on a genetic level there's no such thing as a Celtic people. And in an ethnolinguistic sense barely any of the people in these regions still speak Celtic languages anymore, so you can't even say 'Celtic genetics are the genetics which belong to people who speak Celtic languages as their mothertongue', because only around 1% of these so-called Celtic countries actually speak Celtic languages to anything approaching a fluent, native level.
It's nonsense, basically. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.14.222.67 (talk) 10:04, 1 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Criticisms like this are meaningless here without citing sources and addressing specific material in the article to change/add/remove (See, e.g., thread immediately below this one for how to go about it.) Wikipedia talk pages are not forums for general discussion, only for working on improving the encyclopedic material. You are more particularly going to have to surmount the overwhelming academic consensus that "Celtic" is a cultural (linguistic and material culture and otherwise cultural) continuum, not an "ethnicity" or "race" (or only a language group). All your bloviating about genetics is simply off-topic. The entire premise the two of you are presenting is an straw man fallacy, since our article is not making any racialist argument. Nor are much of any modern scholarship at all. (Nor are indvidiual pan-Celticists for the most part; if we run into a notable strain of such thinking – like a major organisation making racialist arguments – we may need to give it due-weight coverage including debunking it. But no one has presented a well-sourced case about this, so there is nothing encyclopedic for us to do about that alleged side-topic.)
There is certainly a lot of romanticising nonsense about the Celts, under both ancient and modern senses of the term, but you're both frankly just adding to the problem, in perpetuating a bogus argument that "Celtic" is widely claimed to be a race, and therefore coverage of the topic is "racist". As for "white supremacist", there is absolutely nothing in this article that can be interpreted that way. The words "race" and "ethnicity" do not appear in this article at all.
PS: "you can't even say 'Celtic genetics are the genetics which belong to people who speak Celtic languages as their mothertongue'" is one of the most confused things I've ever read. You clearly understand neither linguistics nor genetics, much less either of them as applied by real scholarship to this particular area. See Dunning–Kruger effect. For actual topical (and accessible, compared to journal material) sources that pertains to the regional genetics in great detail, see: Blood of the Isles: Exploring the Genetic Roots of Our Tribal History (a.k.a. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain) by Bryan Skyes; and Britain: A Genetic Journey by Alistair Moffat (also Scotland: A Gentic Journey for a northern drill-down).
 — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  07:17, 24 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"Other territories" section is missing stuff

[edit]

See, e.g., discussion at Celtic nations#Other Claimants, about Padania (northern Italy), Belgium, Netherlands, and Switzerland. I've encountered elsewhere some references to pan-Celticism stuff in Switzerland and Austria (e.g. creation of regional tartans, and hosting of Highland games-style events, etc.), parts of France aside from Brittany, as well as even in a few places in Eastern Europe and maybe even in part of Turkey. I was not looking for stuff to cite for a WP article, so I did not take particular notes. Anyway, the point is that our article is probably not presenting a complete picture of "ethnic Celtic nationhood" claims in the present day, and some source digging on the matter is needed.  — SMcCandlish ¢ 😼  06:42, 24 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Incongruent with French language version

[edit]

http://fr.wiki.x.io/wiki/Pays_celtiques

Interesting comments made here that I need more time to research - at the moment I am wondering why there is so much inconsistency in wikipedia depending on what language version you check - with the online translators that ate now available I think that there should be some checking of the basic facts with other language versions when editing or creating an article in English especially if the context of the topic has more information in another language - I know the translators are not perfect however the basic facts and sources can be easily extracted to confirm information posted here. e11e99 (talk) 08:47, 31 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Why not England

[edit]

England may be seen as Germanic but it has a significant celtic population 2A00:23C8:A5B2:FF01:483C:BD27:1FD4:BE76 (talk) 11:30, 9 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]