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Comment by theoh | Hacker News Reader

The genetic distribution of the European population is not blended to the point of indistinguishability.

https://www.eupedia.com/europe/maps_Y-DNA_haplogroups.shtml

It is still right to say it's highly anachronistic to call modern people Celts. Not to mention most countries of the former Roman empire have been home to Celts.

It's useful to have a term to refer to the Irish, Scots and Welsh. In a modern context "Celtic" is normally used to refer to those places, and more to refer to a common culture rather than an ethnicity.

Uh, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts_(modern)

(I'm a Dubliner and I would accept the label.)

Define "Celt".

You are right. The term is over-used, and many of the original tribes have very much blended. Some however, have not (dark green in map) Here is a good list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Celtic_tribes

People the Romans conquered, then assimilated in places like northern Italy and modern France. That their languages survived relatively isolated a while longer in places like Britain and Ireland is why we think of them as being from there.

Without looking around at all, I recall that only Tacitus mentions the "Keltike", which is a Greekism and not Roman, so I'm probably wrong a bit. I believe that there are very, very few refs to Celts pre-modern revivalism. I think Tacitus mentions them as located in what we would think of as Belgium (nee bit of France, sort of).

I think that Celt is generally confused with Briton (Preton/Pretanike - Pytheas) thanks to some fanciful thinking over the last few hundred years. You might also notice: Britany - a region of modern France. The "indigenous" Britons were duffed up by various invaders. The Scots migrated from Ireland and the Picts went the other way etc etc. Angles and Saxons, Norwegians and Danes farted around at various times (we had a King Knut/Canute famous for talking to the sea - he didn't really - he was emphasising how the sea is unstoppable (or was he!)

These isles off of the left hand side of mainland Europe have a pretty complicated history but perhaps not as complicated as say what we now know as France, Germany, Italy and co.

The Celt thing is a bit ambiguous at best ...

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