G, GORT, ivy in the Ogham alphabet. The bird ... - Rodney Mackay

names visited upon the Scots by their Irish enemies. If this
is so, it is likely that sea-faring Scots numbered survivors
from the old Fomorian sea-kingdoms in the west. It is
almost a homely to say that pre-Roman Britain was
inhabited by a people “who were mainly Celtic and that the
Celts reached this country in three principal waves of
immigration. One wave came to the east coast by way of
the North Sea, another by way of the Gaul to the South of
England, and the third from the Continent by way of
Irealand.” This is the view of most historians, although
there is no written magic to back up the idea that all the
peoples of the islands arrived from the east. In the black
well of times long past historians are as much adrift as
mythologists, and many of these have a contrary opinion.
These is the problem of Irish Gaelic, which is still
considered the most antique of all the Celtic tongues.
Aryan scholars say that the Indo-European tongues started
in northern India and spread slowly from there westward.
Professor Schleider (1874) that this Celtic tongue has the
appearance of a separation from the supposed root
(Sanskrit) at a later date than the Cymric and Brythonic
tongues, but they are supposedly of more recent evolution.
Worse still, Gaelic has the look of being more closely allied
with Latin than any of the supposed Indo-European
affiliates. These idiosyncracies suggest that Gaelic might
have spread from Ireland to the east, where it collided
with, and became associates of the west-bound language
which is now preserved in English, German and the
Scandinavian tongues.
We are then left with the question of where the Gaelic
vocabulary originated and are led back to the fact that the
Celto-Iberian tongues have “more analogies with American
types than with any other.” In his book, On the Phenomena
of Hybridity in the Genus Homo,, Paul Broca (1869) said that
“Of all Europeans, we must provisionally hold the Basques
to be the oldest inhabitants of our quarter of the world.” He
said that their language, the Euscara, “has some common
traits with the Magyr (Hungary), Osmanli, and other dialects