One problem I see with his (?) discussion here, is that much of the argument offered here is circular. For example, speaking of the present-day Mexican population, I wrote that :
"They speak an Indo-European language because their ancestors were conquered by an Indo-European speaking people (the Spanish), whose ancestors were, in turn, conquered millennia earlier by another Indo-European speaking people (the Romans). By this point, any "Indo-European" bloodline is going to be thinned out to the point of invisibility.
May I suggest to our Asatruar visitor that the Romans were far from the first "Indo-European" people to conquer a non-Indo-European speaking population, without eliminating it?"
Here, we see a series of cases in which the language in a region has been changed, without the native population being supplanted. The United States offers a blatant example of the reverse. While Anglo-Saxons have dwindled to the point of being a minority in this country (the third most common ethnicity, expected to drop to fifth in the near future), the US is still an English-speaking country, a situation which is not expected to change for the foreseeable future. In each case, language has proved to be an unreliable marker for the ancestry of the local population. Were the situation otherwise, I would most likely be writing to you in German right now, at least until Spanish or Gaelic supplanted it.
And yet Loborubro writes:
> .. Whose ancestors were mainly Indo-European
> .. - the Celtiberians. All in family...
An assertion based on - what? The only thing "Indo-European" about the Celts that I see being pointed to, is their language. In the case of the pre-celtic Iberians, and those Iberians who never saw a Celtic conqueror, there isn't even that. Basque is a non-Indo-European language, with no known living relatives.
To put it simply : the counterexample offered in defense of the proposition, relies on the truth of the proposition for its verification. This is circular reasoning. (That the Iberians were not simply replaced by the Romans is supported by the historical record. Also, it would have been a little hard for the Romans to produce that many dead bodies in a short period of time without modern archaeologists becoming aware of it: there'd be too many skeletons that could be carbon-dated to a narrow time frame, all with signs of having been killed violently. People may lie, but the physical evidence won't. Ergo, no Roman holocaust in Iberia).
To my point that
"The majority of the early 21st century population of Mexico speaks an Indo-European language : Spanish."
while Loborubro acknowledges that the Mexican population is, by and large, not of "Indo-European ancestry", he (or she) responds
> .. But some of their traditions are not.
which begs the question. On what basis does one argue that the visibly different cultural traditions of the Romans and Germans are derived from a common Indo-European base? Assuming, that is, that there ever even was an original "Indo-European" people to begin with, and that the root language didn't grow out of the fusion of a number of distinct languages, through cultural exchange as a variety of tribes interacted. (How does one know that "Indo-European" wasn't a lingua franca, for a variety of tribes that needed a common language for trade purposes, for example). Suppose, for example, that the West had adopted Esperanto as a common language, and that civilization had then fallen, leaving Esperanto to diverge into a family of languages. 3,000 years pass. Imagine the amount of brainpower that would be wasted looking for the lost "Esperantians", the imagined forefathers of the Western Eurasians.
The moral of this little fable is "don't jump to conclusions". Reality can be far messier than the tidy pictures our imaginations like to create.
The question begging doesn't even seem to be consistent, as Loborubro contends that
> .. An Indo-European ethnicity is still alive,
> .. both in language, in traditions and also
> .. enriched and over-indo-europeanized
> .. by germanic migrations.
Indeed? Even though most of the target countries of these "migrations", today, speak nothing resembling a Germanic language? It bears repeating: all Germanic languages are Indo-European languages, but the reverse isn't true. Spain, Portugal, France and Italy all speak Romance languages to this day. In particular, let us note that to get to Iberia, the Germanic tribes, traveling by land, would have had to travel through what is now France. French and German are hardly similar languages.
Here, we have an alleged similarity of ancestry, despite any great similarity in language. So, which it is? Is language a good marker for descent, or isn't it?
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