Acceso usuarios
Jörg Timmermann
The central concern of the present contribution is to give further evidence for the Celtic-based etymology of Catalonia/Cataluña. Our starting point is the remarkable formal proximity between the latter name and the name of a tribe of Belgic Gaul, i.e. the Catalauni. Obviously, the Catalauni are not the only tribe to leave their trace in the toponymy of what is now North-Eastern Spain: other findings of place-names of Celtic origin seem to confirm the hypothesis that parts of different Belgic tribes invaded the North-Eastern corner of the Iberian Peninsula in order to settle there. In this article we’ll situate this putative migration in a plausible historical context. It will be argued that it is nothing more than the second branch of a historically well-known migration, i.e. the movement of several tribes from Belgic Gaul to Britain, as attested by Julius Caesar.
