Article - Tartessian as Celtic and Phoenician as a possible substrate? Steve Hewitt

I was interested to read this article because having read the summary article on Celtic from the West, I was interested in the idea of Tartessian as an ancestor of the Celtic languages, as this would fit in well with the idea of migration from the Iberian peninsula through the Atlantic coastline.

However, while it appears that there are some similarities between Tartessian and the Celtic languages, there also seem to be a number of things that suggest that they are not related. Few professional Celticists support the idea.

The other suggestion proposed in the article is that Phoenician was a possible substrate to Tartessian, as there were Phoenician trading settlements in the area. However, it looks unlikely, not least because when a dominant language acts as a superstrate to a subordinate language the influence is mainly lexical. When a subordinate language acts as a substrate then the influence is mainly structural. Phoenician was the dominant language, and unlikely to have influence on the structure of Tartessian.

So, it looks like these hypotheses are to be rejected.