hi Lear :) It's super interesting, right? There's a lot of scholarship still to be done on this era, but the linguistic side is very difficult to figure out. We know very little about the languages of Europe before the Indo-European expansion in the Bronze Age, and about the pre-European languages of northern Europe ... almost nothing.
Linguists start talking about Celtic languages (including the Goidelic branch) from about 1000 BC, and these sites were still being used at that time, but! we don't know how quickly or how uniformly these languages spread to Ireland because the British and Irish Isles are fairly peripheral compared to main areas of focus for Iron Age Celtic studies.
There are plenty of Irish words that don't seem to be Celtic / Indo-European in origin (list), which to me suggests a long period of contact and co-existence between the Celtic languages on the continent and their pre-existing non-Indo-European neighbours (in the case of the words that are also found in Gaulish and Basque), and also that this was particularly the case in ancient Ireland (in the case of the words whose origins we don't know at all).
But it all gets really speculative. The Vasconic substrate hypothesis is (justly) not accepted by anyone any more, and neither is the idea of a para-Semitic / Phoencian substrate in the insular Celtic languages - but even if something more sensible was proposed it's just borderline impossible to prove anything because without anything ressembling written evidence (for the pre-Celtic languages), and with less attestation for Insular Celtic languages themselves than for other Indo-European languages or even the Continental Celtic languages, you'd still be on very shaky ground. Even the Italo-Celtic theories (which have a lot of merit and are roughly contemporary with the original builders of Brú na Bóinne), rely on evidence from south-central Europe.
Given how decentralised all palaeo-European societies were, it seems very obvious that there must have been a huge amount of linguistic diversity, with possibly hundreds of different languages, but basically all that's left is a handful of placenames. I don't read German, but I thought that Hans Krahe's Unsere ältesten Flussnamen might be interesting to you (it's from the 60s and there are some problems with his work re. prefixes but still cool). I'll make a post with a list of reading on this :)
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Date: Thursday, 5 August 2021 11:56 (UTC)Linguists start talking about Celtic languages (including the Goidelic branch) from about 1000 BC, and these sites were still being used at that time, but! we don't know how quickly or how uniformly these languages spread to Ireland because the British and Irish Isles are fairly peripheral compared to main areas of focus for Iron Age Celtic studies.
There are plenty of Irish words that don't seem to be Celtic / Indo-European in origin (list), which to me suggests a long period of contact and co-existence between the Celtic languages on the continent and their pre-existing non-Indo-European neighbours (in the case of the words that are also found in Gaulish and Basque), and also that this was particularly the case in ancient Ireland (in the case of the words whose origins we don't know at all).
But it all gets really speculative. The Vasconic substrate hypothesis is (justly) not accepted by anyone any more, and neither is the idea of a para-Semitic / Phoencian substrate in the insular Celtic languages - but even if something more sensible was proposed it's just borderline impossible to prove anything because without anything ressembling written evidence (for the pre-Celtic languages), and with less attestation for Insular Celtic languages themselves than for other Indo-European languages or even the Continental Celtic languages, you'd still be on very shaky ground. Even the Italo-Celtic theories (which have a lot of merit and are roughly contemporary with the original builders of Brú na Bóinne), rely on evidence from south-central Europe.
Given how decentralised all palaeo-European societies were, it seems very obvious that there must have been a huge amount of linguistic diversity, with possibly hundreds of different languages, but basically all that's left is a handful of placenames. I don't read German, but I thought that Hans Krahe's Unsere ältesten Flussnamen might be interesting to you (it's from the 60s and there are some problems with his work re. prefixes but still cool). I'll make a post with a list of reading on this :)