Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

Recognising an inscription as Celtic means knowing something about the properties of ancient Celtic languages. It turns out that an important characteristic of Celtic was the loss of the sound [p]. Such Latin basic words as pater, piscis, plenus, super, pro (translated by their English relatives father, fish, full, over, before ) turn up still in modern Irish Gaelic as athair, iasc, lán, for, roimh. The same phenomenon can be seen in some of the remaining vestiges of Gaulish or British: Cambo-ritum , the British name of Lackford in Suffolk, seems to mean ‘Crooked Ford’, the last element, like rhyd in Welsh, meaning ‘ford’ (cf. Greek poros , Latin portus). And it is conjectured that the source for the name of the notorious ‘Hercynian forest’ mentioned by Caesar and Tacitus (now the Black Forest, but extending all the way across the German highlands to modern Leipzig) must have been a Celtic speaker who dropped his Ps: if its real name were Perkun this would make it the same as some Germanic words for mountain (Gothic fairguni , Old English firgen ), but also allow a nice tie-up with the origin of the old Latin word quercus , ‘oak’. It is natural to derive this from *perquus (cf. known parallels such as quinque , ‘five’, from *penque, coquo , ‘cook’, from *pequo). And then it looks very like the name of the Lithuanian god Perkūnas , known for his association with oak trees! [838]

In other ways, Celtic languages of the period are remarkably like Latin. The system of inflexion for Gaulish nouns was just a little more complex than the Latin one, with seven cases to Latin’s six, but tantalisingly close to it. So, for example, the noun EQVOS , ‘horse’, has the genitive EQVI , ‘horse’s’—the very same words in Latin and Gaulish. ‘He has given to the mothers of Nîmes’ comes out as DEDE MATREBO NAMAUSIKABO; in Latin it could be *DEDIT MATRIBUS NEMAUSICABUS. An everyday piece of authentic Gaulish could be very close to its Latin equivalent: take for examples two typically frisky inscriptions on spindle whorls: MONI GNATHA GABI BVθθVTON IMON and NATA VIMPI CURMI DA would translate to MEA NATA, CAPE MENTVLAM MEAM and NATA BELLA, CERVISIAM DA: ‘my girl, take my todger’ and ‘pretty girl, give some ale’. [451]

On a modern estimate, these divergences would represent something like one and a half millennia of separate development, or sixty generations. Although both were speaking variants of what had once been the same language, this was enough time for very different traditions to have developed in each variant.

The earliest known Celtic inscriptions (from c .575 to 1 BC) are found in the southern foothills of the Alps near Lakes Como and Maggiore. This was the home of the Lepontii. Their language is hence known as Lepontic, and is written in a script, the ‘Lugano’ alphabet, evidently borrowed from the Etruscans, who were the dominant literate people in northern Italy. [840]The texts are usually only two or three words long, which can make interpretation difficult, and it is likely that most of the words are proper names.

No classical author characterised the Lepontii as Celts (despite vague rumours of a very early Gallic settlement of this region in Polybius and Livy). [451]Nevertheless, there are grounds for viewing Lepontic as a form of Celtic. It seems to have lost P, having uer - and latu - in place of Indo-European uper -, ‘over’, and platu -, ‘flat’; it also has some proper names very reminiscent of Gauls, for example alKouinos , like Alkovindos, which would contain the root windo -, ‘white’, seen also in Winchester (once more clearly called Vin-dobona ) and Guinevere.

Over four hundred years later, from about 150 BC, the same Lugano alphabet was used in mirror image (now left to right), a little farther south round Novara, to record a more clearly Gaulish language. This would be the written footprint of the Insubrians, who had invaded the north of Italy in the historic period. Livy (v.34) remarks that the city of Mediolanum (Milan—Gaulish for ‘mid-plain’) was founded by Gaulish incomers, pleased to find that the name Insubrian (familiar to them as a cantonal name in their homeland across the Alps) was already established in the neighbourhood.

This typical inscription reads:

TANOTALIKNOI Dannotalos-son

KUITOS Quintos

LEKATOS the legate

ANOKOPOKIOS Andocombogios

SETUPOKIOS Setubogios

ESANEKOTI (sons) of Essandecotos

ANAREUIZEOS Andareuiseos

TANOTALOS Dannotalos

KARNITUS built the tumulus

with a vertical note at the side:

TAKOS TOUTAS decision of the tribe

But Caesar notes that the most familiar script to the Gauls was Greek writing, and sure enough, Gaulish inscriptions written in Greek are found dating from 300 BC to AD 50. What is now the French Riviera was then very much a Greek coast, with notable colonies such as Nicaea (Nice) and Antipolis (Antibes), all focused on the metropolis of Massilia (Marseilles), which had been founded c .600 BC. There are about seventy such inscriptions on stone discovered so far, mostly gravestones and dedications, and there are also another 220 pieces of broken pottery with writing on them: this ancient equivalent of scrap paper and old bottles and cans is often gratifyingly durable.

segomaros uilloneos tooutious namausatis íorou belesami sosin nemeton

’Segomaros son of Uillu, citizen of Nemausus, dedicated to Belesama this shrine’

These Greek-lettered inscriptions are found along the coast, and all the way up the River Rhône, with a few more in the centre of France, on the upper reaches of the Loire and Seine. Caesar refers to Helvetian records written in Greek, and kept on wooden tablets. But this brings us well into the period of Rome’s conquest of Gaul (completed in 51 BC). Thereafter we do find Gaulish written in Roman letters, but only for a century, and never actually replacing the use of Greek script: there have only been sixteen such Gallo-Roman inscriptions discovered to date. The most magnificent remnant of this period yet discovered is a fragmentary Druidical calendar engraved on bronze found at Coligny, not far from the Roman administrative centre of Lugdunum (Lyon).

North of the Seine, the only inscriptions that have turned up are on potters’ stamps, which probably came from farther south. Advertising could also use ‘eye candy’ in a way decidedly reminiscent of the twentieth century: The inscription reads:

rextugenos sullias avvot Rextugenos (son) of Sulla made (this pot).

Otherwise, the only evidence of written Gaulish is a few Celtic personal names on pots at Manching in southern Germany, and on a sword at Port in western Switzerland.

But there is hard evidence of another Celtic language, known as Celtiberian, being written in the north-east of central Spain. There are in fact eighty-five inscriptions, and fifty legends on coins, from the last two centuries BC. There is not much in these that incontrovertibly proves them Celtic, [841]rather than some other related strain of Indo-European, though the suitably grandiloquent name Divorix does appear: ‘Divine-King’, comparable with Julius Caesar’s early adversary Dumnorix, ‘World-King’. But they are in the right time and place to be Celtiberians, and it was an accepted truth in the ancient world that these people were Celts: Martial, a first-century AD poet born in the local capital of Bilbilis, liked to claim ancestry from Celts and Iberians. [451]