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

However, by AD 50 Gaulish, and indeed Insubrian and Celtiberian, appear largely to have lost their literate status, even in their heartland areas.

How, then, did these languages reach the far parts of Europe where they were spoken? The spread of Celtic across Europe, phenomenal as it was, happened before recorded history. The forces that drove it are a matter for speculation and intuition, rather than for observation and inference. But if we take the culture at its own evaluation, Gaulish owed its success, or rather the success of the lineages that spoke it, to their distinctive equipment, notably wheeled vehicles drawn by horses, and to the magnificent products of their smiths, especially ironwork for warriors’ swords, helmets and ring-mail armour.

A linguistic note confirms this. The words for ‘iron’ in Greek ( sidēron ), Latin ( ferrum ) and Celtic ( isarno -) [855]have separate origins, but the Germanic word (e.g. Gothic eisarn. Old English īsern, īren ) appears to have been borrowed from Celtic. [451]This is unsurprising, since the Celts were evidently the middlemen for the transmission of ironworking to the north of Europe. (Tacitus even mentions ( Germania , xliii) that the Cotini, a Gaulish tribe, paid tribute to the German Quadi in iron ore. He adds typically, ’quo magis pudeat —the more shame to them’: they should have been able to use the iron to turn the tables.) [842]

Although the technical level was high, then, its military application tended to emphasise individual leaders’ prowess, sustained by these prestige products, rather than the development of overwhelming large-scale organisation. Their communities remained small, without even a feudal structure of overlords and kings. Literacy was unnecessary, and largely avoided. Perhaps, as some of their descendants would do two thousand years later on the other side of the world, they had been able to rely on their superior weapons, and prevail against vast odds without troubling to outwit their opponents.

Although Celtic warriors and their villages became widespread, they did not eliminate or submerge the communities in their path. (In this, they contrast markedly with the spread of the Pax Romana , and of Latin with it.) To mention only the ancient communities of whose language we can find some trace, Celtic speakers are found in coexistence with Germans north of the Alps, with Veneti and Etruscans south of them, with Basque speakers ( Aquitani ) in southern Gaul, with Iberians and Tartessians in Spain, and with Macedonians and Thracians in the Balkans. This was a culture that harried its neighbours and thrust them aside, but did not subjugate or incorporate them.

But besides the raid, and military conquest of new land, there was perhaps one other channel through which the Celtic languages spread, and indeed developed into new and separate languages. This was navigation.

It was an accepted tradition of medieval Europe that Ireland had been populated from the coast of Spain. The usual grounds quoted are twin mistakes about geography and etymology. The reconstructed Tabula Peutingeriana shows Ireland as an island offshore from Brigantia (La Coruña), and St Isidore’s influential sixth-century Etymologiae states: ‘Hibernia…extends north from Africa. Its forward parts face (H)iberia and the Cantabric Ocean [viz. the Bay of Biscay]. Whence too it is called Hibernia.’ [451]

However, there may have been a lot more to this link. Avienus, gathering coastal navigation information in the fourth century, says, of the ‘Holy Island’: ‘the race of the Hierni inhabits it far and wide. Again the island of the Albiones lies near, and the Tartessians were accustomed to carry business to the end of the Oestrymnides. Citizens of Carthage too and the common folk round the Pillars of Hercules went to these seas.’ [451]

Now lernē was the common Greek term for Ireland, and the Oestrymnides are probably the Scillies, or Cornwall, since he also notes that these islands are ‘rich in mine of tin and lead’. [451]The whole passage is evidence for a link between the British Isles and the southern Iberian region of Tartessus, known to be a focus of Carthage’s trade empire.

This link is amply confirmed by archaeological evidence. Impressed by the apparent profusion of exchange relations among the different Atlantic-facing sectors of the European coast, including Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, Galicia and Portugal in the late Bronze Age, 1200-200 BC, Barry Cunliffe has suggested that ‘Atlantic Celtic’ may have grown up as a lingua franca, or perhaps an elite language, among the various communities on the eastern seaboard. [451]

This hypothesis, though archaeologically inspired, has a certain attraction from the linguistic and cultural point of view. It gives a medium for the spread of Celtic across to the southern side of the Pyrenees, when there is no tradition of invasion from the north, and most of the intervening territory between southern Gaul and central Spain was in fact always held by Basques. It gives a basis in history to a persistent theme of old Irish literature, the immrama , tales of magical voyages, such as that of St Brendan. And it provides an explanation for a niggling fact of Celtic historical linguistics: the dialectal similarity between Celtiberian and the Goidelic languages of Ireland and western Scotland.

While Lepontic, Gaulish and Brythonic (P-Celtic) all usually convert old k w to p , Celtiberian and Goidelic (Q-Celtic) retain the k element. It would be possible, then, to see Q-Celtic as the original form, spread to the shores of Gaul by effective users of iron, and then, through the establishment of exchange relationships and trade, beyond to the south and north across the sea. Subsequently, the Celts in Gaul and the Alps innovated in converting k w to p , followed by their close associates in Britain, while the peripheral ones, Celtiberian and Goidelic, retained the k w , those in the north, Iernē , later simplifying it to k. [836]

In fact, some strange changes came over Celtic in the British Isles, as nowhere else: verb-subject-object as basic word order, mutation of initial consonants, conjugated prepositions, strange locutions to express status and activity (’I am in my student’, ‘I am at reading of my book’), and much else. There are those who believe that these strangenesses are really inherited from the lost previous languages of the old inhabitants, perhaps spoken by the civilisations that raised megalithic monuments. Failing to learn the incoming language fully, they simply continued with many features of their old languages. This is the substrate hypothesis; interesting, but it explains little since we know nothing of the languages of the British Isles prior to Celtic.

Another hypothesis is language mixing, or creolisation. It too can be brought into the theory of Celtic spread by navigation along the Atlantic coast, by noting that major partners in this network, for most of the first millennium BC, were the Phoenicians, many of them (specifically the Carthaginians) based in North Africa, and quite capable of maintaining links along the whole Mediterranean. Now it so happens that in the North African language families, Egyptian, Semitic and Berber, there are direct parallels for at least seventeen of these curious characteristics of British and Irish Celtic, characteristics that are quite unparalleled in any Indo-European language, let alone their Celtic cousins, and which are indeed extremely rare globally. [451]If Celtic was indeed spread as a coastal lingua franca, these North Africans, in trade and exchange, would have been among its speakers, and effective in moulding it.