The Gaulish Language

[Theobald]

Gaulish language

http://www.all-science-fair-projects...ulish_language

Gaulish is name given to the now-extinct Celtic language that was spoken in Gaul before the Romans and the Franks invaded. It is only known from a few, quite small pieces of writing.

It was a Continental Celtic language with a fairly complicated inflecting morphology. It had six or seven cases. Unfortunately for the future of the language, it was, in fact, quite similar to Latin. This meant that the Gauls had little trouble learning Latin, and quickly adopted it. The Gaulish language survived up to the time of the Frankish conquest in some areas. Gregory of Tours mentions that there were still some people in his area who knew how to speak Gaulish at the time he wrote, in the sixth century. However, the language must have died out shortly thereafter.

Enough inscriptions and texts in the Gaulish language survive to enable us to ascertain that Gaulish was a P-Celtic language, having p where the other group of Celtic languages, Q-Celtic, have q or k. Thus the Gaulish word for "son" was *mabos or *mapos, where Q-Celtic would have had maccos or maqqos, forms which are actually attested in Ogham inscriptions. Some of the Celts in Iberia may have spoken Q-Celtic languages; their language has left even fewer traces.

The longest surviving extended discourse in Gaulish is the Coligny calendar, found in Coligny near Lyons, France, which recorded the months in use in Gaul at the time of its use, and marks each day as lucky or unlucky. Gaulish was written in various alphabets that were brought to Gaul by outsiders; the Greek alphabet was sometimes used, as were the Latin alphabet and the Etruscan alphabet. The ogham script, found in the British Isles, was not used in Gaul.

Some remnants of the language still survive in Breton, a British language, having borrowed some features from Gaulish, though this is merely a trace.


French words from Gaulish origin

http://users.skynet.be/sky37816/Mots_gaulois.html

Gaulish-English dictionnary

http://www.geocities.com/indoeurop/p...ry/gloss2.html

Gaulish calendar

http://lwh.free.fr/pages/algo/calend...er_gaulois.htm


Gaulish peoples in 0 :

[Theobald]

Group

Celtic (with Irish, Welsh etc.), Continental branch (with Celtiberian and Lepontic)

Geography

"Gauls" was the name given by Romans to the Celtic tribe of Senoni who invaded Italy several times in the 4th century BC and plundered Rome once. Later the name of Gaul was identified with Northern Italy, then with France as well. The geography of Celtic expansion was however much wider. It seems that Gaulish itself or some kind of its dialect was spoken around the whole Central Europe, modern France, the Upper Danube valley and even in the Balkan region - as Celtic glosses fixed by Greek authors resemble Gaulish very much.

History

Celtic started spreading around Europe in the 6th century BC, in the Halstatt archaeological period. Right to the 3rd century BC Celts dominated over Western and Central Europe. And that was when the Gaulish language seems to appear: its speakers inhabited territories of modern France, South Germany, Austria, and maybe Bohemia (this name itself is inherited from the Celtic tribal name Boii). In Spain, Celtic immigrants acquired a set of Iberian language features, their language being transformed into what we call Celtiberian. Gauls expanded their area also to the east, invading the Balkans, destroying Delphi and Sparta in Greece in 279 BC and crossing the Bosphore to Asia Minor where they founded the Kingdom of Galatia. After the Roman conquest of Gaul, however, the Celtic language disappears quickly out of use, replace by Latin. It was maybe the 3rd or even the 5th century AD when Gaulish becomes extinct. All the inscriptions date back from the 6th to the 1st cent. BC.

Phonetics

Gaulish is a typical "centum" tongue turning Indo-European palatals into velar stops k,g. The IE *p disappears completely as everywhere in Celtic. Gaulish does not support the idea of dividing Celtic into p- and q- branches: the IE *kw obviously could have both reflexes as it is seen in Gaulish epo- 'horse' and Eqwos 'the name of a month'. As for *gw it turns to Gaulish b. The vowels preserve the distinction between long and short ones, the diphthongs tend to disappear but are still seen widely in inscriptions. An argument is still going on about the Irish-like initial mutations in Gaulish: maybe they were just starting to emerge in the language when Gaulish disappears itself.

Nominal Morphology

A highly inflected IE language, Gaulish has its nouns declined in six of seven cases. The nouns are declined by stems, of which consonant stems seem to become unproductive. There were all three genders (masc., fem., neut.) preserved well, the same as in Latin or Greek. The adjectives were also declined, the degrees of comparison used the suffix -tam-.

Verbal Morphology

We do not have much to analyse, but the examples show several distinct features: the verbs included the athematic type together with thematic (1st pers. sg. present uediu-mi 'I pray' vs. delg-u 'I hold'). Passive forms could be formed with -r, like in Italic and Tocharian. The personal inflections tend to be dropped sometimes. As for the tense system, the sigmatic aorist forms are witnessed (maybe in the Perfect function). Verbs use a great number of prefixes.

Lexicon

We can be certain only about 150 or 200 words of Gaulish, including place and personal names. The majority of them can be traced back to IE, and there is no significant substratum influence noticed.

Writing

Gauls did not have their own writing system: the inscriptions in Gaulish are either made in Etruscan, Latin or Greek alphabets.

Close Contacts

Gaulish seemed to Romans so close to Latin that Caesar while fighting in Gaul had to write his reports and letters in Greek. Being the most archaic of the Celtic tongues, Gaulish remains quite similar to Italic, Illyrian and Tocharian languages. Several important glosses group Celtic also with Germanic: the two dialects could contact even before coming in Europe.

Sample

Segomaros Uilloneos Toutius Namausatis eioru Belesami sosin Nemeton.
Segomaros Uillonis, Citizen of Nimes, dedicated this here sanctuary to Belisama.

[Theobald]

When Cicero's brother Quintus was besieged by the Nervii in Gaul, Julius Caesar sent him a secret message -- in Greek, not Latin, so it could not be read by the enemy if they intercepted it. This is because the Latin and Gaulish languages were very similar to each other, whereas Greek was only a distant relation (and also had a different alphabet). Unfortunately the Gauls have left us no literature, so the two ancient European languages we normally study are Latin and Greek.

Despite the similarity, Gaulish was not an Italic language like Latin, but belonged to the Celtic language group, whose modern derivatives include Gaelic, Welsh and Irish. The ancient Celts were variously called Keltoi, Celtae, Galatae or Galli, which are really four different forms of the same name. Around 390 BC the Gauls sacked Rome. In 279 BC they attacked Delphi, and some of them settled in north-western Turkey: these were the Galatians, whose descendants received an epistle from St. Paul. The western Celts lived mostly in northern Italy, France and Britain, and these were the 'Gauls' encountered by Caesar.

Our sketchy knowledge of the Gaulish language comes from notices in classical authors and from a small number of Gaulish inscriptions. The longest and most famous of these is the Coligny calendar, preserved on two bronze tablets found in 1897 at Bourg in eastern France. This is a lunar calendar with months of 29 days; the lunar time-reckoning of the Gauls is mentioned by Caesar (Gallic War 6.18).
Many Gaulish words closely resemble their Latin counterparts:


Gaulish / Latin

-cue 'and' -que

es 'out of" ex

are 'before' ante

ver 'over' super

allos 'second' alius

tarvos 'bull' taurus

tri 'three' tres, tria

more 'sea' mare

rix 'king' rex

Caesar's civitates Aremoricae are those who live are more (= ante mare). His opponent Vercingetorix is the over-king (ver-rix) of warriors (cingetos = Irish cinged 'champion')

In the Coligny calendar, the verb divertomu appears at the end of each month and means 'we turn aside (to a different month)': its Latin equivalent is the very similar divertimus. The verb comeimu means 'we go together' (Latin con- 'together' + imus 'we go', from eo, ire).
The close similarity of Gaulish and Latin declensions is clear from this example:


Gaulish / Latin

Nominative -os /-us (earlier -os)

Genitive -i / -i

Dative -u (earlier -o) / -o

Accusative -om / -um (earlier -om)

Nom. Pl. -os, / -oi -i (earlier -oi)

Gen. Pl. -om / -orum (earlier -om)

Dat. Pl. -obis / -is (earlier -ois)

Acc. Pl. -ons / -os (earlier -ons)

Some Gaulish words have no Latin equivalent, because they refer to
things unknown at Rome: sapo "soap" (Romans used olive oil instead), cervesia 'beer' (Romans drank wine), tunna 'barrel' (Romans preferred clay storage jars), bracae 'trousers' (Romans wore a toga or tunic). Our word 'beaver' is related to beber, the Gaulish name for this animal, from which comes the Gaulish town-name Bibracte. (The Roman equivalent, castor, is possibly the origin of our 'castor' oil, which has a certain resemblance to a nauseous, bitter-tasting oily medicine formerly extracted from the bodies of beavers.)
The similarity of Gaulish to Latin helped it to disappear. Under Roman rule, the Gauls found it relatively easy to learn Latin, and eventually forgot their own language. By the Late Empire, when Gaul was overrun by the Germanic Franks, Gaulish was close to extinct. This explains why modern French is based on Latin and Frankish rather than Gaulish.

- L. A. Curchin

Source