Gaulish is an extinct Celtic language spoken in parts of Continental Europe before and during the period of the Roman Empire. In the narrow sense, Gaulish was the language of the Celts of Gaul (modern France and neighboring areas roughly to the Rhine). In a wider sense, it also comprises varieties of Celtic that were spoken across much of central Europe, parts of Southeastern Europe, and Anatolia ("Galatian"), which are thought to have been closely related. The more divergent Lepontic of Northern Italy has also sometimes been subsumed under Gaulish.; cf. McCone, Kim, Towards a relative chronology of ancient and medieval Celtic sound change, Maynooth, 1996
Together with Lepontic, Galatian, Celtiberian, and potentially Gallaecian, spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, Gaulish is a member of the geographic group of Continental Celtic languages. The precise linguistic relationships among them, as well as between them and the modern Insular Celtic languages, are uncertain and a matter of ongoing debate because of their sparse attestation and complicated history.
Gaulish is found in some 800 (often fragmentary) surviving inscriptions including calendars, pottery accounts, funeral monuments, short dedications to gods, coin inscriptions, statements of ownership, and other texts, possibly curse tablets. Gaulish was first written in Greek script in southern France and in a variety of Old Italic script in northern Italy. After the Roman conquest of Gaul, writing shifted to the Latin script. During Julius Caesar's campaign in Gaul, he reported that the Helvetii were in possession of documents in the Greek script, and all Gaulish coins used the Greek script until about 50 BC.The European Iron Age by John Collis p.144 ff
Gaulish in Western Europe was supplanted by Vulgar Latinfor the early development of Vulgar Latin (the conventional term for what could more adequately be named "spoken Latin") see Mohl, Introduction à la chronologie du latin vulgaire (1899) and Wagner, Introduction à la linguistique française, avec supplément bibliographique (1965), p. 41 for a bibliography. by around the end of the 5th century. It is thought to have survived in pockets possibly into the 6th century.
The legacy of Gaulish may be observed in the modern French language and the Gallo-Romance languages, in which 150–400 words, mainly referring to pastoral and daily activities, are known to be derived from the extinct Continental Celtic language. Following the 1066 Norman Conquest, some of these words have also entered the English language, through the influence of Old French.
Classification It is estimated that during the Bronze Age, Proto-Celtic started splitting into distinct languages, including Celtiberian and Gaulish. Due to the expansion of Celtic tribes in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, closely related forms of Celtic came to be spoken in a vast area extending from Britain and France through the Alpine region and Pannonia in central Europe, and into parts of the Balkans and Anatolia. Their precise linguistic relationships are uncertain due to fragmentary evidence.
The Gaulish varieties of central and eastern Europe (hypothetical Noric language) and of Anatolia (known as Galatian language) are poorly attested, but from what is known of them it appears that they were quite similar to those of Gaul and can be potentially considered dialects of a single language. Noric was proposed from only two inscription in Slovakia and Austria, making its existence especially questionable compared to better researched Galatian. Among the regions where substantial inscriptional evidence exists, three varieties of Gaulish are usually distinguished. Lepontic, attested from a small area on the south slopes of the Alps, near the modern town of Lugano in Switzerland, is the oldest Celtic language known to have been written, with inscriptions in a variant of Old Italic script appearing circa 600 BC. It has been described as either an "early dialect of an outlying form of Gaulish" or a separate Continental Celtic language. Attestations of Gaulish proper in present-day France are called "Transalpine Gaulish". Its written record begins in the 3rd century BC with inscriptions in the Greek script, found mainly in the Rhône area of present-day Occitania and Provence, where Greek cultural influence was present via the colony of Massilia, founded circa 600 BC. After the Roman conquest of Gaul (58–50 BC), the writing of Gaulish shifted to the Latin script. Finally, there are a small number of inscriptions from the 2nd and 1st centuries BC in Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy), which share the same archaic alphabet as the Lepontic inscriptions but are found outside the Lepontic area proper. As they were written after the Gallic conquest of Cisalpine Gaul, they are usually called "Cisalpine Gaulish". They share some linguistic features both with Lepontic and with Transalpine Gaulish; for instance, both Lepontic and Cisalpine Gaulish simplify the consonant clusters and to and respectively, while both Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaulish replace inherited word-final with . Scholars have debated to what extent the distinctive features of Lepontic reflect merely its earlier origin or a genuine genealogical split, and to what extent Cisalpine Gaulish should be seen as a continuation of Lepontic or an independent offshoot of mainstream Transalpine Gaulish.
The relationship between Gaulish and the other Celtic languages is also debated. Most scholars today agree that Celtiberian was the first to branch off from other Celtic. Gaulish, situated in the centre of the Celtic language area, shares with the neighboring Brittonic languages of Britain, as well as the neighboring Italic Osco-Umbrian languages, the change of the Indo-European labialized voiceless velar stop > , while both Celtiberian in the south and Goidelic in Ireland retain . Taking this as the primary genealogical isogloss, some scholars divide the Celtic languages into a "q-Celtic" group and a "p-Celtic" group, in which the p-Celtic languages Gaulish and Brittonic form a common "Gallo-Brittonic" branch. Other scholars place more emphasis on shared innovations between Brittonic and Goidelic and group these together as an Insular Celtic branch. discusses a composite model, in which the Continental and Insular varieties are seen as part of a dialect continuum, with genealogical splits and areal innovations intersecting.Cited after
History
Early period The Celts (Ancient Greek ; Latin ) were tribes and tribal confederations of ancient Europe, who resided in west central Europe in the Late Bronze Age and early Iron Age (the Hallstatt culture). In the La Tène period they expanded, through migration and cultural transmission, to the British Isles, northern Iberia, the Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor. The Greeks and Romans commonly referred to areas under Celtic rule as or .Livy, Ab urbe condita 5.34 They had a relatively uniform material culture (especially in the La Tène period) and non-material culture (customs and norms), which differed from neighbouring peoples like the Italians, Etruscans, Illyrians, Greeks, Iberians, Germans, Thracians, and Scythians.Helmut Birkhan: Kelten. Versuch einer Gesamtdarstellung ihrer Kultur. pp. 32 ff.
Though Gaulish personal names written by Gauls in Greek script are attested from the region surrounding Massalia by the 3rd century BC, the first true inscriptions in Gaulish appeared in the 2nd century BC. At least 13 references to Gaulish speech and Gaulish writing can be found in Greek and Latin writers of antiquity. The word "Gaulish" () as a language term is first explicitly used in the in a poem referring to Gaulish letters of the alphabet. — Virgil, Catalepton II: "THAT lover of Corinthian words, That—well, that spouter, for that all of Thucydides, a tyrant of Attic fever: that he wrongly fixed on the Gallic tau and min and spin, thus he mixed all those words for [his] brother".
Julius Caesar says in his of 58 BC that the Celts/Gauls and their language were separated from the neighboring Aquitani and Belgae by the rivers Garonne and Seine/Marne, respectively. Caesar relates that census accounts written in Greek script were found among the Helvetii.BG I 29,1 "In the camp of the Helvetii, lists were found, drawn up in Greek characters, and were brought to Caesar, in which an estimate had been drawn up, name by name, of the number who had gone forth from their country who were able to bear arms; and likewise the numbers of boys, old men, and women, separately." He also notes that as of 53 BC the Gaulish druids used the Greek alphabet for private and public transactions, with the important exception of druidic doctrines, which could only be memorised and were not allowed to be written down.BG VI 6,14 "They are said there to learn by heart a great number of verses; accordingly some remain in the course of training twenty years. Nor do they regard it divinely lawful to commit these to writing, though in almost all other matters, in their public and private transactions, they use Greek letters. That practice they seem to me to have adopted for two reasons: because they neither desire their doctrines to be divulged among the mass of the people, nor those who learn, to devote themselves the less to the efforts of memory, relying on writing; since it generally occurs to most men, that, in their dependence on writing, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly, and their employment of the memory." According to the Recueil des inscriptions gauloises nearly three quarters of Gaulish inscriptions (disregarding coins) are in the Greek alphabet. Later inscriptions dating to Roman Gaul are mostly in Latin alphabet and have been found mainly in central France.Pierre-Yves Lambert, , éditions errance 1994.
Roman period
Latin was quickly adopted by the Gaulish aristocracy after the Gallic Wars to maintain their elite power and influence,Bruno Rochette, "Language Policies in the Roman Republic and Empire", translated by James Clackson, in A Companion to the Latin Language (Blackwell, 2011), p. 550; Stefan Zimmer, "Indo-European", in Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio, 2006), p. 961; Leonard A. Curchin, "Literacy in the Roman Provinces: Qualitative and Quantitative Data from Central Spain", American Journal of Philology 116.3 (1995), p. 464; Richard Miles, "Communicating Culture, Identity, and Power", in Experiencing Rome: Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire (Routledge, 2000), pp. 58–59. with trilingualism in southern Gaul being noted as early as the 1st century BC.Alex Mullen, Southern Gaul and the Mediterranean: Multilingualism and Multiple Identities in the Iron Age and Roman Periods (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 269 (note 19) and p. 300 on trilingualism. Because Gaulish and Latin shared remarkably similar structural features, the local populace adopted Latin rapidly.La Gaule (1947); for the relevance of the question of the transition from Gaulish to Latin in French national identity, see also Nos ancêtres les Gaulois. While magical texts and traditional cultural practices fostered the retention of Gaulish within private spheres, the speed of Romanization ultimately varied by region. Early references to Gaulish in Gaul tend to be made in the context of problems with Greek or Latin fluency until around AD 400:
During the last quarter of the 2nd century, Irenaeus, bishop of Lugdunum (present-day Lyon), apologises for his inadequate Greek, being "resident among the Keltae and accustomed for the most part to use a barbarous dialect".On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis; Adv. haer., book I, praef. 3 "You will not expect from me, as a resident among the Keltae, and accustomed for the most part to use a barbarous dialect, any display of rhetoric"