Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (65 page)

Whatever the travels that took them there by the third century BC, we therefore have evidence of a variety of peoples most likely speaking Celtic, predominating in western Europe and its islands but extending right round the Alps north and south, and on into Dalmatia. They were predominantly settled populations, living in farming villages with roads linking them. Latin has shown up one characteristic of contemporary Gaul by (quite consciously, it seems) borrowing from Gaulish so many words for wheeled vehicles:
benna
, ‘buggy’,
carrus
, ‘hand-cart’,
cisiwn
, ‘cabriolet’,
carpentum
, ‘carriage’,
essedum
, ‘war chariot’,
raeda
, ‘coach’. Indeed, magnificent four-wheeled carriages are significant grave-goods in many of the La Tène graves. So although basically settled, Gaulish society could also be very mobile when it chose.

But for linguists, the hardest evidence of where and when the language was used comes from writing. Since none of the Celts had a written literary tradition until fifth-century AD Ireland, this means that we are largely reliant on inscriptions. These come from many different places. Celts appear to have been literate only where they had neighbours who could teach them. And the places where this happened are far flung indeed, though naturally they tend to be on the margins of Celtic-speaking areas. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, they do not include sites equated with the Hallstatt or La Tène cultures.

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!
^*

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’.
²²

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.
^*
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).
²³
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,
^*
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.
²⁴

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
-)† have separate origins, but the Germanic word (e.g. Gothic
eisarn.
Old English
īsern, īren
) appears to have been borrowed from Celtic.
²⁵
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.)
^*

† Recorded in the Gaulish name of an old village in the French Jura,
Isarnodori, ferrei ostii
, ‘iron door’. Grimm (1876, vol. I, ch. 4: 5).

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.’
²⁶

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.’
²⁷

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’.
²⁸
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.
²⁹