Gaulish

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. In a wider sense, it also comprises varieties of Celtic that were spoken across much of central Europe, parts of the Balkans, and Anatolia, which are thought to have been closely related. The more divergent Lepontic of Northern Italy has also sometimes been subsumed under Gaulish.
Together with Lepontic and the Celtiberian 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.
Gaulish is found in some 800 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 those regions, writing shifted to Latin script. During his conquest of Gaul, Caesar 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.
Gaulish in Western Europe was supplanted by Vulgar Latin. It is thought to have been a living language well 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 and of Anatolia are barely attested, but from what little is known of them it appears that they were quite similar to those of Gaul and can be considered dialects of a single language. Among those regions where substantial inscriptional evidence exists, three varieties are usually distinguished.

Lepontic, attested from a small area on the south slopes of the Alps, near the modern Swiss town of Lugano, is the oldest Celtic language known to have been written, with inscriptions in a variant of Old Italic script appearing circa 600BC. 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 Greek script, found mainly in the Rhône area of southern France, where Greek cultural influence was present via the colony of Massilia, founded circa 600 BC. After the Roman conquest of Gaul, the writing of Gaulish shifted to Latin script.
Finally, there are a small number of inscriptions from the 2nd and 1st centuries BC in Cisalpine Gaul, 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 -nd- and -χs- to -nn- and -ss- respectively, while both Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaulish replace inherited word-final -m with -n. 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.

History

Early period

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 Appendix Vergiliana in a poem referring to Gaulish letters of the alphabet. Julius Caesar says in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico of 58 BC that the Celts/Gauls and their language are 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. 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. According to the Recueil des inscriptions gauloises nearly three quarters of Gaulish inscriptions are in the Greek alphabet. Later inscriptions dating to Roman Gaul are mostly in Latin alphabet and have been found mainly in central France.

Roman period

Latin was quickly adopted by the Gaulish aristocracy after the Gallic Wars to maintain their elite power and influence, with trilingualism in southern Gaul being noted as early as the 1st century BC.
Early references to Gaulish in Gaul tend to be made in the context of problems with Greek or Latin fluency until around AD 400, whereas after, Gaulish begins to be mentioned in contexts where Latin has replaced "Gaulish" or "Celtic", though at first these only concerned the upper classes. For Galatia, there is no source explicitly indicating a 5th-century language replacement:

During the last quarter of the 2nd century, Irenaeus, bishop of Lugdunum, apologises for his inadequate Greek, being "resident among the Keltae and accustomed for the most part to use a barbarous dialect".
According to the Vita Sancti Symphoriani, Symphorian of Augustodunum was executed on 22 August 178 for his Christian faith. While he was being led to his execution, "his venerable mother admonished him from the wall assiduously and notable to all, saying in the Gaulish speech: Son, son, Symphorianus, think of your God!". The Gaulish sentence has been transmitted in a corrupt state in the various manuscripts; as it stands, it has been reconstructed by Thurneysen. According to David Stifter, *mentobeto looks like a Proto-Romance verb derived from Latin mens, mentis 'mind' and habere 'to have', and it cannot be excluded that the whole utterance is an early variant of Romance, or a mixture of Romance and Gaulish, instead of being an instance of pure Gaulish. On the other hand, nate is attested in Gaulish, and the author of the Vita Sancti Symphoriani, whether or not fluent in Gaulish, evidently expects a non-Latin language to have been spoken at the time.
The Latin author Aulus Gellius mentions Gaulish alongside the Etruscan language in one anecdote, indicating that his listeners had heard of these languages, but would not understand a word of either.
The Roman History by Cassius Dio may imply that Cis- and Transalpine Gauls spoke the same language, as can be deduced from the following passages: Book XIII mentions the principle that named tribes have a common government and a common speech, otherwise the population of a region is summarized by a geographic term, as in the case of the Spanish/Iberians. In Books XII and XIV, Gauls between the Pyrenees and the River Po are stated to consider themselves kinsmen. In Book XLVI, Cassius Dio explains that the defining difference between Cis- and Transalpine Gauls is the length of hair and the dress style, the Cisalpine Gauls having adopted shorter hair and the Roman toga at an early date. Potentially in contrast, Caesar described the river Rhone as a frontier between the Celts and provincia nostra.
In the Digesta XXXII, 11 of Ulpian it is decreed that fideicommissa may also be composed in Gaulish.
Writing at some point between and AD 395, Latin poet and scholar Decimus Magnus Ausonius, from Burdigala, characterizes his deceased father Iulius' ability to speak Latin as inpromptus, "halting, not fluent"; in Attic Greek, Iulius felt eloquent enough. This remark is sometimes taken as indicating that the first language of Iulius Ausonius was Gaulish, but may alternatively mean his first language was Greek. As a physician, he would have cultivated Greek as part of his professional proficiency.
In the Dialogi de Vita Martini I, 26 by Sulpicius Severus, one of the partners in the dialogue utters the rhetorical commonplace that his deficient Latin might insult the ears of his partners. One of them answers: uel Celtice aut si mauis Gallice loquere dummodo Martinum loquaris 'speak Celtic or, if you prefer, Gaulish, as long as you speak about Martin'.
Saint Jerome remarked in a commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians that the Belgic Treveri spoke almost the same language as the Galatians, rather than Latin. This agrees with an earlier report in AD 180 by Lucian.
In an AD 474 letter to his brother-in-law, Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont in Auvergne, says that in his younger years, "our nobles... resolved to forsake the barbarous Celtic dialect", evidently in favour of eloquent Latin.
Cassiodorus cites in his book Variae VIII, 12, 7 from a letter to king Athalaric: Romanum denique eloquium non suis regionibus inuenisti et ibi te Tulliana lectio disertum reddidit, ubi quondam Gallica lingua resonauit 'Finally you found Roman eloquence in regions that were not originally its own; and there the reading of Cicero rendered you eloquent where once the Gaulish language resounded'
In the 6th century, Cyril of Scythopolis tells a story about a Galatian monk who was possessed by an evil spirit and was unable to speak, but if forced to, could speak only in Galatian.
Gregory of Tours wrote in the 6th century that a shrine in Auvergne which "is called Vasso Galatae in the Gallic tongue" was destroyed and burnt to the ground. This quote has been held by historical linguistic scholarship to attest that Gaulish was indeed still spoken as late as the late 6th century in France.