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Of course, Gaulish and Roman were somewhat related, as they where both Indoeuropean languages and as two thousand years ago the differentiation between the different Indoeuropean languages was clearly less then it is today. Old Gothic, Ancient Greek and Latin had much more in common with each other then modern Germanic Languages, New Greek end Romanic languages have. In the same way Gaulish and Latin had quite some resemblances, but everything we know about Gaulish (which is not THAT much), indicates that both languages were NOT mutually comprehensible. Even between Latin and the much more closely related Italic languages Umbrian, Oscan and Samnitic mutual comprehension was out of the question, even though speakers of these languages could learn Latin rather easily. It would have be considerably less easy for the Gauls. The reason why Latin GRADUALLY replaced Gaulish was the high prestige of Roman civilisation. At first the Gaulic aristocracy tried to ape Roman customs and became bilingual (within 1 or 2 generations). Then the urban population became bilingual (the towns being a creation of the Romans, quite a few Italians and inhabitants of other parts of the Empire settled there). Then more and more peasants learned some Latin after having served for 10 years or more in the Roman army. It was probably not before 300 AD (3 1/2 centuries after the Roman conquest!) that a majority of the Gauls started abadoning the Gaulish language and becoming monolingual speakers of vulgar Latin. By 400 AD, however, Gaulish had almost died out. The Gallo-Roman author Ausonius remarks that in his time (early 4th century AD) a Celtic dialect (closely resembling that of the Galatians in Asia Minor) was still spoken in the neighborhood of Augusta Trevirorum (Trier).

I strongly feel that the mention of Gauls taking over to Latin very soon because the languages were mutually comprehensible (even if it has been promoted by the famous French historian A. Lot) is unsubstantiated and should be removed from the article.

Lignomontanus - 2nd of May 2005

I really doubt that a Celtic language and Latin might be mutually intelligible. Can anyone back up this claim? The story about sending a message in Greek rather than Latin is hardly sufficient proof. Burschik 12:47, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Whether you doubt it or not, that's how it is. Gaulish and Latin were unrelated, mutually intelligible languages. How, I don't know. But linguists will tell you that is the reason Gaulish fell out of favor so quickly in Roman lands, since the language of their new leaders was so similar. -- 141.156.184.238 14:51, 20 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I remember reading somewhere (long time ago) that Roman scholars noted that there were similarities between Celtic languages and Latin. I imagine, since Celts and Romans had been in contact for 400 years before Caesar's conquest of Gaul, there might have been a lot of importation of Latin vocabulary into Gaulish. And of course they were both Indo-European laguages, so words for commmon objects would have been similar anyway.

A few examples

Celtic mor = Latin mare = English sea (mere)

Celtic deus = Latin deus = English god (deity)

Celtic ekwos = Latin equus = English horse (equestrian)

and so on. I would have thought a Gaul and Roman could have understood each other.

Exile 23:01, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

They were similar, they were not identical. It was relatively easy for Gauls to master Latin, just the same as it's relatively easy for Dutch people to master English, when compared to, say Frenchmen or Russians. They were not mutually comprehensible. There are enough texts in Gaulish to show that. Diderot 19:09, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I think that perhaps also Celtic, since Latin was the closest, largest international language at that time, might have borrowed quite much vocabulary from Latin, as well. (?)

Gaulish did not borrow a great deal (although Latin borrowed words from Gaulish). Old Welsh does have quite some borrowing from Latin, yes. --Nantonos 23:39, 15 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Dutch and English are closely related and native speakers can relatively easily learn the other language, however they aren't mutually intelligible Barcud Coch (talk) 00:25, 20 December 2008 (UTC).[reply]

• Those similarities are because Latin and Gaulish are both Indo-European languages. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 08:28, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Only in 2004 was Asterix first published in Gaulish, despite the inhabitants of his village being referred to as Gauls.

This makes no sense. It's a dead language. Daniel Quinlan 13:34, Mar 26, 2005 (UTC)

He means Gallo [1], which is not a Celtic language, it's the regional romance language of eastern Brittany. I pulled it.

---Diderot 17:26, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)

We don't yet know enough to translate Asterix into Gaulish, and maybe never will. --Nantonos 23:39, 15 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Do any of you mean "Gaellic"? Gaellic is the only language I've ever heard of the Gauls speaking.

Then you are wrong, gaellic was spoken by the gaels (ireland and Celtiberia) and is a different language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.217.237.9 (talk) 19:00, 3 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, it shouldn't be exaggerated that Gaulish was very close to Latin and mutually comprehensible without qualification---Yet, I suspect that French scholars like Lot may not have been too far off. Remember that some linguists also propose that Italic languages & Celtic languages both may descend from Italo-Celtic. If so, there may have been Celtic languages that still retained a large Italic element. Decius 12:46, 21 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Italo-Celtic as a class was politically motivated, so is strongly POV. --Nantonos 23:39, 15 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Given the uncertainty & diverging opinions among scholars, it is best not to indulge in too much POV one way or the other in the article. Decius 12:47, 21 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

it's the first time I hear Italo-Celtic is politically motivated. (sigh, why are languages always used as propaganda tools!). But what is the rationale? Franco-Welsh brotherhood? There were sound linguistic reasons for assuming I-C. So even if there was a political angle, we should just present the evidence regardless of that. dab (ᛏ) 10:35, 16 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What have the Welsh got to do with it? (I agree, sigh). A bunch of historical, archaeological and linguistic stuff was 'adapted' to form national myth in the period 1870 - 1914 - Franco-Prussian war to First World War. Italo-Celtic as a concept, while having some linguistic basis, was also used to demonstrate that Classical Rome and the Glories of 'nos ancêstres les gaulois' stood together against the barbarism of the Germans , and wil do so again, yadda yadda. Which just means that the current generation has to sift through this carefully. However, that being said, Proto-Celtic language does not currently see a need to postulate strong links to Italic, and Celtic languages states "the Celtic languages have sometimes been placed with the Italic languages in a common Italo-Celtic subfamily, a hypothesis that is now largely obsolete" although without a specific reference. --Nantonos 15:23, 16 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I see. well, quite apart from this grande nation nonsense, there is certainly strong evidence for prolongued areal contact in the Iron Age, I think that much is undisputed. That doesn't make for Italo-Celtic, of course, but the theory is still notable, and can be argued on entirely factual grounds. It's just that most common features have since been shown to descend from PIE, but that doesn't take away the common features. Proto-Celtic doesn't need to make that case, we have Italo-Celtic for that. dab (ᛏ) 15:31, 16 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with what you say, dab and there was certainly some parallel evolution, Gaulish contributing words for new technical items into Classical Latin and also into vulgar Latin at a later date (eg caballos). I may have been reacting in too sensitive a way to "there may have been Celtic languages that still retained a large Italic element", probably in a similar way to how I suspect Decius would react to suggestions that Dacian "still retained some Slavic elements". Most of the time when I see the similarity of Gaulish and Latin discussed, the arguments are quite superficial and come down to things like "Its not very Celtic, is it?" (meaning, it doesn't look much like modern Irish) or "it looks like a dialect of Latin" (meaning, the only language with a case system that they have heard of is Latin).

Anyway, yesterday I added a table of the best attested cases (-o- and -a- stems) to the article Gaulish language. --Nantonos 16:11, 16 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

To be fair, note in what context I made that statement: If Italo-Celtic is correct (and we're not sure it is incorrect), then there may have been Celtic languages that were closer to Italic than other Celtic languages were to Italic (>Gaulish). It's not just about grammar, but vocabulary and even some phonology in common. But I'm not an Italo-Celtist myself. If I would group these language branches together, it would be more than just a two-forked branch. I would include Venetic and some other languages. Decius 18:27, 16 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not going to step too much in this territory yet, because I have not studied the similarities between Italic & Celtic enough, but this dispute seems to be reminiscent of other cases. In the case of Dacian, there are no real sentences of the language surviving (the longest is three words, and it looks close to Latin or Albanian the way it uses 'per'), so I would indeed take offense to someone hastily linking it to Slavic. Decius 18:46, 16 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I entered this discussion to try to underline one point: Gaulish and Latin, regardless of whether they were closely genetically related as languages (though they may have been), were kind of close to each other in practice, so Lot's idea is feasible to a degree. But I don't expect a Gaul who was previously unfamiliar with Latin to just walk up to a Roman who is unfamiliar with Gaulish and have a mutually intelligible conversation. I do expect that it was very easy for an average Gaul to pick up Latin, and probably vice versa. Decius 19:03, 16 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I can agree that it might have helped - as earlier comments noted, in much he same way as a speaker of Dutch finds it easier to pick up English than a native speaker of French or Russian. The major reason, though, was the same reason that an immigrant to the US or the UK finds it advantageous to learn English - increased employability, its the language of official communications, and so on. To continue the analogy, they may well continue to speak their native language at home. In other words the reasons were social, economic and political, not linguistic. --Nantonos 20:16, 16 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

certainly. The effect of any degree of intercomprehensibility is far outweighed by the fact that the Romans were TEH EMPIRE, and every self-respecting young gaulois was certainly aspiring to be able to chat away nonchalantly in Latin. dab (ᛏ) 20:33, 16 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There is general agreement here Nantonos, and I can agree with Dab's last point also. However, in the French Wiki's Gaulish language talk page, there is a section called Gaulois, proche du latin, where a Bretonique user named Guénael made the wild claim that Gaulish was no more close to Latin than it was to ancient Greek or Old Slavonic. To this, Enzino (a prominent figure in the French Wiki) disagreed and responded: "C'est étrange car mes références, parlent tous d'un sous-groupe réunissant les langues celtes et les langues italiotes."---Enzino is saying that all the references he has seen (in France) support Italo-Celtic and the closeness of Gaulish to Latin (so I guess it is popular among French scholars). And he indicates that Guénael's view is representative of the anti-Italic Bretonique attitude (so I guess it is not popular in Brittany). Decius 21:49, 16 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the pointer, oddly enough I just linked in the French wikipedia article on Gaulish Language (well, a section of a page in fact) today. Enzino overstates things if he claims that all French scholarship supports an Italo-Celtic hypothesis - it does not. For example Lambert 2003 p.13 (following quotation is fair use for purposes of discussion but should not be used directly in the article) "Certains ont supposé, du même, une unité italo-celtique, moins étroite bien sûr. Mais les traits communs à l'italique et au celtique se réduisent à très peu de choses: des assimilations phonétiques (p ...k^w ... > k^w ... k^w dans le chiffre « cinq » quinque, dans le nom du chêne, quercus), et des innovations morphologiques réduites. L'unité italo-celtique est aujourd'hui un groupement contesté. Néanmoins, il est vrai que le celtique a des élèments communs avec les dialectes voisins, comme l'italique et le germanique." Lambert is saying that some people have suggested this grouping, which he describes as weak, gives examples of the connections, saying there are not very many, and says that it is contested (my emphasis), finally agreeing that there are some common elements with neighboring languages (which does not imply a common source). --Nantonos 01:24, 17 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I'm satisfied with the way Lot's idea is currently presented in this article, so I have no issue here. Earlier, I commented because User:Lignomontanus was, without actually presenting counter-references, just writing that Lot's theory was "very unlikely" in the article or something. There's nothing wrong with "passing judgment" in itself, but Lignomontanus was not presenting any references and was basically just enforcing his own Point Of View in the text. Decius 01:40, 17 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

well, the contesté part is afaik a rather recent development. The Lambert reference is from 2003, I can imagine somebody who didn't follow the recent literature would be of the opinion that I-C is widely accepted. The arguments of i-Genitive and a-conjunctive were quite strong, and I think it was only over the last 20 years or so that it became clear that they are not conclusive. So I do think "I-C belief" may linger in France, in good faith, but if we want an up to date article, we will say that I-C has been essentially replaced by points about prolongued contact. For the purposes of Roman Gaul this is irrelevant anyway, it wouldn't matter if similarities at this point were genetic or areal. dab (ᛏ) 08:06, 17 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

ah, language suicide is the term I was looking for. Maybe we can link to that :) I do think any similarity to Latin was irrelevant, Etruscan went the way of Gaulish, much earlier, and wasn't similar to Italic at all. dab (ᛏ) 08:14, 17 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Don't forget about the non-Indo-European Iberian language of pre-Roman Spain. Though the Romans were in Spain for a long time, and even Chinese would have been Romanized in Spain. What do you mean by "language suicide"? Latin didn't commit suicide: it got smart and took over an empty shell called Old English and made it into English. Decius 08:20, 17 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

no, Gaulish committed suicide, because Latin was cooler. dab (ᛏ) 08:27, 17 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

The whole Gaulish-Latin similarity is exaggerated out of proportion. What is true is that the core vocabulary (note boldness) was somewhat similar. However, this doesn't necessarily say anything about mutual intelligibility. Much of the core vocabulary of English and Sinhalese are similar too, but the two are definitely not mutually intelligible (English water, Sinhalese wathura, for example). Much of this is chance, with how the roots evolve, but even in the modern day, much of the core vocabulary of most modern Indo-European languages remains similar.

For example...

TIME: English- time < tʰaɪm> Spanish- tiempo <tjempo> French- temps <tɑ̃> Swedish- tempo (something along the lines of <tempu>, I think...) Danish- time (but lets note that while it doesn't sound much like the English, but if we lost all of our knowledge of the phonology of Danish and judged only be reconstructed roots and the orthography, it appears to be the same word exactly)

... note how Spanish and Swedish APPEAR to be, using only this word, much more similar than to each other than the other two. Of course, we know that in reality, among these four, if they were aligned on a spectrum, Spanish and Swedish would be at opposite ends, in terms of grammar, in terms of phonology, and so on... Furthermore, another thing we have to keep in mind is that the written form of the language, as well as the guesswork that linguists put into at the phonology of a long dead language that we know little about with few sources, is not really a good representation of how the words sound. --Yalens (talk) 00:52, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Please, whoever added the Modern Irish and/or the Russian material, do not re-add it. The Modern Irish material is irrelevant, since ordinal number constructions are not inherited from Old Irish, and therefore do not compare with the Gaulish words. Likewise, Russian, a non-Celtic language, does not show any parallels, and if it did, would be outside the scope of a comparison with Gaulish's NEAREST relatives, that is, the other Celtic languages. It is not necessary to compare Russian with EVERY other Indo-European language. That can be done on the Indo-European languages page.

Flibjib8 01:55, 14 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose Indo-European *eqos should be Proto-Indo-European *ekʷos, but as a source is given I didn´t dare to change it. Is there someone out there who can check if *eqos is what the source says, or are there any rules in Wikipedia how to write PIE? Laurelindë 20:02, 27 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

• ekʷos is indeed correct. --24.201.238.141 16:25, 8 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Some parts of the phonetic information here are more or less bizarre:

"[χ] is an allophone of /k/ before /t/."

A single, allophonic uvular, separated at least 1000 km from its closest kin? I bet that this actually means [x] (which appears briefly in the article too), in some old non-IPA sort of transcription.

"nasal + velar became /ng/ + velar"

Obvious bad transcription aside, is there any reason this would have waited 'til the actual Gaulish period? Just because they wrote <N> does not imply [n]. Sounds like some sort of misunderstanding here.

"U /u/ and V /w/ are distinguished only in one early inscription"

Seriously? That would put the birth of U some 500 years back from what's usually thought.

"intervocalic /st/ became the affricate [ts] (alveolar stop + voiceless alveolar stop)"

(Emphasis mine.) Is that just a failed attempt to point out that an affricate consists of a stop & a fricativ, or something more ambitious that also failed?

"and intervocalic /sr/ became [ðr] and /str/ became [þr]"

And yet we don't have {{[IPA|[ð]}} nor [þ] in the phonology. Either might mean the affricate, or some intermediate that later became something else??

--Tropylium (talk) 22:46, 6 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I imagine the eð serves here for the Gaulish Ð which the article says occurs in some inscriptions, whose value isn't 100% certain, but may have been /ts/. Don't understand the Þorn, though.

-- Paul S 16:33 14 March 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Paul S (talk • contribs) 16:35, 14 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Should this article discuss the influence of Gaulish on French, its primary successor? Or is there another article already existing on that? Funnyhat (talk) 23:07, 14 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Gaulish and Breton

Jean Markale wrote a book some years ago (which unfortunately I don't have anymore) and in it made a claim that the Southern dialect of Breton (Vannetais) was directly descended from Gaulish. I don't remember the specific examples he used in his argument but he pointed to the evidence that the Old British of Southern Britain and Gaulish were mutually intelligible and the "Vannetais" dialect is different from the other northern and western varieties of Breton. The British language evolved in those Centuries after the end of the Roman administration and then in the Sixth Century when the flood of Britons into Armorica reached its peak, they dominated the native Gaulish that was still being spoken there...indeed, he believed that some of the impetus of the British migrations at that time was that the culture and language were so similar in what was to be called Brittany. While British took over most of the province, on the south coast there is still evidence of direct Gaulish continuity. Has anyone ever heard this theory? Any comments on it? Brian Ceanadach

Has anyone noticed the strong similarities between Gaulish noun inflection, analytic construction and that of Albanian? In Albanian N.sing.Accus. Def. is also inflected with -n , feminine dative sing nouns are also inflected with -s, the Albanian gen/dative plural -ave or ëve bear a striking similarity to the cited gaulish obo - ebo - ibo inflections. The Gaulish vocative cited here seems to be a bare stem; likewise in Albanian. Compare the uninflected Gaulish subordinating particle jo with the Albanian particle që, also uninflected. Albanian also has pronominal clitics which are tied to the verb and which can be doubled to mark direct and indirect objects. The described analytical sentence structure (SVO pro-drop, genitives and adjectives follow head nouns)could equally describe Albanian.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.196.26.198 (talk) 08:33, 5 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Other possible cognates:

Gaulish=art Albanian=ari Eng=bear
Gaulish=uerno Albanian=verv Eng=alder
Gaulish=carros Albanian=karro Eng=wain
Gaulish=briga Albanian=breg Eng=hill/barrow/burg
Gaulish=bitu Albanian=botë Eng=Life/quick
Gaulish=gobbo Albanian=gojë Eng=mouth
Gaulish=maru Albanian=madh Eng=great/much
Gaulish=sapo Albanian=sapun Eng=soap

The sounds... need clarification. For example, X. Does that represent the Voiceless uvular fricative (as the article seems to suggest, but I find slightly hard to believe due to the fact that that sound... doesn't appear anywhere else in the vicinity), Voiceless velar fricative, or something else? You left it in brackets, but it isn't linked to the IPA. Other issues like that elsewhere as well...

Also, more citation would be nice... especially when we're dealing with the phonology of a dead language. --Yalens (talk) 22:34, 14 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There is a silly edit war going on about the translation for toutious, a reference to the "Vincelican language" and the Gaulish contribution to French. Silly IMHO because

1. while toutious is etymologically straightforward, the translation will remain problematic (citizen, tribe leader, tribal official, etc.): we are going to need a question mark there

re: Cagwinn's edit: you (in that case: me) never stop learning...! I'll have to check up on that inscription. I thought I'd seen it translated as "tribal official" somewhere, but don't ask me where exactly. Assume of course you're right and it's really "generally accepted". ;-) Best, Trigaranus (talk) 14:23, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There is certainly some room for debate, but "citizen" is the translation that I most often run across. It's literal meaning (root *tout- "tribe" + suffix of appurtenance -io-) is "(he that belongs to the) tribe/people". When collocated with a place name, "citizen of( X)" makes the best sense in English.Cagwinn (talk) 18:27, 16 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

1. there is no reason whatsoever to propose a "Vindelican language" separate from Gaulish as long as we do not have sufficient epigraphical material to establish their relationship; for all we know Vindelican, just like "the Boian language" or "the Helvetian language" was a form of Gaulish in its wider sense. Mentioning Vindelican in this place is perfectly gratuitous
2. most contributors will be aware of the close similarities between late Gaulish and Vulgar Latin as spoken in Gaul (if you are not, read for example MEID, Wolfgang, 1980: "Gallisch oder Lateinisch?"); however, it is the scholarly consensus that the language Old French evolved from was, in fact, the latter of the two. The right place to emphasise the similarities between the ancient continental Celtic languages and the Italic languages is there, and not in the introduction to Gaulish. Trigaranus (talk) 22:36, 15 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

This section was recently added to the main article, but needs to be checked for errors and references need to be added.

Adverbs & Coordinating Conjunctions

• AC: preposition + instrumental association use "with" (cf. Breton hag, Old Welsh ac, Welsh a, Irish ag "and" French avec)
• -C "and" , coordinating suffix between two similar sentences (verbs, nouns) (cf Old Irish -ch)
• ETI: (adv.): "well, again" (cf. Latin etiam) - preposition (cf L item or idem )
• ETIC: "and more" introduced on the instrumental or a final list item (Fr et encore);
• EXTOS, EXTER * "but" (cf W eithr "except", OIr echtar)
• COETIC: "and also" , see etic;
• NEUE * "or" (cf W neu, Scottish neo)
• NU: "Now, now" (cf I & W nu)
• TONI (adv): "Then, secondly, then, again, also" (cf. Engl "Then", Germ & Neth dann, L tum);
• -EU "or" coordinating suffix (Fr ou);

Adverbs

• AIUSA: "forever" (cf W eisoes)
• DESI: yesterday (cf W ddoe, doe , Br dec'h, OIr indé, S an-de, Manx jei)
• ETI: again, (cf Br eta "then" W eto "again" Ir eadh "thus")
• MOXSOU*: soon, sooner; (cf W Moch, Ir moch)
• NU: now, (cf Ir nu)
• SINDIU: today (cf Br hiziv, W heddiw, Ir andiu, S an-diu, M jiu, Fr aujourd'hui)
• SINNOXTI*: Tonight, (cf Br henozh, W heno, OIr anocht, Fr cette nuit).
• TONI: So, then
• INTE + adj. D Masc. or N: adverb of manner in "-ly" - eg. inte Maroua (cf W yn fawr, M vooar dy, Br -ent, Fr ment) = substantially (cf W yn M dy)

Prepositions and prefixes

• AD: "towards, at" prep. + Accusative (cf. OIr preverb ad, OW ad "to", Fr à) adomi
• AMBI: "around, about, about" thought (cf Br em, W am, Ir im)
• ANDE: "sub" (cf Br dan, Ir ann)
• APO: "with" (cf. Br, W â)
• ARE: "front, with" prep. + Dat. (cf Br W er, Ir air "on", Fr auprès)
• ATE: "new" (cf W Br ad, OIr ath-, Aith- "re-")
• AU: "of, from" prep. genitive / dative (cf W o "from ", OIr, Br of Vannes)
• CANTA: "with" prep. → Kantimi (with me) (cf W Br glove "with" Ir gan "without")
• COM, CON: "with, in full" prefix (cf W cyf, Ir comh)
• DI: (1) ", coming from (distance, separation); (2) "of (partitive)" (3) "no" or negative prefix Intensive preposition dat. (cf Br di, W y Ir di, Fr de)
• ENTER ENTAR: "between" prep Acc. (cf Br be, W Ithr, Ir eidir, Fr entre)
• ERI: (1) "by, on behalf of, for" (2) "around" (cf Br er "because, for", W er "to" Ir air "because,for")
• ES: "out, out of" prep. dat. (cf Br eu, W ech, Ir as)
• IN, ENI, "in" Pref. and prep. dat. & Acc. ; → Enimie (by me) (cf. Br en, W yn, Ir a n-, Fr en, dans)
• ISSOU "below, at the foot, below the" Pref. and prep. dat. (cf Br is "down below" W si Ir is, Fr dessous)
• MEDIO "amidst, within" (cf. Br mez, OIr mide)
• RACO "before before" (cf Br araok "before", dirak "before" W rhag)
• SEPOS (acc): "except, beyond, besides"> "without" (cf Br hep "free", W heb 'without', Ir seach "in the past ")
• TO: "to" prep. dative (to, zu germ.) → Tamiya (for me) (cf. Br da, irl do "at")
• TRE, TRI, "by, through" Pref. and prep. Acc. (cf W Br tre be, Ir tri)
• UXSE "over the top of" (cf. Br us, W uwch "higher" Ir ós, Fr au dessus de)
• VER "on, above '; Pref. and prep. dat. & Acc. (cf Br war, W gor, Ir for)
• VERTO: (1) "cons, to near" (2) "for, for, against '(cf. Br ouzh, W gwrth, OIr fri, Ir re, vers)
• VO: "under"; Pref. and prep. dat. & Acc. (cf W go, Ir for)

When did Gaulish die out and why didn't a similar process of language shift happen in roman Britain? Abrawak (talk) 08:47, 26 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There's no firm date available; most scholars believe that it was effectively dead by the 5th century AD, though obviously it could have survived in isolated areas for some time afterward. The process of colonization and Romanization was much more thorough in Gaul than in Britain (which was always rebellious against and troublesome for Rome).Cagwinn (talk) 15:18, 26 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hello,

Is here somebody, who has knowledge of Gaulish verbs in the inflection of just the present tense and how the infinitive is built? I ask this, because I want to contribute Wiktionary with Gaulish verbs I found in a Gaulish glossary (http://indoeuro.bizland.com/project/glossary/gaul.html). Please help me!

Excuse my English & please answer Greetings HeliosX (talk) 20:42, 23 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The article says that the Roman Emperor required an interpreter to speak with Veleda, a prophetess/priestess. It's implicit in this article that she spoke Gaulish. But the article about Veleda says she was a völva of the Germanic Tribe of the Bructeri. Maybe the original use of the term 'Germani' included some tribes that spoke Celtic, but it doesn't seem to apply in this case. See the article for the Bructeri: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bructeri. It's reasonably clear that Veleda spoke Germanic, not Gaulish. Thus the reference to her in this article is not valid and should be removed.

Californicus (talk) 01:18, 6 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I agree Calfornicus. It's done.Nortmannus (talk) 07:19, 6 July 2012 (UTC). Can you read French or German ? because I would like to translate http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanum that I wrote partly and http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallo-römischer_Umgangstempel Such temples are common in Great-Britain too and I do not know why there is no corresponding article in English. An interesting site about these Romano-Celtic temples in Great-Britain http://www.roman-britain.org/romano-british-temples.htm. and for the design http://www.roman-britain.org/places/bourton_grounds.htm Regards. Nortmannus (talk) 07:36, 6 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Nonsense! The Wikipedia article on Veleda, as is typical of this awful encyclopedia, is filled with original research. While there is no proof either way whether she (or the Bructeri themselves) spoke Germanic or Celtic (this was a mixed linguistic zone in the 1st century), most scholars regard her name as Celtic, which makes it more likely that she, herself, was a Celtic speaker. Cagwinn (talk) 15:12, 6 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The current Gaulish article assumes that Ausonius spoke Gaulish. However, given that Ausonius came from Bordeaux, one could argue that his language would more probably have been Aquitanian (believed to be ancestral to Basque). But perhaps I am wrong here - can anyone clarify why people assume that Ausonius spoke Gaulish rather than Aquitanian? (Personally, I suspect Bordeaux had already converted to using Latin, so my question would be irrelevant, but that is another matter.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.172.38.82 (talk) 17:01, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is an interesting question, and one I now realize I've never thought through very well, so thanks for asking it. Ausonius wrote in Latin, and as the tutor of the future emperor Gratian would've spoken Latin. He refers in his poems to local traditions and heritage, and the proper nouns in such passages seem to be Celtic (names of people and deities, for instance, and fish names in the Moselle poem, as I recall). He teases a friend, for instance, for being so proud of his druidic heritage. I don't know what the evidence is that he actually spoke Gaulish as his first language or used it regularly. I have my doubts, since in the lofty circles he moved in, a person was considered lacking in sophistication if he spoke Latin gallice (with a Gaulish accent), and it seems unlikely that he would've been entrusted with educating elite Roman youth if his spoken Latin weren't topnotch. I'm pretty sure the article says it was Ausonius's physician father, Julius Ausonius, who has sometimes been thought to have Gaulish as his first language, but the passage in his son's poetry doesn't actually say that.

I'm not completely sure, but I don't think the entirety of what the Romans called Aquitania, or designated later as the province of Aquitania, was Vasconian. As I recall, some of the peoples of present-day Bordeaux have straightforwardly Celtic names in Caesar, for instance. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:48, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think Ausonius' ethnicity is still a matter of debate, but Burdigala was the capital city of the Gallic tribe Bituriges Vivisci. They spoke Gaulish until the Roman period, after which they switched to Latin. Roman Aquitania was somewhat artificial (like many of the arbitrarily created nations in Europe and the Middle East the post-WWI era) and included both Celtic and no-Celtic speakers. Cagwinn (talk) 14:31, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Gaulish article currently makes the claim that "In the 5th century AD, the existence of Gaulish is attested in modern German Switzerland.[citation needed]".

Can anyone offer a reference for this claim, and if so, insert the reference into the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.158.211.148 (talk) 15:25, 9 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I am removing the claim "The senator Dio Cassius was appalled to hear Gaulish being spoken by soldiers at Rome.[citation needed]". After reading Cassius Dio's Roman History, I conclude the only possible basis for this claim is the following passage (Roman History Book 75), and it does not mention Gaulish:

"There were many things [the Emperor] Severus did that were not to our [the Senators'] liking, and he was blamed for making the city [Rome] turbulent through the presence of so many troops and for burdening the State by his excessive expenditures of money, and most of all, for placing his hope of safety in the strength of his army rather than in the good will of his associates in the government. But some found fault with him particularly because he abolished the practice of selecting the body-guard exclusively from Italy, Spain, Macedonia and Noricum, — a plan that furnished men of more respectable appearance and of simpler habits, — and ordered that any vacancies should be filled from all the legions alike. Now he did this with the idea that he should thus have guards with a better knowledge of the soldier's duties, and should also be offering a kind of prize for those who proved brave in war; but, as a matter of fact, it became only too apparent that he had incidentally ruined the youth of Italy, who turned to brigandage and gladiatorial fighting in place of their former service in the army, and in filling the city with a throng of motley soldiers most savage in appearance, most terrifying in speech, and most boorish in conversation." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.111.240.251 (talk) 23:56, 19 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The article makes two dubious claims. Can we resolve these so we can remove the tags?

1. Gaulish is genealogically a Continental Celtic language: Per all our sources, Continental is a geographic group, not a genealogical one.
2. Lepontic is a Gaulish dialect: Some argue that Cisalpine Gaulish/Celtic is a dialect/descendent of Lepontic rather than of Gaulish, but no-one argues that Lepontic is a dialect of Transalpine Celtic.

— kwami (talk) 23:19, 27 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome Kwami, and hi Cagwin. Cagwin and I have had this discussion on a private level before. Because source material is scarce, there seems to be a spectrum of scholarly opinion on how widespread Gaulish was. See the tactful Encyclopaedia Britannica:

"Gaulish language, ancient Celtic language or languages spoken in western and central Europe and Asia Minor before about 500. Gaulish is attested by inscriptions from France and northern Italy and by names occurring in classical literature. Modern knowledge of the vocabulary and sounds of Gaulish is slight, and its exact relation to the Celtic languages of Britain and Ireland is not clear."

My own suspicion is that we will never know until someone excavates a Gaulish library somewhere. Meanwhile, the cautious approach of David Stifter makes sense to me: distinguishing between Gaulish in the narrow sense (Caesar's Gaulish language between the Garonne and the Marne) and a possible broader Gaulish (perhaps all the way to Galatia and the areas on the way). I think the first paragraph should make this distinction between the narrower and the broader sense of "Gaulish", and changing the tags is less useful for the general reader. Just my opinion. user:92.79.185.0, 2014 May 29‎, 06:19

Thanks. That sounds like sound advice. I'll wait to get rid of the obvious nonsense before adding that, though, so we don't have to do it twice. — kwami (talk) 17:51, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the separateness of Insular Celtic from all other Celtic languages (which, due to the fact that they are all attested on the Continent, are called "Continental Celtic"), here is Eska (forthcoming): "The evolution of the dual system of verbal flexion shared by Goidelic and Brittonic, evidence for which is completely lacking in Transalpine Celtic, on the other hand, is so unusual and distinctive as to guarantee the diagnosis of an Insular Celtic node in the Celtic family tree." (Eska is only contrasting Insular Celtic from Transalpine Celtic here because he has them both springing from the Core Celtic node, but his comments apply to the other Continental Celtic languages, too).

The phylogenetic structure of the Celtic languages per Eska (forthcoming):

A. Proto-Celtic > 1) Hispano-Celtic; 2) Nuclear-Celtic

B. Nuclear-Celtic > 1) Cisalpine Celtic (includes Lepontic); 2) Core Celtic

C. Core Celtic > 1) Transalpine Celtic (includes Galatian, Noric); 2) Insular Celtic

D. Insular Celtic > 1) Goidelic; 2) Brittonic

E1. Goidelic > 1) Western Goidelic; 2) Eastern Goidelic

E2. Brittonic > 1) Northern Brittonic; 2) Southwestern Brittonic

F1. Western Goidelic > Irish

F2. Eastern Goidelic > 1) Scottish Gaelic; 2) Manx

F3. Norhern Brittonic > Welsh

F4. Southwestern Brittonic > 1) Cornish; 2) Breton

Cagwinn (talk) 18:07, 29 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. You just proved both of my points at the top of this thread. Can I restore the article now, or are you going to continue to edit-war over a POV which you claim you do not believe? — kwami (talk) 00:20, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You just don't get it.Cagwinn (talk) 02:00, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Since you provided a RS that Lepontic is not a dialect of Gaulish, and that Continental Celtic is polyphyletic, I will again remove the claims that Lepontic is a dialect of Gaulish, and that Continental Celtic is monophyletic. — kwami (talk) 06:00, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I provided ONE SOURCE - NOT THE ONLY SOURCE!!! In fact, there are other Celticists who disagree with Eska - if you knew anything at all about Celtic linguistics, you would be aware of this! Stop POV pushing!!! Cagwinn (talk) 06:06, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Why do you keep providing sources which support my POV if you disagree with my POV? That's completely irrational. You have never provided a source that Continental Celtic is monophyletic, nor that Lepontic is a dialect of Celtic. Either quit obfuscating and demonstrate your POV, or get out of the way and allow serious editors to develop the article. — kwami (talk) 06:19, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Gentlemen, please calm down. As a non-linguist I have two questions on the current article: First, why the "dubious" comment in the passage "into Continental Celtic languages,[dubious – discuss][this is not a language family]". As far as I can see, nobody in the current text is claiming that Continental Celtic languages are a "family". Furthermore, even if this claim were made, it would be inappropriate English. In higher-order relationships the word "family" is indeed used (for example, "the Indo-European language family"), but not lower down in the hierarchy (thus you do not say "the Romance language family"). Secondly, I believe Caesar does include the Swiss Rhine valley in his Celtic language area, although admittedly I find Caesar's geography here a little ambiguous. Your comments welcome. (It was me who inserted the Swiss Rhine valley some months ago). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.79.185.0 (talk • contribs)

Not to mention, it is consistent with the definition of "language family" in the lede of the Wikipedia article of that name: "(a) language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family." All of the Celtic languages, no matter their inter-relationship, are descended from Proto-Celtic, thus each subdivision can appropriately be called a "language family". Continental Celtic is a universally accepted term among Celticists for any Celtic language that is not Insular Celtic; and even though there are internal subdivisions, they are all related languages and descendants of Proto-Celtic.Cagwinn (talk) 16:08, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Cagwin, I suspect there are a couple of typos in your comment immediately above - could you please check and fix so we do not talk at cross-purposes. As to "family" - I think the Wikipedia definition is logical but un-English. One tends to talk of a Romance "branch", or that Romance is "monophyletic", rather than of a Romance "family". I agree with the content of what you say, but I think your use of terms may inadvertently be contributing to the disagreement. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.79.185.0 (talk • contribs)

Sorry folks, I have to correct you both on two points. First, 92.*, the term family is not used only for the major units but can be used for any size of grouping further down too, so it is absolutely common and normal in linguistics to speak of the "Romance language family" or the "Celtic language family" – even though, if and when you wish to refer to both a larger and a smaller unit at the same time you would be more likely to say something like "the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family". But secondly, and this goes to Cagwinn, in its precise technical definition the term family is in fact more narrow than just "any grouping of languages that have a common ancestor". The ideally correct defition would demand that it is a group of languages that uniquely have a common ancestor – i.e. one not shared by any other language outside the group; in other words, a "clade" in the tree. However, I agree that this may be too narrow and technical a view in the present instance. Sometimes, groupings that do not fulfil this strict definition are nevertheless widely used in classification in practice. Such groupings are called paraphyletic. If we assume Eska's tree you cited above, then "Continental Celtic" would be paraphyletic with respect to "Insular Celtic" (with Insular Celtic still being a true clade), just like, in biology, the class of reptiles is paraphyletic with respect to the class of birds. Nevertheless, the classification is so universally used that I can see no good reason not to use it in our trees in the infoboxes.

But, not to get lost too much in technicalities, let's go back to Kwami's original claims at the top of this thread. On one point I have to correct Kwami too. You objected to the claim that "Lepontic is a Gaulish dialect" with the argument that "Some argue that Cisalpine Gaulish/Celtic is a dialect/descendent of Lepontic rather than of Gaulish, but no-one argues that Lepontic is a dialect of Transalpine Celtic." This argument seems to presuppose that "Transalpine Celtic" is the same as "Gaulish". But there clearly are authors who do understand the term "Gaulish" in a broad enough sense to subsume Lepontic under it. Eska does this quite explicitly in his chapter on Celtic in The Ancient Languages of Europe, while in his chapter on Lepontic in The Celts: History, Life, and Culture (ed. J. T. Koch, 2012) he sums up the situation by saying that there are "some arguing that it is essentially an early dialect of an outlying form of Gaulish, and others arguing for its position as a separate Continental Celtic language". Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:17, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Future Perfect. Ironically it was a linguist who told me to stop using "family" for Romance many moons ago. What does the OED say about family? I do not have access to the OED at the moment. In the main article, I have now tried to reword cautiously so that everyone is happy. Is it OK now? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.79.185.0 (talk • contribs)

Seems okay to me, but haven't looked too closely yet. I think the lede could do with a few more changes. About another thing, could you please get into the habit of signing your posts, like we do? Just include four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your posting. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:06, 30 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Correct, a "family" is any monophyletic node. But it must be monophyletic: If it is not, it is not a family. The equivalent in biology is a clade. Reptiles are not a clade, but a grade. Continental Celtic is a grade, not a clade – that is, not a family. That's not "too technical", it's just the definition. When linguists argue about whether a group is a family, or membership of a family, they are arguing over monophyly. In the trees in the info boxes of other language articles, when we wish to link to an article on a group of languages that are not a family (not a clade), we mark it somehow, such as by putting it in parentheses or adding a footnote. This is because people expect a family tree to list families (or, if you prefer, a cladistic tree to list clades), not geographical or areal groups.

As for Lepontic & Gaulish, here is my understanding from a number of sources: Lepontic was an early Celtic language south of the Alps. Several recent sources state that it was one of the earliest lineages to branch off the Celtic tree, while Gaulish branches off later. In historical times, Gauls crossed the Alps and invaded Italy. Inscriptions dating to that era have been called "Cisalpine Gaulish", under the belief that they recorded the language of the Gaulish invaders. However, a number of Celticists challenge that conclusion, and believe the inscriptions to be a daughter or at least niece of earlier Lepontic. That is, rather than these inscriptions being interpreted as a form of Gaulish, they're interpreted as a form of Lepontic. In Eska, the two languages are together called "Cisalpine Celtic". In Cagwinn's table above, Lepontic + Cisalpine "Gaulish" (> "Cisalpine Celtic") branches off at (B), whereas Gaulish ("Transalpine Celtic") branches off at (C). But our articles state that this makes Lepontic a dialect of Gaulish, the exact opposite of what the sources are saying.

BTW, I left out the commentary, but placed dubious or citation-needed tags where this article makes these unsupported claims. — kwami (talk) 07:00, 31 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

About Lepontic being subsumed under Gaulish: Eska (2008), "Continental Celtic", in Woodard ed., The Ancient Languages of Europe, p. 166 says explicitly that "it is probable that Lepontic and Galatian are not discrete languages, but regional dialects of Gaulish". (In this view, "Gaulish" essentially covers all attested ancient forms of Celtic that aren't Hispanic). David Stifter, in this [2] chapter, confirms that "Lepontic is considered by some to be only a dialect or chronologically early variant of Gaulish", while describing the alternative view that considers it separate as the "mainstream" view. The article on "Celtic languages" in Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, ed. Mallory & Adams, p. 97, says that "the narrow geographical range of Lepontic has suggested that it be treated as a dialect of Gaulish but it also shows a number of more conservative features than Gaulish".

As for the nature of our trees: these are classification trees, not necessarily strict cladistic trees. Restricting the use of tree diagrams solely to strict genealogical trees is not what the literature does, and in situations of dialect continua and similar cases it would be quite impossible anyway. So I don't believe it's true that "people expect a family tree to list families" in this narrow sense. Just look at what our sources do: many, including high-class linguistic sources, even those that do acknowledge in their text that precise cladistic divisions are uncertain or that "Continental" and "Insular" are merely geographical/chronological classifications but not cladistic ones, will nevertheless happily include exactly these nodes when it comes to tree visualizations (like here [3], in Fortson, Indo-European Language and Culture, p.10, or here [4], in Stifter, Sengoidelc: Old Irish for Beginners, p. 1); or will start off their chapters on "Celtic" heads-on with a statement to the effect that "Celtic is divided into Insular and Continental" and then use that as the main structuring criterion for the body of the text (as does Bussmann, Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft, and Koch, Celtic culture: a historical encyclopedia); or use "Insular" and "Continental" as the first descriptive classifier in the text when they introduce one of the languages in question. The LinguistList family tree also lists "Gaulish" as a daughter of "Continental Celtic" [5]. If having a tree with "Continental" and "Insular" nodes is good enough for Fortson, Stifter and the LinguistList authors, it's good enough for me on Wikipedia. Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:12, 31 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

LinguistList (actually MultiTree) is a horrible ref, and not a RS. Glottolog is better, and they don't have Continental. They actually follow Eska, who also does not have Continental. I don't mind us including it, but parentheses would indicate that this is not a reliable distinction.

Anyway, the problem is not just the info box, but the text, where Cagwinn is edit-warring over false claims. Dumbing down the info box is one thing, but the text is another.

Good, we have a source that some older sources considered Lepontic to be Celtic. We still have the confusion between that and the classification of Cisalpine. — kwami (talk) 22:39, 31 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

[I assume that you meant to say "...considered Lepontic to be Gaulish".] Yes, indeed, but it's not "some older sources" that do that, it's freaking Eska himself in 2008. And before you go on claiming that would be self-contradictory with the tree models from him we've all been throwing around here, no it isn't – in his view the term "Gaulish" simply spans both sides of the "Cisalpine"-vs.-"Core Celtic" dialect split. As for edit-warring in the text, maybe I'm missing something, but the only pieces of body text I've seen you two edit-warring over was about Cagwinn preferring a version that said Celtic split into Continental Celtic languages [6], and a version that said that "The earliest inscriptions found in Cisalpine Gaul date from the 6th century BC" [7]. Neither of which is a "false claim". (Yes, every attested language among those into which Proto-Celtic split was a Continental Celtic language, no matter how you look at the precise relationships between them; and yes, Lepontic is clearly the oldest of form of attested cisalpine Celtic.) You might have disagreements about optimizing those statements for relevance, but accusing him of spreading "false claims" is just wrong and, I hate to say it, displays a deeply unconstructive attitude on your side. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:26, 1 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Supporting sources do help clarify the argument! My statements were accurate given the sources that Cagwinn had provided. But you're right, Eska in Woodard (2008) does say that Lepontic was probably a dialect of Gaulish. Eska (2010) says the opposite, and in at least one of these articles, the argument in Eska 2010 was used to make the contrary claim in Eska 2008. That was a transparently false claim.

As for the classification, consider Stifter (2008),[8] who is not pushing his own analysis but summarizing the literature. There is no continental there, so I think it should be marked here as not being a normal node, and both Insular and P-Celtic are presented as possibilities. As an encyclopedia, we should also summarize the literature like this.

Thanks BTW for cleaning up the 'early period' section. — kwami (talk) 18:35, 1 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If by "Eska 2010" you mean the chapter on "The emergence of the Celtic languages" in Ball & Müller eds. The Celtic languages, then no, he is saying nothing there that contradicts what he said in 2008, certainly not about the separate-language status of Lepontic. In the 2010 paper he is simply not talking at all about "separate language" versus dialect status of any of these varieties, nor about the scope of any one language designation – he is merely saying that Cisalpine Gaulish is more akin with Lepontic than with Transalpine Gaulish. (By the way, if the summary of that article in the current version of our Celtic language article is yours, you have done a disappointingly poor job at it; the claim that Eska "rejects" Continental Celtic as a node is pure OR, as he raises no argument about the term at all but continues to use it as a matter of course; likewise, the claim that he "doubts that Cisalpine Gaulish is actually Gaulish" is your own projection into his article of your own prejudice that "Gaulish" must be equivalent to only "Transalpine Celtic", which is a premise nowhere justified by his paper.) You are also again mixing issues up. I named two issues over which you had edit-warred with Cagwinn in the text of this article, and challenged you to show how his versions were "false claims"; neither of the two issues in question depend in any way on any perceived or possible differences between the two Eska papers.

As for the Stifter lecture notes [9] (I suppose you are referring to the stemma on p.23, not the actual chapter on Lepontic), such a composite stemma is of course far too complex to use as a model for our infobox hierarchies; as I showed you in one or my previous posts, Stifter himself has no qualms using "Continental" and "Insular" for a simple general-purpose overview tree elsewhere. Of course we could include a more complex diagram like that – or, even better, an isogloss map like the one on the same page, somewhere in a "classification" section. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:06, 1 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, he uses the term "Continental Celtic", but as a geographic term; he clearly rejects it as a node. See the Glottolog summary of his classification here. He doesn't use the name "Gaulish" at all, but rather "Transalpine Celtic" and "Cisalpine Celtic", which are distinct branches. The former is Transalpine Gaulish (fn 13), the latter includes Cisalpine Gaulish, so one can obviously not be a dialect of the other. Thus what you changed here was not OR, but a straightforward reading of the source, as supported by the tree in Glottolog. — kwami (talk) 20:30, 1 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Who on earth ever claimed that T.G. and C.G. (or T.C. and C.C.) were dialects "of each other"?! What Eska 2008 is saying is that they were both dialects of a single over-arching language, "Gaulish". Nothing in that is contradicted by the assumption of a genetic division like that between Transalpine and Cisalpine, and as you rightly noticed, the 2010 paper simply doesn't touch on the concept of Gaulish as a language unit at all. As for the "Continental" node, not using a node is not the same as rejecting it – the latter would imply that he is raising an explicit argument against the use of the concept, which he is not. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:44, 1 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're misreading the sources. In 2008 he speaks of varieties of a Gaulish language. In 2010 the only thing that can be Gaulish is Transalpine. There can be no broader Gaulish, because anything broader would include the Insular languages. So there is an obvious contradiction: In 2008 Lepontic is a dialect of Gaulish, in 2010 it is not. — kwami (talk) 21:08, 1 June r2014 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, he does say somewhere that he considers the ancestor varieties of Insular to also have been still close enough to fall under the same umbrella of "Gaulish" at the time. So no, still no contradiction. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:13, 1 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Then Lepontic is not a dialect of Gaulish as we use the term here on WP; our articles are about topics, not words. So no contradiction for Eska, but no support for saying Lepontic is sometimes considered a dialect of Gaulish either. We might want to explain that Eska's "Gaulish" is Celtic minus Iberian, i.e., Glottolog's Nuclear Celtic. — kwami (talk) 06:50, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

McCone, Kim, Towards a relative chronology of ancient and medieval Celtic sound change, Maynooth, 1996, page 5 and chapters 2 and 3 (pp. 37-104), argues that Lepontic is simply a dialect of Gaulish, rather than a separate branch of the Celtic family.Cagwinn (talk) 16:09, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. That is helpful.

user:92.79.185.0 said you've discussed this elsewhere, and that "the cautious approach of David Stifter makes sense". Do you agree with that assessment? — kwami (talk) 17:16, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I subbed Cagwinn's ref for Eska in the lead. I haven't accessed it, so I'm only assuming that McCone means Gaulish in the same sense we do. — kwami (talk) 21:55, 2 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It is not our task on Wikipedia to decide what "we" mean by "Gaulish". Gaulish is whatever the literature says it is, and we are already acknowledging in the article that there are wider and narrower concepts. Your "topics, not words" lawyering is spurious. Your are, again, begging the question on the basis of your own prejudice: "A cannot be part of B." – "But some sources say that A is part of B." – "But those sources are not really speaking about B, but about some other thing they call B." – "Why can't they be talking about B?" – "Because A cannot be part of B". That's all your "logic" boils down to. Ridiculous.

I could of course live with the McCone ref just as well, but I am going to restore the Eska ref neverthless, both as a matter of principle, and because it's more easily accessible than the other one. If you choose to edit-war about it, as you have edit-warred about pretty much everything in the past, this thing goes straight to ANI – I'm no longer seeing this as a legitimate content disagreement but as a matter of your disruptive conduct. Fut.Perf. ☼ 12:26, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Of course it's not our task to decide what "Gaulish" is. But it is our task to decide what the topic of the article is. If there were a language in Borneo that happened to be called "Gaulish", we wouldn't add refs to it with the argument that it's not up to us to decide what "Gaulish" means. And if we had refs to "Gaulois", we wouldn't exclude them because it's not up to us to decide if that's the same as "Gaulish". You're arguing that Lepontic is a dialect of Gaulish because all of Celtic apart from Celtiberian is Gaulish, but nowhere do we tell the reader that we're no longer referring to the language defined in the lead. That's intellectually dishonest. — kwami (talk) 15:11, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This debate is now over. You are now up against the third highly experienced editor in two weeks who despairs of the possibility of discussing with you because talking to you is like talking against a brick wall. Maybe you really should start considering whether there is something about you that causes this. Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:07, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And you beat your wife. See? Saying something doesn't make it so. The article is definitely better, as you've addressed most of my concerns, but objecting to irrational statements is hardly inappropriate just because the person making them is irrational. We now use a source that can only support the point cited (that Lepontic is Gaulish) if we conclude it means that Irish and Welsh are also Gaulish, but Irish and Welsh are not Gaulish per this article, so the ref is inappropriate. Silly, really, because we have another ref that says the same thing, and we can just use that. — kwami (talk) 02:33, 10 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I will try for one final time to explain this to you, so listen:

1. If you are basing any point on supposed relations with the insular languages, please remember I only said I thought Eska said something to that effect somewhere, "if I remember correctly"; in fact I cannot locate that passage anywhere now and may well have misremembered. He isn't saying anything about it in the 2008 chapter in question, so in any case it is immaterial. And of course nobody has ever claimed that "Irish and Welsh" are also Gaulish (what I was suggesting was that their ancestors might have been subsumed under it).
2. Your contention that Eska's conception of "Gaulish" (whatever it may be) makes it a "different topic" from the concept of Gaulish this article is about is absurd sophistry. Of course, all the literature agrees on the basic intensional meaning of the term: Gaulish is, by definition, the ancient Celtic language known to us mainly from the inscriptions in Gaul. If some authors have different views about how far beyond Gaul its boundaries as a single languge may have reached (i.e. presumably different estimates about how far beyond Gaul there would have been mutual intelligibility), then that doesn't somehow magically make the term take on a different meaning; these are simply different opinions about the single, shared topic, the Gaulish language.
3. Thus we are left with just you feeling that Eska's description in the 2008 chapter is somehow logically inconsistent with his description in the later paper. That is your opinion, and as such WP:OR. You can either go and debate that with Professor Eska in private, or you can go and find some reliable source by some other expert criticising Eska on this point. I doubt you'll find such. Failing this, your objection is immaterial.
4. Your objection also happens to be rather poor linguistics. Your mistake is that you confuse the concept of a genealogical tree node with the concept of a "single language" as a synchronic unit. They are not the same. A "single language" (such as "Gaulish") is defined in terms of synchronic mutual intelligibility at a given point in time. Tree divisions, in contrast, are defined purely by age of innovation – not by amount or speed of innovation, hence not by synchronic dissimilarity. It is perfectly possible for two varieties that are divided by an older dialectal split, and hence further apart from each other in a tree, to still maintain a higher degree of similarity and mutual intelligibility with each other than with a third variety that split off at a much later date. So, even if Eska did say that (a) Lepontic is divided from Transalpine Gaulish by an older genealogical split than nsular Celtish, and that (b) Lepontic and Transalpine Gaulish formed a single language in antiquity while the insular languages didn't, there would still be no logical contradiction between these two statements.

Now, if you are still not satisfied, feel free to choose any form of dispute resolution you want: RfC, DRN, 3O, whatever – as long as it doesn't involve us two trying to convince each other, because my patience with you is absolutely exhausted. If you continue upholding your disruption through edit-warring and tag-bombing, I will call for sanctions against you at WP:ANI (and note, on the occasion, that if I hadn't become involved in this dispute with you I would in the meantime have blocked you myself for your conduct in the other dispute with User:Skookum1). Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:34, 10 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid I understand this problem even less than the others. The text was being used to cite the sentence "The more divergent Lepontic Celtic of Northern Italy has also sometimes been subsumed under Gaulish" and it's not the only cite given. Kwami tagged it with the summary "fails ref (Irish is not Gaulish)". In his comment here he says "We now use a source that can only support the point cited (that Lepontic is Gaulish) if we conclude it means that Irish and Welsh are also Gaulish, but Irish and Welsh are not Gaulish per this article, so the ref is inappropriate." Uh, what? I can't read page 165, but p. 166 clearly states "As mentioned above, it is probably that Lepontic and Galatian are not discrete languages, but regional dialects of Gaulish"; there's no mention of the Insular tongues on this page. Regardless of whether Kwami likes this source (or understands it), it seems clear enough to me.--Cúchullain ^t/c 11:41, 10 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to me we make it pretty clear that there are broader and narrower concepts of "Gaulish" and we lay them out pretty effectively. Future Perfect's version is the best we've seen in a long time. It would be nice if the discussion could now shift to how best to improve this and related articles.--Cúchullain ^t/c 18:22, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, it's much better, apart from that one failed ref. — kwami (talk) 02:33, 10 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Future Perfect, as you have seen here, modern scholars hardly agree on anything regarding Gaulish, Celtic etc. It is therefore disturbing when you now start deleting the primary evidence, namely inconvenient ("unreliable") Classical eye-witness reports by Caesar and others. Can you please resurrect them? We modern scholars will be dead and superseded in 100 years, Caesar et al. will remain. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.137.39.180 (talk) 16:49, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There is nothing "inconvenient" about those sources; why do you think I would have anything against them? It's just a matter of Wikipedia policy that we can't use primary historical sources as evidence to directly draw our own conclusions from. Please acquaint yourself with our policy on WP:Primary and secondary sources. We base our articles on secondary sources, i.e. modern scholarly works, as a matter of principle. Whatever it is Caesar said about Gaulish (and as far as I know it really isn't very much and very precise anyway), we can't use it unless we have modern scholars explaining to us how his statements ought to be interpreted. That's the policy in this place, like it or not.

And, for heaven's sake, please learn to sign your posts at last. Fut.Perf. ☼ 16:56, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I have now read the WP guideline, and this is what it says: "A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge." Caesar ticks that box. The other primary courses were referenced by secondary sources, as WP stipulates. Now return the favor and read the first few sentences of the Caesar reference - it will take you two minutes. There is nothing uncertain or "unreliable" about the Garonne, Seine and Marne. Please resurrect where you see fit. Shylock. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.137.39.180 (talk) 17:07, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't believe the primary sources really add anything. In fact, it confuses the attribution; presumably the whole couple of lines about Gaul, Noric and Galatian are meant to be attributed to Stifter and Eska, but inserting the primary sources in the middle of the sentences makes it appear that only the last part is from Stifter and Eska.--Cúchullain ^t/c 17:31, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Cuchllian. Your post is slightly out of place here (the Noric/Galation addition is not of my making). I suggest we wait with bated breath where Future Perfect places the primary refs (he suggested in the External section). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.137.39.180 (talk) 18:21, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, you or someone added primary source references immediately after "Gaul (modern France)" and Asia Minor ("Galatian"), and rearranged the passages so it appeared the Stifter and Eska cites only covered the end of the passage, rather than the whole thing. I'm sure this wasn't intentional, but it's definitely how it looks to the reader. It doesn't really add anything to the intro, and risks confusing it. I think what Future's saying is that such references may be appropriate for the "external references" section, and I'd tend to agree, depending on how it's presented.--Cúchullain ^t/c 18:45, 4 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Et voilà. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.111.222.98 (talk) 14:15, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, works for me. (But, for the third time now, can you please, please, please learn to sign your posts on talk pages? Everybody else does it; it really isn't difficult.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 14:28, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Food for thought for Future Perfect, Cagwinn, Kwami et alii. It strikes me that the statement "Gaulish was supplanted by Vulgar Latin and various Germanic languages from around the 5th century AD onwards" contradicts the sources and statements in the subsequent sections which imply that the language switch came about via upper-crust trilingual Gauls, via the nobles learning Cicero, via the Bible translated into Latin etc. Does not sound very Vulgar to me. (Although I appreciate the Bible was referred to as the Vulgata.) And if you follow the Vulgar Latin weblinks, it seems the whole concept of Vulgar Latin is not straightforward. Any ideas how to remove/explain the apparent contradiction?

My own suspicion is that normal Latin imposed on Celtic substrate created Romance pretty much instantaneously in the fifth century, but my opinion is not important. Shylock. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.111.222.98 (talk) 14:05, 11 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Like in every case where one language is supplanted by another through language shift, the old language will disappear only after a more or less protracted time during which substantial parts of the population have been bilingual. It takes more than just the "upper crust" becoming bilingual. This time of more or less mass bilingualism could have begun anywhere between Ceasar's days and late antiquity. The Latin adopted by these large parts of the population would of course have been popular vernacular Latin, i.e. "Vulgar" Latin. People somewhere in rural provincial Gaul would have learned Latin from their more Romanized neighbours in the nearest market town, not through reading Cicero. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:57, 12 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

With respect, you say "could have", would of course", "would have". Wiki does not allow original research. From my own experience with immigrants I do not believe that a language shift is necessarily protracted (often the parent(s) speak one language, while the children are perfectly fluent in another, higher-status language). But my opinion and yours are unimportant. The point is, what the article needs is a reference for a proposed Gaulish-Vulgar Latin transition, to resolve the contradiction (most conveniently by amending: "Social conditions such as serfdom and the shift of urban power to a villa economy moved large numbers of Latin-speakers into the countryside and upset the linguistic balance,[citation needed] resulting in the eventual extinction of Gaulish."), or a removal/qualification of the Vulgar Latin claim in the Intro. I had discussed this briefly with Cagwinn some time ago, but without a real solution. (I suspect that there is no such conclusive reference/evidence, and that it is all based on "of course", but am willing to be pleasantly surprised). Shylock.