Celtiberian

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

I wrote:
>>>That would put you at (1000BC minus 2000 minus 2000 more) 5000BC.
>>>And of course, the differentiation between [Mycenaean, Latin, Hittite] and
>>>Tocharian, Luwian, the undecipherable Thracian, Albanian and Celtiberian
>>>should send your date of dispersal hurtling back to that magic 7000BC
>>>you've mentioned so frequently.

Mr. Stirling replied with the usual pertinent pointedness:

>> -- another bizzare statement.  Would you care to elucidate why the
>>existance of Celtiberian should affect our datings?  Particularly as we
>>know virtually nothing about it, or Thracian.

On 2/23/2000 6:51:30 PM, sonno3 at hotmail.com further replied:

>I think you are overstating a bit on Celtiberian - we may not know as much
>about it as Gaulish, but we are far from knowing "virtually nothing about it"
>(and it is certainly not undecipherable!) In any case, we know Celtiberian was
>already being spoken in Spain in the 6th century BC, and that it shares many
>similarities with the Goidelic branch (PIE -Kw->=Qu/Ku/Cu, for example). Its
>vocabulary preserves some archaisms not found in Goidelic or Brythonic (Silbur
>"silver" next to regular Common Celtic word Arganto-) and its sentance
>structure was SOV.

Just want to point out that I never called Celtiberian 'undecipherable' as I
did not call Albanian indecipherable.  As the author above points out, we
actually know a bit about Celtiberian.  The problem is that the language is
not the 'remarkably uniform' Celtic that has been represented on this list.

Since evidence of Celtiberian dates back as far as early Latin, contrary to
what was said above, it certainly is a candidate as one of the earliest IE
languages on record and needs to be accounted for on an equal basis, I think.
 I received some additional information on Celtiberian:

"The 'first full manual' on the language appeared in 1998.  Jordán Cólera,
Carlos. Introducción al Celtibérico. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza.
Wolfgang Meid's commentaries on Celtiberian Inscriptions Archaeologica
(Budapest 1994) have been considered authoritative.  Francois Villar's A new
interpretation of Celtiberian grammar (Innsbruck 1995) approaches the issues
of both the non-Indoeuropean and what may be singular indoeuropean aspects of
the language.  Some general observations:

The Iberian "syllabic" script that was used to write Celtiberian has often
been described as unable to represent the opposition of voiced and voiceless
consonants, as well as being limited to representing a limited range of final
consonants (s, m, r, n, l).  These conclusions have been questioned
recently... On the basis of Latin scripts used in the last phase of
Celtiberian, it was concluded that the language fell into the Q-Celtic
category.  However, it now appears that this may also have been the result of
the Latinization of the language in the late period, since some early texts
now seem to show signs of being P-Celtic...  The lexical data shows that
Celtiberian innovated or borrowed a good many words and roughly half the
vocabulary is not known with real certainty...  It has been said that
Celtiberian also contains some Indoeuropean archaisms, but far outnumbering
these are elements that remain to be explained - including the frequent use
of the genitive singular ending -o.  And while the predicted Indoeuropean
passive -r ending does not now seem to be present, some researchers feel they
have detected evidence of mutation (lenition) in the Celtiberian script...
There is also the difficult problem, mentioned above, as to whether
Latinization in the mid 2d century BC altered the language so that it was at
least dialectically different from the one used in the Iberian script.
Familiar structure that appears in Latin alphabet texts are not often
confirmed in the earlier texts.  And this difficulty is amplified by the fact
that the accepted phonetic interpretation of early Celtiberian texts have not
proved especially useful in elucidating the original Iberian script...>>

Regards,
Steve Long