Celtiberian

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: <X99Lynx at aol.com>
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2000 4:43 AM

[snip]

> "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.

[Ed Selleslagh]

This could be a Basque-like (Iberian?) feature: the derivative -ko suffix, with
some subsequent alteration (lenition....), cf. etxekoandrea = the
mistress/lady of the house [house-of-lady-the].

>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...

[Ed]

Strangely enough, according to my own reading of a particular Iberian
inscription (Sinarcas), this feature, or something resembling it, might be
present in Iberian. But accompanied by a subject in an apparently ergative
case.

> 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...>>

[Ed]

The latter is well known and quite easy to explain: e.g. there is a redundancy
of rhotics (r/R) and sibilants (s/s') when the script is used for Celtiberian
(and deficiencies on the other hand: e.g. lack of voiced/unvoiced opposition).
So, Celtiberian could never elucidate distinctions (in Iberian) it doesn't have
itself. Imagine we had Latin texts in Arabic script: how far would we get in
determining the meaning of all Arabic characters?

> Regards,
> Steve Long

[Ed]

A more general comment: Given the presence of Q-Lusitanian (maybe Celtic, maybe
Italic, or an early form of both when they were still rather undifferentiated)
on the one hand, and that of P-Celtic in Gaul on the other hand, plus the
admixture of Iberian or a Basque-like language and later Latinization,
Celtiberian may have gone through a whole series of stages. One can even
imagine it was a kind of evolving creole grown out of a pidgin used to
communicate among the various very different peoples in Iberia, or an
adapted/modified Lingua Franca.

Ed.