Celtiberian language


Celtiberian or Northeastern Hispano-Celtic is an extinct Indo-European language of the Celtic branch spoken by the Celtiberians in an area of the Iberian Peninsula between the headwaters of the Douro, Tagus, Júcar and Turia rivers and the Ebro river. This language is directly attested in nearly 200 inscriptions dated to the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, mainly in Celtiberian script, a direct adaptation of the northeastern Iberian script, but also in the Latin alphabet. The longest extant Celtiberian inscriptions are those on three Botorrita plaques, bronze plaques from Botorrita near Zaragoza, dating to the early 1st century BC, labelled Botorrita I, III and IV. In the northwest was another Celtic language, Gallaecian, that was closely related to Celtiberian. It is the only known Celtic language not to be classed as Nuclear Celtic.

Overview

Enough has been preserved to show that the Celtiberian language could be called Q-Celtic, and not P-Celtic like Gaulish. For some, this has served to confirm that the legendary invasion of Ireland by the Milesians, preserved in the Lebor Gabála Érenn, actually happened.
Some scholars believe that Brythonic is more closely related to Goidelic than to Gaulish; it would follow that the P/Q division is polyphyletic, the change from kʷ to p occurring in Brythonic and Gaulish at a time when they were already separate languages, rather than constituting a division that marked a separate branch in the "family tree" of the Celtic languages. A change from PIE to p also occurred in some Italic languages and Ancient Greek dialects: compare Oscan pis, pid with Latin quis, quid; or Gaulish epos and Attic Greek ἵππος hippos with Latin equus and Mycenaean Greek i-qo. Celtiberian and Gaulish are usually grouped together as the Continental Celtic languages, but this grouping is paraphyletic too: no evidence suggests the two shared any common innovation separately from Insular Celtic.
Celtiberian exhibits a fully inflected relative pronoun ios, not preserved in other Celtic languages, and the particles -kue 'and' < *kʷe, nekue 'nor' < *ne-kʷe, ekue 'also, as well' < *h₂et-kʷe, ve "or". As in Welsh, there is an s-subjunctive, gabiseti "he shall take", robiseti, auseti. Compare Umbrian ferest "he/she/it shall make" or Ancient Greek δείξῃ deiksēi / δείξει deiksei " he/she/it shall show".

Phonology

Celtiberian was a Celtic language that shows the characteristic sound changes of Celtic languages such as:

PIE Consonants

Noun casesWodtko, Dagmar S. "An outline of Celtiberian grammar" 2003

There is also a potential Vocative case, however this is very poorly attested, with only an ambiguous -e ending for o-stem nouns being cited in literature.

Demonstrative pronounsJordán Cólera, Carlos "La forma verbal ''cabint'' del bronce celtibérico de Novallas". En Emerita, Revista de Lingüística y Filología Clásica LXXXII 2, 2014, pp. 327-343

Sample texts