Gallaecian language
Gallaecian or Northwestern Hispano-Celtic is an extinct Celtic language of the Hispano-Celtic group.[1] It was spoken by the Gallaeci in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula around the start of the 1st millennium. The region became the Roman province of Gallaecia, which is now divided between the Spanish regions of Galicia, western Asturias, the west of the Province of León, and the North Region in Portugal.[2][3][4]
This article is about an extinct Celtic language that was spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. For the current Romance language, see Galician language. For the extinct Celtic language of Anatolia, see Galatian language.Gallaecian
Attested beginning of the first millennium CE
None (mis)
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Overview[edit]
As with the Illyrian, Ligurian and Thracian languages, the surviving corpus of Gallaecian is composed of isolated words and short sentences contained in local Latin inscriptions or glossed by classical authors, together with a number of names – anthroponyms, ethnonyms, theonyms, toponyms – contained in inscriptions, or surviving as the names of places, rivers or mountains. In addition, some isolated words of Celtic origin preserved in the present-day Romance languages of north-west Iberia, including Galician, Portuguese, Asturian and Leonese are likely to have been inherited from ancient Gallaecian.[5]
Classical authors Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder wrote about the existence of Celtic[6] and non-Celtic populations in Gallaecia and Lusitania, but several modern scholars have postulated Lusitanian and Gallaecian as a single archaic Celtic language.[7] Others point to major unresolved problems for this hypothesis, such as the mutually incompatible phonetic features, most notably the proposed preservation of Indo-European *p and the loss of *d in Lusitanian and the inconsistent outcome of the vocalic liquid consonants, which has led them to the conclusion that Lusitanian is a non-Celtic language and is not closely related to Gallaecian.[8][9][10][11]