Viggen Posted May 9, 2006 Report Share Posted May 9, 2006 Just wondering, was there a single language or dialects, or did various celtic areas speak completely different language, meaning they couldnt understand each other at all? For example if in Caesars times, a Celtiberian, a celt from Helvetia, one from Noricum, one from Gaul, one from Galatia and one from Britain would have met.(was there actually a chance that this could have happend?) How would they have communicated, a unifying dialect? each his own dialect that they could understand? or perhaps just latin or greek? Do we actually know anything to come to an answer? cheers viggen Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pantagathus Posted May 9, 2006 Report Share Posted May 9, 2006 Definitely different dialects stemming out from the two major divisions: Goedelic ("Q" or Insular) & Brythonic ("P" or Continental) Cunliffe has proposed that Celtic as a whole was the Lingua Franca of trade B.C. outside the Greco-Roman zone of influence. But which dialect? I imagine they were as different as the modern Romance languages are from each other. Celtiberian would have been quite different because of the shear amount of non-Indo-European loans words that apparently made up it's grammar & vocabulary. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
docoflove1974 Posted May 9, 2006 Report Share Posted May 9, 2006 A good resource for this is: Lewis, Henry and Holger Pedersen (1989). A Concisce Comparative Celtic Grammar. G Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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