Ligurian language (ancient)

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Ligurian (ancient)
Native to Liguria
RegionNorthern Mediterranean Coast straddling South-east French and North-west Italian coasts, including Northern Tuscany and Corsica.
Era300 BCE (?) – 100 CE [1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 xlg
xlg
Glottolog anci1248 [4]

The Ligurian language was spoken in pre-Roman times and into the Roman era by an ancient people of north-western Italy and current south-eastern France known as the Ligures.

Contents

Very little is known about ancient Ligurian; the lack of inscriptions and unknown origin of the Ligurian people prevents its certain linguistic classification into a Pre-Indo-European [5] or an Indo-European language. [6] The linguistic hypotheses are mainly based on toponyms and names of persons.

Ancient sources

Map of Italy and its languages. The Ligurian group is N4. The Ligurian is increasingly attested as a non-Indo-European language. Italic-map.svg
Map of Italy and its languages. The Ligurian group is N4. The Ligurian is increasingly attested as a non-Indo-European language.
Liguria in Roman Italy. Meyers b9 s0067b.jpg
Liguria in Roman Italy.
Iron Age Italy.png

Strabo indicates that the Ligurians were different from the Celts:

As for the Alps... Many tribes (éthnê) occupy these mountains, all Celtic (Keltikà) except the Ligurians; but while these Ligurians belong to a different people (hetero-ethneis), still they are similar to the Celts in their modes of life (bíois).

Because of the strong Celtic influences on the language and culture, the Ligurians were known in antiquity as Celto-Ligurians (in Greek ΚελτολίγυεςKeltolígues) in some other sources. [7]

Herodotus (5.9) wrote that sigunnai meant 'hucksters, peddlers' among the Ligurians who lived above Massilia.

Ligurian as a Pre-Indo-European language

Scholars, such as Ernst Gamillscheg, Pia Laviosa Zambotti and Yakov Malkiel, [8] [9] consider ancient Ligurian as a pre-Indo-European language, with later and significant Indo-European influences, especially Celtic (Gallic) and Italic (Latin), superimposed on the original language.

The thesis is that the Ligurians were survivors of the ancient pre-Indo-European populations that had occupied Europe, at least from the fifth millennium BC. [10] These populations would have had their own linguistic strain, which they would have preserved until the onset of waves of Indo-European migration. Later, the latter would conquer the territories, imposing their culture and language on the Ligurians.

Ligurian as an Indo-European language and its relationship with Celtic

Xavier Delamarre argues that Ligurian was a Celtic language, similar to, but not the same as Gaulish.[ citation needed ] His argument hinges on two points: firstly, the Ligurian place-name Genua (modern Genoa, located near a river mouth) is claimed by Delamarre to derive from PIE *ǵenu-, "chin(bone)". Many Indo-European languages use 'mouth' to mean the part of a river which meets the sea or a lake, but it is only in Celtic for which reflexes of PIE *ǵenu- mean 'mouth'. Besides Genua, which is considered Ligurian (Delamarre 2003, p. 177), this is found also in Genava (modern Geneva), which may be Gaulish. However, Genua and Genava may well derive from another PIE root with the form *ǵonu-, which means "knee" (so in Pokorny, IEW). [11]

Delamarre's second point is Plutarch's mention (Marius 10, 5-6) that during the Battle of Aquae Sextiae in 102 BC, the Ambrones (who were a Germanic tribe from Jutland) began to shout "Ambrones!" as their battle cry; the Ligurian troops fighting for the Romans, on hearing this cry, found that it was identical to an ancient name in their country which the Ligurians often used when speaking of their descent (outôs kata genos onomazousi Ligues), so they returned the shout, "Ambrones!".

A risk of circular logic has been pointed out – if it is believed that the Ligurians are non-Celtic, and if many place names and tribal names that classical authors state are Ligurian seem to be Celtic, it is incorrect to discard all the Celtic ones when collecting Ligurian words and to use this edited corpus to demonstrate that Ligurian is non-Celtic or non-Indo-European. [12]

The Ligurian-Celtic question is also discussed by Guy Barruol (fr) in his 1969 paper The Pre-Roman Peoples of South-East Gaul: Study of Historical Geography.

Ligurian as substrate

French historian and philologist Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville held that Ligurian was the first Indo-European language spoken in Western Europe and was related to Sicel. In his work Premiers Habitants de l'Europe (2nd edition 1889–1894), Jubainville proposed an early Indo-European substrate language for Corsica, Sardinia, eastern Spain, southern France and western Italy, based on the occurrence there of place names ending in -asco, -asca, -usco, -osco, -osca as well as -inco, -inca. [13] For examples of the Corsican toponymy cited by Jubainville, see Prehistory of Corsica.

Other linguists expanded on the idea. Julius Pokorny adapted it as the basis for his Illyro-Venetic theory. Paul Kretschmer saw evidence for Ligurian in Lepontic inscriptions, now seen as Celtic. Hans Krahe, focusing on river names, converted the concept into his theory of the Old European hydronymy. [14]

See also

Related Research Articles

Celtic languages Language family

The Celtic languages are a group of related languages descended from Proto-Celtic. They form a branch of the Indo-European language family. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, following Paul-Yves Pezron, who made the explicit link between the Celts described by classical writers and the Welsh and Breton languages.

Celts Ethnolinguistic group

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Cisalpine Gaul Roman province

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Ligures Ethnic group

The Ligures were an ancient population that gave the name to Liguria, a region of north-western Italy.

Lepontic language Ancient Celtic language

Lepontic is an ancient Alpine Celtic language that was spoken in parts of Rhaetia and Cisalpine Gaul between 550 and 100 BC. Lepontic is attested in inscriptions found in an area centered on Lugano, Switzerland, and including the Lake Como and Lake Maggiore areas of Italy.

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The Celtic Cisalpine Gaulish inscriptions are frequently combined with the Lepontic inscriptions under the term Celtic language remains in northern Italy. While it is possible that the Lepontians were autochthonous to northern Italy since the end of the 2nd millennium BC, it is well-known that the Gauls invaded the regions north of the river Po in several waves since the 5th century BC. They apparently took over the art of writing from the Lepontians, including some of the orthographic peculiarities. There are 20 Cisalpine Gaulish inscriptions, five of which are longer than just one or two words. The inscriptions stem largely from the area south of the Lepontians.

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References

  1. Ligurian (ancient) at MultiTree on the Linguist List
  2. Kruta, Venceslas (1991). The Celts. Thames and Hudson. p. 54.
  3. Kruta, Venceslas (1991). The Celts. Thames and Hudson. p. 55.
  4. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Ancient Ligurian". Glottolog 3.0 . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  5. "Liguri". Enciclopedie on line. Treccani.it (in Italian). Rome: Treccani -Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. 2011. Le documentazioni sulla lingua dei Liguri non ne permettono una classificazione linguistica certa (preindoeuropeo di tipo mediterraneo? Indoeuropeo di tipo celtico?).
  6. "Ligurian language". Britannica.com. 2014-12-16. Retrieved 2015-08-29.
  7. Baldi, Philip (2002). The Foundations of Latin. Walter de Gruyter. p. 112.
  8. Ernst Gamillscheg, Romanen und Basken. Mainz & Wiesbaden: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz, 1950. (in German)
  9. Yakov Malkiel, Old and New Trends in Spanish Linguistics, published July 1952 (172) 1951-1952.
  10. Pia Laviosa Zambotti, La civiltà dei più antichi agricoltori liguri, in „ Rivista di Studi Liguri" (Anno IX, N. 2—3, Maggio-Dicembre 1943, pp. 96—108) (in Italian)
  11. Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch
  12. Celtic Gods: The Gaulish and Ligurian god, Vasio at the Wayback Machine (archived 2013-05-18)
  13. Jubainville, H. D'Arbois de (1889). Les Premiers Habitants de l'Europe d'après les Écrivains de l'Antiquité et les Travaux des Linguistes: Seconde Édition (in French). Paris: Ernest Thorin. pp. V.II, Book II, Chapter 9, Sections 10, 11.
  14. Mees, Bernard (2003). "A genealogy of stratigraphy theories from the Indo-European west". In Anderson, Henning (ed.). Language Contacts in Prehistory: Studies in Stratigraphy. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company. pp. 11–44. ISBN   1-58811-379-5.

Sources