Linguists at Aberystwyth University are assembling what they say will be the first complete dictionary of ancient Celtic, gathering more than 1,000 words that survive from roughly 325 B.C. to A.D. 500 in an effort to reconstruct the linguistic landscape of Britain and Ireland at the dawn of that historical period.
The project, its leaders caution, will not result in a hefty volume; instead, its outcome is expected to be relatively little material that has survived. But the team expects the compiled entry list will exceed 1,000 words drawn from disparate sources, including Julius Caesar’s accounts of his campaigns, Roman administrative records and soldierly letters, place names, and inscriptions carved in the early Ogham alphabet.
“These disparate sources have never before been brought together in a way that offers such an insight into the nature of Celtic languages spoken in these islands,” said Dr. Simon Rodway, a senior lecturer in the department of Welsh and Celtic studies at Aberystwyth. He said the dictionary should interest not only linguists but historians, archaeologists, and archaeogeneticists.
Elements of modern languages can be traced to the ancient words being researched
Elements of modern Celtic tongues such as Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, and Cornish can be traced to the words the researchers are collecting. Rodway pointed to the continuity between modern words for “sea”, Welsh môr and Old Irish muir, and ancient Celtic forms such as “Mori” found in place names like Moridunum, the early name for Carmarthen in southwest Wales, meaning “sea fort.”
Because so little was written in the far north of Europe in the early period, the project will rely heavily on records produced by outsiders or preserved in other languages. “With the exception of a very small number of inscriptions from Roman Britain in Celtic languages, we’re dependent on documents that are written either in Latin or Greek, but which contain names of places, ethnic groups, or individuals that we can say are Celtic,” Rodway said.
The majority of surviving material comes from the Roman period in Britain, roughly the first through fourth centuries A.D., while comparable evidence in Ireland appears later, from the middle of the second century onward, Rodway said. Ogham inscriptions, straight-line characters carved on stone, metal, bone, or wood in parts of Ireland and Cornwall, also provide important fragments.
Online and printed editions of the ancient Celtic dictionary are set to be released
Project organizers plan both online and printed editions of the dictionary. The team said assembling all available evidence in a single, searchable reference will make it easier to spot linguistic patterns and to chart how ancient Celtic tongues related to each other and evolved into the modern languages spoken today.
“There’s much less from Ireland from that period, because it was never part of the Roman empire,” Rodway said. “People have studied place names before and a few inscriptions, but we’re going to try and get everything together and see what patterns emerge.”
The work, researchers say, aims to offer a clearer picture of languages spoken in Britain and Ireland some 2,000 years ago and to provide a resource for scholars across disciplines seeking to better understand the islands’ past.
