Cisalpine Celtic (with Dr. David Stifter)

[@fartsofdoom6491]

As a native German speaker, I had never noticed the verb first thing in jokes, and my mind is absolutely blown. If anyone's looking for an example, the infamous "A horse walks into a bar..." would likely be rendered "Geht ein Pferd ins Gasthaus..." in German. It's a fascinating little thing, really. By the sentence structure itself you can tell that you're being told a joke. I'm shocked that I never realised this. As far as I can tell, it very much cuts across all dialects, too. Absolutely amazing.

[@gregrefon]

It is same in some South Slavic languages.

[@andrew_owens7680]

As always, you bring on the best guests with the highest quality content. This is what the internet should be about, a wonderland of learning.

[@craigcrawford22]

Thanks! Really interesting! Great interview.

[@matteofurlotti6211]

Jackson: "People in my community think deeply about language" Me: "Myyy mother told mee"

[@seamussc]

This was fantastic! I learned so much about things I have always wondered about regarding Celtic languages, and them some.

[@Johan-vk5yd]

15:09 Amateur with language interest. I’m not surprised the Alps could be home of many quite different languages. Mountains divide people, isn’t it so?

[@ULYSSES-31]

I'd really love to see a full talk on old Irish and Ogham with Dr. Stifter.

[@charleslinares1]

Great interview ! David Stifter is so good (and old irish so difficult...). Thank you.

[@patchshorts]

Ogham first appeared in the 3rd and 4th centuries when monks appear. Inspired by Latin is probably correct. However still used to express old names on rocks.

[@KetinUSA]

Please do make a separate video on ogham!

[@sanjivjhangiani3243]

So, to the Cisalpine Gauls, I guess these Leopontic Celts may have sounded like hillbillies!

[@tidsdjupet-mr5ud]

Old french is another indo-european language that underwent similar strong phonetic reduction in the same time and area in western Europe.

[@ethanskinner7914]

Hey, Dr. Crawford. I am curious to see if there are any hapax legomenon that occur in Old Norse writings (which I'm sure there are). Would be a video I'd be very interested in seeing

[@NetTopsey]

That was fascinating. I was especially surprised by the change of the language in what is estimated to be 100 years or so. I wonder if any neighbouring cultures have echoes in their languages of whatever the event was that caused the change?

[@mawkernewek]

It could have been the case that the spoken language had been changing for some time, whereas the inscriptions reflected a literary standard based on an older version of the language, and at a certain this older literary standard ceased being used, and was replaced by something closer to the spoken language.

[@andrew_owens7680]

Rapid changes in language often indicate political strife. I was speaking to an Iraqi. The Civil War in Iraq following the American invasion set the Sunnis and Shiites against each other. People were stopped in the street and killed if they said something typical of a Shiite or Sunni (depending on who was being attacked) I posit that two dialects will evolve over a very short time.

[@nataliajimenez1870]

He mentions how Old Irish emerges around the 6th century, so the changes might be correlated with the fall of Rome and its repercussions across the Empire and its neighbors. There must have been a lot of instability in that period. Also the spread of Christianity in Ireland happens in this period and with it the spread of literacy through the monastic system

[@mindyschaper]

This was fascinating to hear. I love how you're refining your Celtic-runic influence theory with each guest. Also it's so nice to see his joy sharing his knowledge with people who are interested!

[@LuigiPavesi-jf9yz]

I was born in Milan and now I live near Bergamo, where my wife comes from. The both of our dialects are celt-roman. there are traces of a lower Celtic layer, an intermediate Latin layer (the most important) and an upper German layer (thanks to Goths and Longobards). We have Ö and Ü sounds in both dialects, negation after verb (I go not = "Mi vo no" /mi vu nÒ/ or "mi vo minga/ in milanese and "me vo mia" / me vo mia/ in Bergamese. what I find really odd is that in Milanese we have "s" sounding a little bit like "sh" and in Bergamese it corresponds to an aspiration (more or less like "hot" in English), as in word Halstadt (the place of the salt). Two different Celtic tribes lived in the corresponding regions, and it is as if their influence were still alive

[@AndrewTheFrank]

A part of the Bronze Age trade network went from Denmark overland to CisAlpine Gaul and back. The Bronze Age ended about 1200 BC but there is no reason to believe that all trade along this route stopped. This just so happens to be the area were the Lepontic are between 500 BC to 100 BC. To me it sounds reasonable that the strange names are likely from that previous Bronze Age culture and the old trade routes from north to south would be a natural means for writing to flow. I understand the reluctance to quite say it but its always annoying when experts talk all the way to a line but never go over.

[@sylviarogier1]

Will Dr Stifter be back as a guest? It seems like there were certain topics which needed more time to develop.

[@lakrids-pibe]

Adgonnetios, he Is Odin's man Vote for Adgonnetios

[@flannerypedley840]

Doctor Sifter... may your dreams come true and you write these books.

[@gandolfthorstefn1780]

Diolch yn fawr.👍🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

[@dcdcdc556]

I'd love to see a video on Belgic. I recall from reading back 15-20 years or so ago that some scholars suggested that the Belgae were a "Celto-Germanic" "mixed" (or maybe "contact" is a better term) group that was largely Gaulish but with Germanic cultural influences, including I think personal names. Anything more recent than my half-recollection would be fascinating!

[@therat1117]

There is very little evidence for this, and it is based strongly on personal names and stereotype. Place-names in the area reported by Romans were all Gaulish, and Belgae peoples who moved to Britain evidently were not so culturally distinct from their neighbours that their archaeological sites are distinct, nor place-names in the areas in which they lived. It does seem that a number of Germanic people lived among the Belgae, some of whom are recorded, but this is nothing unique for neighbouring peoples. Notions of their culture being 'German influenced' are based on, may I say, stereotypes. The Belgae were very spartan, warlike, and apparently very religious compared to their fellow Gauls. Apply some modern cultural stereotypes about manly Germans and effete Frenchmen, and suddenly you are assigning Germanicity to Gauls. Tacitus records that Germanic peoples drank heavily and in culturally important ways, whereas the Belgae eschewed drink, as an example. Their methods of warfare were similarly closer to the Celtic norm than the Germanic.

[@Tranxhead]

The verb-first aspect of "New" Celtic... You can see constructions a lot like Old Irish's in Gaulish where the verbs get built up at the start of the sentence with preverbs, infixed objects etc..

[@vampyricon7026]

There is one exception to the robustness of voicing contrasts among ancient Indo-European languages: Tocharian!

[@morvil73]

Hallo David! Toller Vortrag - sehr interessant. Können wir irgendetwas über die Betonungsverhältnisse im Lepontischen sagen? (Is there anything we can gather concerning stress patterns in Lepontic?) LG, Danny

[@davidstifter849]

Thank you. No, unfortunately we cannot say anything serious about the stress pattern in Lepontic or Cisalpine Gaulish. Ultimately, this issue is just part of the much wider problem of accent in the ancient Celtic languages, about we know very littlle. The little that we can usually say, especially about stress in Gaulish, is rather where the stress did NOT fall.

[@andrew_owens7680]

But you did provide me das Wort des Tages - die Betonungsverhältnisse. Danke sehr.

[@thogameskanaal]

Impulsive, uneducated guess: Could 'pala' or 'bala' which means gravestone be cognate with English 'pole'? I mean, you can see the connection, right?

[@rorypage5374]

Or one could also consider "poll" which is a "hole" in insular Celtic, or balla which is a (stone) wall in modern Irish as possible derivatives.

[@eh1702]

In the very rapid change to neo-Celtic forms in Britain & Ireland, there may be a modern corollary in England, specifically. The Black Death in the 1340s hit with such ferocity that within a few years there just were not enough people left who could understand Latin or Norman French well enough to produce legal manorial, town & borough records, or civil deeds and contracts, in those languages of officialdom. Lower-class people just had to be inducted as clerks - and taught to read and write in English to fill those needs. English, which had various differences in its regional genesis from different continental sources anyway, had developed on its own regional trajectories since pre-Norman days, but also it had become a lot more Frenchified, especially in southern England, since 1066. So they were now writing in English again - but something very different from the English that we see in the pre-Conquest documents that survive. Which were probably linguistically conservative in their own time, compared to what people were speaking. (Interestingly, this all played out in somewhat different ways, and on different timescales, in other polities on the same island - Wales and Scotland.) None of this means that the general populace of England, or any region of it, transformed their speech in just a couple of generations of socioeconomic fallout from the Black Death. Or, for that matter, that the peasantry had suddenly adopted Frenchified English by 1100. The impact of Rome on continental forms of Celtic - say, Gaulish, and possibly others - may well have had a similar effect on the learned community of Britain & Ireland generations before the Romans arrived. It could have shrunk the community of “conservative” culture-bearers and “international celtic” speakers considerably. We know that the Romans regarded the Gaulish and insular learned class as having strong cross-channel links. We know that oral (distinct from written) traditions of scholarship and tradition were so unnerving to the Romans that they made a special project of expunging this class of civilians by purposely “kettling” and annihilating the scholarly (druid) class on Angelsey. Anglesey was probably not the only instance. (In turn, later Saxon invaders acted similarly, famously turning their battle line upon the unarmed Celtic clergy.) The Roman conquest of the Gauls (genocidal in Armorica, by their own account) and the assault by Rome on the scholarly community of Britain would have ended the connection of insular Celtic speakers with more conservative linguistic forms being used internationally to achieve a certain “standardisation” of, and to recite, oral literature. Including their histories. A vernacular or prakrit survived in Wales (who knows about England?) and in Scotland and Ireland: that doesn’t mean each mutated or developed all of a sudden. Even Welsh had centuries to assimilate all that Latin. Irish scholars undoubtedly survived but their scholarly community was drastically reduced and isolated. It seems very reasonable that what the plague was to Latin and Norman French, the Romans were, over some centuries, to conservative or ancestral forms of Celtic in the islands.

[@Johan-vk5yd]

1:09:33 Paleogenetics is an awesome tool! Together with language science it can give so many clues to history of humans on this planet. (Svante Pääbo and his team earned their Nobel Prize for sure.)

[@markc1564]

Hello Jackson, I recently found your channel and really enjoy it. I studied but didn't finish a MA in linguistics in the 70's so obviously have limited knowledge. I enjoy so much about your channel. The opening with the western theme, buffalos and particularly when you are shown wielding a gun, however, seems to trivialize your presentations--particularly the gun which in these days given the devastation done by guns, I find offensive ....but thanks for your work.

[@eh1702]

One of the fascinating things about ogham is how analytical it is linguistically. The way that strokes come off the stem (eg horizontal, sloped this or that way) has a lot in common with the way that written Korean was methodically analysed for a writing system around the 14th century. That is, the letters in ogham are not visually grouped “in alphabetical order”, nor just split visually into vowels and consonants. They are further grouped by how/where they are produced in the mouth. It’s not precisely the same way modern linguists identify “labials” “fricatives”,;“dentals” etc, but it is undoubtedly a very similar rationale that is being used.

[@AnonUser1977]

fascinating discussion. I really like learning about early post-bronze age, proto-classic era European history. Good stuff.

[@YolayOle]

*Shakes fist* Darn you Laaattiiin!! Making all these languages disappear!

[@khajiitkitten5679]

"Latin is a language as dead as it can be. First it killed the Romans; now it's killing me." 11th grade Latin. :))

[@andrew_owens7680]

Latin has nothing on English.

[@Ed1ArchitectHist]

Fantastisch, außergewöhnlich, "thank you well" drs. Stifter & Crawford! So much new and compelling information ☘🍀

[@maxgruntgens9000]

Fantastic interview! Please do more interviews concerning Celtic studies if possible. A very underreported field of study imo.

[@tuasucks]

Thank you so much! Dying to learn more about ancient celtic culture and language. Almost all of the content of youtube is pretty questionable.

[@AndrewTheFrank]

"run to the store." verb first, wasn't hard to think of and something that wouldn't be odd to hear. We can also make it into a conversation. A: "running to the store." B: "running to the store?" A: "buying eggs." B: "go then." A: "go?" B: "go buy those eggs!" A: "later" ok it sounds a bit corny strung all together but its not like any of this in and of itself is farfetched or would sound strange, especially as the start of a sentence.

[@eh1702]

In some contexts, my grandmother’s generation would use the verb first, very explicitly - not just leaving out pronouns. “Go you and get it.” would be a strong imperative. They also would relate anecdotes in a way you only see in books now, in English, to the extent that us kids would use it to mimic them n skits. “Go you and get it, said she. Get it yourself! says he right back. And then - says she to me, she says - He’s so lazy!” says she.

[@frankjoseph4273]

It seems iron age West and Central Europe was a hodgepodge of loosely knit Celtic tribes that were held together by language and their disdain for authority.

[@pixel7694]

Great interview! So he suspects that New Celtic arose in the 6th Century due to an influx of immigrants. Interesting!

[@samhall5212]

luPiu louerniliom ! (I love the little fox !)

[@TheZinmo]

Is there anything about the kingdom of Noricum and the languages in the eastern alps?

[@MP-hz6iz]

Really interesting about the extremely rapid (hypothesised) shift from old Celtic to neo-Celtic, yet Brythonic languages and Goidelic languages still contain a huge number of cognates? Fascinating to think that Brythonic and Irish could have evolved as languages fusing a pre-Celtic language with old Celtic respectively in Ireland and Britain respectively...and then the very large influence Latin had on Brythonic during the Roman period.

[@kevingriffin1376]

It makes a lot more sense that ogham inscriptions were intentionally archaic or left by Gaulish / British elites who were making inroads into Gaeldom - the Dingle Peninsula has a lot of coastline to defend…

[@zenosAnalytic]

Gosh this is so tantalizing! I wonder if Basque might have been related to any of these old Alpine languages?

[@andrew_owens7680]

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. I don't believe so.

[@andrew_owens7680]

@@christopherellis2663 I actually was lucky enough to take a local bus from Bayonne to Bilbao. Unfortunately, I was only there for part of the day, but travelled through the heart of Basque country and heard a lot of it spoken. I know now why the Basques want to separate. They are living in a paradise of waterfalls and green forests.

[@Tele-fk4cu]

@davidstifter849 In respect of the names the Celts had for themselves, wasn't the father of Vercingetorix named Celtillus? Or do you think that was through external influence?

[@talideon]

The term "Keltoi" comes from Greek, so this seems more like a coincidence than anything. Moreover, we don't even know for sure if the peoples the Greeks were referring to are the same ones we refer to as "Celts" today.

[@emom358]

Amazing interview, thank you both for this.

[@ciarandoyle4349]

Further videos on old Irish, ogham, and the migration northwards of writing from Greece and/or Italy to Scandinavia -- yes please! But please remember that your most "informed" non-academic audience for old Irish are the thousands of us who are speakers of Irish as a second language; we learned it etymology free as teenagers. For us the "ogam" [agam] pronunciation of "ogham" [ohm] seems suspiciously like accademic sniggering behind our backs.

[@benedyktjaworski9877]

I believe prof. Stifter says /oɣəm/ with the fricative (the lenited ‘gh’ sound), which would be the reconstructed Old Irish (up to Classical Gaelic) pronunciation (and writes it as ‘ogam’ which is the Old-Middle Irish spelling). Some Scottish Gaelic speakers would pronounce it this way too (but I think the common pronunciation in Sc. Gaelic is /o.əm/, two syllables, no consonant in the middle). Anyway, /oɣəm/ is a valid pronunciation in a way too. Search for “You say ogham and I say Ogam” blog post by D. Stifter, explaining the various pronunciations (while stating that “Not uncommonly, however, one can hear the spelling pronunciation [ogam], which is just plainly wrong. At no period of the Gaelic languages ever did authentic speakers pronounce it so.” too ;-)).

[@ciarandoyle4349]

@@benedyktjaworski9877 Hmmm! Thank you! Professor Stifter's blog post seems to boil down to: The Scots tend to pronounce "GH" as "G"; the Irish let the "GH" disappear. Hence, my name Ó Dubhghaill (Doyle) is pronounced O'Doole (the "BH" also disappears), while the related Scottish name Mac Dubhghaill is pronounced McDugall. I'll stick with ogham, pronounced ohm; let the Scots pronounce it as they like.

[@benedyktjaworski9877]

@@ciarandoyle4349 Actually prof. Stifter’s blog post (incorrectly) suggests that ‘ohm’ (ie. one-syllable /oːm/) is a Scottish pronunciation too (but it’s not, they have two syllables there). Neither Scottish Gaelic, nor Irish, nor even Old Irish had a /ɡ/ (a stop consonant) there. The Scots definitely *don’t* tend “to pronounce GH as G”, I’ve no idea where you got that from. In Scottish Gaelic it’s /ɔ.əm/ or /ɔɣəm/. In Old Irish /oɣəm/.

[@ciarandoyle4349]

@@benedyktjaworski9877 I give up!

[@davidstifter849]

@@benedyktjaworski9877 Yes, you are right, what I say in the blog about the Scottish Gaelic pronunciation is wrong. I will have it corrected, thank you.

[@flannerypedley840]

Absolutely brilliant interview. so interesting in so many ways.

[@jabezcreed]

"Adgonnetius" seems like it could be "Ignatius"? Is there another related name in modern languages?

[@eh1702]

Eochain / Eochaidh? People pair it sometimes with “Alexander” in English - but then they also pair Gaelic “Gilleasbaig” with “Archibald” and Uisdean with both Hugh and Austin. None which have any linguistic connection.

[@mindyschaper]

What is the title of the recent book that the professor is referring to, with his article about Celtic?

[@mindyschaper]

Ah, I see the title

[@patchshorts]

What are the two Dozen non stone objecs?

[@Clemeaux_]

Very lovely!

[@GrimLordofOregon]

Fantastic discussion!

[@beepboop204]

[@bendthebow]

Tha..

[@mindyschaper]

Hebrew is also verb initial. Langfocus made a video exploring the possible connections between Celtic and Hebrew.

[@daddypoil]

The Lambert is an excellent one ! Currently reading it.