Chapter I: GAULISH.--Celtic place-names are found as far east as the Dniester

and Dobrudja, and as far north as Westphalia. The language of the Galatians in Asia Minor must have stood in a very close relation to Gaulish. Indeed few traces of dialectical differences are to be observed in continental Celtic. Unfortunately no literary monuments written in the ancient speech of Gaul have come down to us, though Caesar makes mention of religious poems orally transmitted by the Druids, and we also hear of _bardi_ and _vates_. But a large number of personal and place-names have been preserved. The classical writers have, moreover, recorded a certain number of Gaulish words which can generally be identified without difficulty by comparing them with words still living in the modern dialects, e.g. _pempedula_, "cinquefoil," cf. Welsh _pump_, "five," and _deilen_, "leaf"; _ambactus_, Welsh _amaeth_; _petorritum_, "four-wheeled chariot," cf. Welsh _pedwar_, "four," and Ir. _roth_, "wheel," or _rith_, "course." We have further between thirty and forty inscriptions (three in north Italy) which we may without hesitation ascribe to the Gauls. These inscriptions are written in either N. Etruscan or Greek or Latin characters. We are thus in a position to reconstruct much of the old system of declension, which resembles Latin very closely on the one hand, and on the other represents the forms which are postulated by the O. Ir. paradigms. Hence Gaulish is particularly valuable as preserving the final vowels which have disappeared in early Irish and Welsh. The few verb-forms which occur in the remains of Gaulish are quite obscure and have not hitherto admitted of a satisfactory explanation. The statements of ancient authors with regard to the Belgae are conflicting, but there cannot be much doubt that the language of the latter was substantially the same as Gaulish. Caesar observes that there was little difference between the speech of the Gauls and the Britons in his day, and we may regard Gaulish as closely akin to the ancestor of the Brythonic dialects. It is difficult to say when Gaulish finally became extinct. It disappeared very rapidly in the south of France, but lingered on, possibly till the 6th century, in the northern districts, and it seems unnecessary to discredit Jerome's statement that the speech of the Galatians in Asia Minor bore a strong resemblance to the language he had heard spoken in the neighbourhood of Trier. There is no evidence that Breton has been influenced by continental Celtic. The number of Gaulish words which have come down in the Romance languages is remarkably small, and though at first sight the sound-changes of French and Welsh seem to bear a strong likeness to one another, any influence of Gaulish pronunciation on French is largely discounted when we find the same changes occurring in other dialects where there is little or no question of Celtic influence.

The proper names occurring in classical writers, on inscriptions and
coins, have been collected by A. Holder in his monumental
_Altceltischer Sprachschatz_ (Leipzig, 1896-1908). The inscriptions
have been most recently treated by J. Rhys in the _Proceedings of the
British Academy_, vol. ii. See also a paper in this volume entitled
"Celtae and Galli" by the same author for the text of the Coligny and
Rom inscriptions. The value of Gaulish for grammatical purposes is set
forth by Whitley Stokes in a paper on "Celtic Declension" in the
_Proceedings of the London Philological Society_ (1885-1886). For the
extent over which Gaulish was spoken, its relation to Latin and its
influence on Romance, see E. Windisch's article on "Keltische Sprache"
in the section "Die vorromanischen Volkssprachen" in Grober's
_Grundriss der romanischen Philologie^2_, vol. i. pp. 373 ff. Cf.
further the introduction to J. Loth's _Chrestomathie bretonne_ (Paris,
1890); G. Dottin, _Manuel pour servir a I'etude des antiquites
celtiques_ (Paris, 1906); R. Thurneysen, _Keltoromanisches_ (Halle,
1884).