Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

 

Where Did Gaulish Language Come From?

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/where-did-gaulish-language-come-from-394be709bb5

 

The Gauls are Celtic people and Celtic languages still exist and are spoken in Europe, particularly in Ireland, England, Wales, France, Spain, and a few other places. It is an Indo-European language that evolved from the language level of development (third articulation) the people who migrated out of Black Africa around 40,000 BCE had reached. They stayed on the Iranian plateau till after the Ice Age and started migrating from there around 12-10,000 BCE. They reached Western Europe circa 5,000 BCE.

But these Indo-Europeans, as differentiated from their direct cousins the Indo-Aryans, had developed some kind of common language, Indo-European or close to it, and they left behind them in their migration or migrations some people and linguistic communication on Indo-European languages that developed in various regions or territories. Contacts and various alliances brought Indo-Europeans in collaboration and at times conflict, with many agglutinative languages of the Turkic older family established in Europe since 50,000 BCE.

They took various routes to get to Europe where several Old European Turkic languages have survived till today like Saami, Finnish, Estonian, and a few more in northern Russia, plus the Hungarians who arrived where they still are around the 7th century AD. And we must keep in mind Basque, of course. These contacts, at times conflicts, of one-fourth of the final population of Europe after the Indo-European migration, meaning the Indo-Europeans only represented 25% of the European population a couple of thousand years BCE, and they still only represent 25% of our DNA, with all the Old European Turkic populations (75% of the final European population and our DNA today) produced a differentiation in various groups of European languages.

This implied a diversification of Indo-European if there ever was only one matrix, which I doubt, in big families: Celtic languages; Romance languages; Germanic Languages which include Scandinavian languages, except the agglutinative Saami, Finnish, and Estonian that are agglutinative; Slav languages (including Polish); and Baltic Languages including Lithuanian and Latvian. One last thing. The Celts have had a writing system based on an alphabet of 20 letters for a good 3,000 years, the Ogham writing system that was preserved and slightly expanded by the Benedictines in the 5th century AD in Ireland. The letters of this alphabet are the first sounds of twenty trees that only existed all of them together within a limited territory in Germany, in the Rhine valley, around where Stuttgart and Frankfurt now stand. Did the Gauls use this alphabet?

Have a good trip back to our distant roots that too many people have forgotten.

 

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

Languages and Linguistics,  *  Indo-European Studies,  *  Celtic Languages,  *  Phylogeny,  *  Gaulish language