Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CLINIAR (Celtic Language and Identity in Northern Italy and the Alpine Region)
Période du rapport: 2023-06-01 au 2025-05-31
In northern Italy and the adjacent Alpine region between the late 7th and the 1st century BC, a number of local languages were written with alphabet variants which had been derived from the Etruscan alphabet of central Italy. The documents are exclusively inscriptions on objects such as gravestones or ceramics, usually short and containing mainly the personal names of deceased persons, owners, and dedicators. Some of these inscriptions – about 450 documents from the western area, mainly Lombardia, Piemonte and Ticino, which are written in the so-called alphabet of Lugano – preserve texts and names which are linguistically Celtic, i.e. they belong to a language group which is also known from ancient Gaul as well as other parts of Europe in antiquity, and lives on today in languages such as Irish and Welsh on the British Isles. The presence of speakers of a Celtic language in northern Italy – a "Cisalpine Celtic" – before the area was conquered by Rome is not surprising, as many Roman historiographers such as Pliny and Livy report that, starting around 400 BC, Gaulish tribes from beyond the Alps moved to and settled in the Padan plain. This tradition is supported by modern archaeological research, which shows that many settlements around this time were destroyed and resettled by bearers of the La Tène culture of continental Europe. A considerable number Cisalpine Celtic inscriptions, however, can be dated archaeologically – i.e. through the objects on which they are written – to the 5th, 6th and even 7th century BC, viz. before the time when the Gauls are supposed to have arived in Italy. There is debate among scholars about how these inscriptions should be explained – are they evidence for immigration movements from Gaul a few centuries before those remembered by the Romans, or do they indicate that an indigenous Celtic-speaking population was already present in the area long before these historical events? In the first case, the language of the older inscriptions would also be Gaulish, while in the second case it would be a separate variety of Celtic, which is traditionally referred to as Lepontic. While archaeological and historical considerations tend to support the second theory, it has proved difficult to show that there is any significant difference between the putative Lepontic, and the Gaulish language which is attested in at least some of the later inscriptions. As a consequence, it is difficult to determine the extent of the linguistic difference between Lepontic and Gaulish, and to decide which inscriptions after 400 BC – all written with the alphabet of Lugano – belong to which of the two linguistic strata. Our inability to distinguish between Lepontic and Cisalpine Gaulish obscures important aspects of linguistic, cultural, economic and settlement history, and the relations and interactions between the Celtic-speaking groups of Northern Italy and their respective identities.
The project's overall aim was to shed light on the linguistic situation of Celtic northern Italy based on a re-evaluation of previous theories based on up-to-date epigraphic material and archaeological and historical research. In a first step, work was done on the digital edition of the Cisalpine Celtic inscriptions, Lexicon Leponticum (LexLep) to improve the quality and reliability of the epigraphic data – specifically readings, linguistic and etymological analyses, and datings. In the course of four trips to Italy and Switzerland, 143 inscribed documents kept in 13 museums, depots and at original sites were examined, described and measured, sketched and photographed. The images and the results of these autopsies as well as results from literature reviews and linguistic analyses were entered into LexLep, and five new inscriptions were added to the corpus. Another 51 inscriptions in LexLep, which could not be examined during the project, were preliminarily updated without autopsies. In a second step, literature on the issue of the Lepontic question (1853–2024) was collected and reviewed, and compiled into a comprehensive research history. A list of linguistic criteria for the distinction between Lepontic and Cisalpine Gaulish was compiled and matched with the relevant evidence and counter-evidence from the inscriptions based on the up-to-date readings and analyses. While individual criteria could be shown to be more or less relevant than assumed, or even descarded, the overall outcome is that the evidence remains inconclusive – too many uncertain readings as well as orthographically and linguistically ambiguous forms do not allow for definive judgements concerning the status of Lepontic as opposed to Gaulish. The project also attempted to approach the issue from a sociolinguistic perspective, inquiring into evidence for the intentional use of linguistic elements or epigraphic styles associated with Lepontic or Gaulish to signal linguistic identity on the part of the writers. While the results were limited, sociolinguistic factors such as the use of different patronymic suffixes or archaic case endings could be argued for individual inscriptions.
The project has resulted in progress in the study of ancient Celtic linguistics and the edition of the Cisalpine Celtic inscription corpus. The open-access edition Lexicon Leponticum, which represents an important resource for international scholarship on Ancient Celtic language and pre-Roman epigraphy, has been significantly improved in terms of data quality and completeness. The project has generated detailed epigraphic data, improved readings, analyses and interpretations of individual inscriptions, created a clearer picture of the early history of Celtic and a larger material base for internal and external comparison. Further research – both in the form of the improvement of the available epigraphic data and the continuative integrative study of the material – will be necessary to refine the results; the acquisition of new data in the form of further new inscriptions (from excavations or museum finds) will help to advance our understanding of Cisalpine Celtic language and identity in the Iron age. The project has established a framework into which new data and theories acquired through future reseach can be readily integrated and assessed easily against the existing evidence.