page_title: Gaulish language
section_title: Inscriptions
hierarchical_section_title: Gaulish language / Corpus / Inscriptions
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Fragment de la tablette de l'Hospitalet-du-Larzac, conservée au Musée de Millau (Aveyron).
context_page_description: Gaulish was an ancient Celtic language that was spoken in parts of Europe before and during the period of the Roman Empire. In the narrow sense, Gaulish was the language spoken by the Celtic inhabitants of Gaul. In a wider sense, it also comprises varieties of Celtic that were spoken across much of central Europe, parts of the Balkans, and Asia Minor, which are thought to have been closely related. The more divergent Lepontic of Northern Italy has also sometimes been subsumed under Gaulish.
  Together with Lepontic and the Celtiberian language spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, Gaulish helps form the geographic group of Continental Celtic languages. The precise linguistic relationships among them, as well as between them and the modern Insular Celtic languages, are uncertain and a matter of ongoing debate because of their sparse attestation.
  Gaulish is found in some 800 inscriptions including calendars, pottery accounts, funeral monuments, short dedications to gods, coin inscriptions, statements of ownership, and other texts, possibly curse tablets. Gaulish texts were first written in the Greek alphabet in southern France and in a variety of the Old Italic script in northern Italy.
context_section_description: Gaulish inscriptions are edited in the Recueil des Inscriptions Gauloises (R.I.G.), in four volumes: 
  Volume 1: Inscriptions in the Greek alphabet, edited by Michel Lejeune (items G-1 –G-281)
  Volume 2.1: Inscriptions in the Etruscan alphabet (Lepontic, items E-1 – E-6), and inscriptions in the Latin alphabet in stone (items l. 1 – l. 16), edited by Michel Lejeune
  Volume 2.2: inscriptions in the Latin alphabet on instruments (ceramic, lead, glass etc.), edited by Pierre-Yves Lambert (items l. 18 – l. 139)
  Volume 3: The Coligny calendar (73 fragments) and that of Villards-d'Héria (8 fragments), edited by Paul-Marie Duval and Georges Pinault
  Volume 4: inscriptions on Celtic coinage, edited by Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Beaulieu and Brigitte Fischer (338 items)
  The longest known Gaulish text is the Larzac tablet, found in 1983 in l'Hospitalet-du-Larzac, France. It is inscribed in Roman cursive on both sides of two small sheets of lead. Probably a curse tablet (defixio), it clearly mentions relationships between female names, for example aia duxtir adiegias [...] adiega matir aiias (Aia, daughter of Adiega... Adiega, mother of Aia) and seems to contain incantations regarding one Severa Tertionicna and a group of women (often thought to be a rival group of witches), but the exact meaning of the text remains unclear.
  The Coligny calendar was found in 1897 in Coligny, France, with a statue identified as Mars. The calendar contains Gaulish words but Roman numerals, permitting translations such as lat evidently meaning days, and mid month. Months of 30 days were marked matus, "lucky", months of 29 days  anmatus, "unlucky", based on comparison with Middle Welsh mad and anfad, but the meaning could here also be merely descriptive, "complete" and "incomplete".
  The pottery at La Graufesenque is our most important source for Gaulish numerals. Potters shared furnaces and kept tallies inscribed in Latin cursive on ceramic plates, referring to kiln loads numbered 1 to 10:
  1st cintus, cintuxos (Welsh cynt "before", cyntaf "first", Breton kent "in front" kentañ "first", Cornish kynsa "first", Old Irish céta, Irish céad "first")
  2nd allos, alos (W ail, Br eil, OIr aile "other", Ir eile)
  3rd tri[tios] (W trydydd, Br trede, OIr treide)
  4th petuar[ios] (W pedwerydd, Br pevare)
  5th pinpetos (W pumed, Br pempet, OIr cóiced)
  6th suexos (possibly mistaken for suextos, but see Rezé inscription below; W chweched, Br c'hwec'hved, OIr seissed)
  7th sextametos (W seithfed, Br seizhved, OIr sechtmad)
  8th oxtumeto[s] (W wythfed, Br eizhved, OIr ochtmad)
  9th namet[os] (W nawfed, Br naved, OIr nómad)
  10th decametos, decometos (CIb dekametam, W degfed, Br degvet, OIr dechmad)
  The lead inscription from Rezé (dated to the 2nd century, at the mouth of the Loire, 450 kilometres (280 mi) northwest of La Graufesenque) is evidently an account or a calculation and contains quite different ordinals:
  3rd trilu
  4th paetrute
  5th pixte
  6th suexxe, etc.
  Other Gaulish numerals attested in Latin inscriptions include *petrudecametos "fourteenth" (rendered as petrudecameto, with Latinized dative-ablative singular ending) and *triconts "thirty" (rendered as tricontis, with a Latinized ablative plural ending; compare Irish tríocha). A Latinized phrase for a "ten-night festival of (Apollo) Grannus", decamnoctiacis Granni, is mentioned in a Latin inscription from Limoges. A similar formation is to be found in the Coligny calendar, in which mention is made of a trinox[...] Samoni "three-night (festival?) of (the month of) Samonios". As is to be expected, the ancient Gaulish language was more similar to Latin than modern Celtic languages are to modern Romance languages. The ordinal numerals in Latin are prīmus/prior, secundus/alter (the first form when more than two objects are counted, the second form only when two, alius, like alter means "the other", the former used when more than two and the latter when only two), tertius, quārtus, quīntus, sextus, septimus, octāvus, nōnus, and decimus.
  A number of short inscriptions are found on spindle whorls and are among the most recent finds 
caption: The Curse tablet from L'Hospitalet-du-Larzac, Musée de Millau.[60]
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