Talk:Gaulish

message: Please, whoever added the Modern Irish and/or the Russian material, do not re-add it.  The Modern Irish material is irrelevant, since ordinal number constructions are not inherited from Old Irish, and therefore do not compare with the Gaulish words.  Likewise, Russian, a non-Celtic language, does not show any parallels, and if it did, would be outside the scope of a comparison with Gaulish's NEAREST relatives, that is, the other Celtic languages.  It is not necessary to compare Russian with EVERY other Indo-European language.  That can be done on the Indo-European languages page.
Flibjib8 01:55, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  numerals 

message: I suppose Indo-European *eqos should be Proto-Indo-European *ekʷos, but as a source is given I didn´t dare to change it. Is there someone out there who can check if *eqos is what the source says, or are there any rules in Wikipedia how to write PIE?
Laurelindë 20:02, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: *ekʷos is indeed correct. --24.201.238.141 16:25, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

text: *:No it's not, as shown by the Sanskrit aśva. PIE labiovelars become plain velars in Skt. It is, though, likely that the Proto-Celtic form was  *ekʷos.Johundhar (talk) 15:25, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question about *eqos 

message: Some parts of the phonetic information here are more or less bizarre:
:" is an allophone of /k/ before /t/."
A single, allophonic uvular, separated at least 1000 km from its closest kin? I bet that this actually means  (which appears briefly in the article too), in some old non-IPA sort of transcription.
:"nasal + velar became /ng/ + velar"
Obvious bad transcription aside, is there any reason this would have waited 'til the actual Gaulish period? Just because they wrote <N> does not imply . Sounds like some sort of misunderstanding here.
:"U /u/ and V /w/ are distinguished only in one early inscription"
Seriously? That would put the birth of U some 500 years back from what's usually thought.
:"intervocalic /st/ became the affricate [ts] (alveolar stop + voiceless alveolar stop)"
(Emphasis mine.) Is that just a failed attempt to point out that an affricate consists of a stop & a fricativ, or something more ambitious that also failed?
:"and intervocalic  became  and  became "
And yet we don't have {{[IPA|[ð]}} nor  in the phonology. Either might mean the affricate, or some intermediate that later became something else??
--Tropylium (talk) 22:46, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phonetics 

message: Should this article discuss the influence of Gaulish on French, its primary successor?  Or is there another article already existing on that? Funnyhat (talk) 23:07, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: There is History of French. By the way, Occitan, Franco-Provençal, and probably Romansh and Gallo-Italic – as well as Breton – are also successors of Gaulish in this sense. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:13, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Influence on French 

message: Jean Markale wrote a book some years ago (which unfortunately I don't have anymore) and in it made a claim that the Southern dialect of Breton (Vannetais) was directly descended from Gaulish. I don't remember the specific examples he used in his argument but he pointed to the evidence that the Old British of Southern Britain and Gaulish were mutually intelligible and the "Vannetais" dialect is different from the other northern and western varieties of Breton. The British language evolved in those Centuries after the end of the Roman administration and then in the Sixth Century when the flood of Britons into Armorica reached its peak, they dominated the native Gaulish that was still being spoken there...indeed, he believed that some of the impetus of the British migrations at that time was that the culture and language were so similar in what was to be called Brittany. While British took over most of the province, on the south coast there is still evidence of direct Gaulish continuity. Has anyone ever heard  this theory? Any comments on it?  Brian Ceanadach
:Vannetais might have a Gaulish substratum, but it is clearly a variety of Breton. See Continental Celtic languages. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:13, 7 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gaulish and Breton 

message: Has anyone noticed the strong similarities between Gaulish noun inflection, analytic construction and that of Albanian? In Albanian N.sing.Accus. Def. is also inflected with -n , feminine dative sing nouns are also inflected with -s, the Albanian gen/dative plural -ave or ëve bear a striking similarity to the cited gaulish obo - ebo - ibo inflections. The Gaulish vocative cited here seems to be a bare stem; likewise in Albanian. Compare the uninflected Gaulish subordinating particle jo with the Albanian particle që, also uninflected.
Albanian also has pronominal clitics which are tied to the verb and which can be doubled to mark direct and indirect objects. The described analytical sentence structure (SVO pro-drop,  genitives and adjectives follow head nouns)could equally describe Albanian.
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.196.26.198 (talk) 08:33, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: These similarities are most likely genetic due to both being Indo-European languages rather than directly related. There are also a great variety of similarities and cognates between Gaulish and Latin or Gaulish and Ancient Greek, in declension and otherwise, but the relationship between these languages are clear. I can find equal similarities between Albanian and Ancient Greek, but this would become a repetitive exercise if I were to list them Andecombogios (talk) 18:26, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Never mind the latin; Nominal morphology & Albanian 

message: The sounds... need clarification. For example, X. Does that represent the Voiceless uvular fricative (as the article seems to suggest, but I find slightly hard to believe due to the fact that that sound... doesn't appear anywhere else in the vicinity), Voiceless velar fricative, or something else? You left it in brackets, but it isn't linked to the IPA. Other issues like that elsewhere as well...
Also, more citation would be nice... especially when we're dealing with the phonology of a dead language. --Yalens (talk) 22:34, 14 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarification needed 

message: There is a silly edit war going on about the translation for toutious, a reference to the "Vincelican language" and the Gaulish contribution to French. Silly IMHO because
# while toutious is etymologically straightforward, the translation will remain problematic (citizen, tribe leader, tribal official, etc.): we are going to need a question mark there
::re: Cagwinn's edit: you (in that case: me) never stop learning...! I'll have to check up on that inscription. I thought I'd seen it translated as "tribal official" somewhere, but don't ask me where exactly. Assume of course you're right and it's really "generally accepted". ;-) Best, Trigaranus (talk) 14:23, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: There is certainly some room for debate, but "citizen" is the translation that I most often run across. It's literal meaning (root *tout- "tribe" + suffix of appurtenance -io-) is "(he that belongs to the) tribe/people". When collocated with a place name, "citizen of( X)" makes the best sense in English.Cagwinn (talk) 18:27, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Toutious & Vindelican 

message: When did Gaulish die out and why didn't a similar process of language shift happen in roman Britain? Abrawak (talk) 08:47, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: There's no firm date available; most scholars believe that it was effectively dead by the 5th century AD, though obviously it could have survived in isolated areas for some time afterward. The process of colonization and Romanization was much more thorough in Gaul than in Britain (which was always rebellious against and troublesome for Rome).Cagwinn (talk) 15:18, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  When did it die out? 

message: Hello,
Is here somebody, who has knowledge of Gaulish verbs in the inflection of just the present tense and how the infinitive is built?
I ask this, because I want to contribute Wiktionary with Gaulish verbs I found in a Gaulish glossary (http://indoeuro.bizland.com/project/glossary/gaul.html).
Please help me!
Excuse my English & please answer
Greetings HeliosX (talk) 20:42, 23 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inflection of Gaulish verbs 

message: The article says that the Roman Emperor required an interpreter to speak with Veleda, a prophetess/priestess.  It's implicit in this article that she spoke Gaulish.  But the article about Veleda says she was a völva of the Germanic Tribe of the Bructeri.  Maybe the original use of the term 'Germani' included some tribes that spoke Celtic, but it doesn't seem to apply in this case.  See the article for the Bructeri: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bructeri.  It's reasonably clear that Veleda spoke Germanic, not Gaulish.  Thus the reference to her in this article is not valid and should be removed.  
Californicus (talk) 01:18, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree Calfornicus. It's done.Nortmannus (talk) 07:19, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Nonsense! The Wikipedia article on Veleda, as is typical of this awful encyclopedia, is filled with original research. While there is no proof either way whether she (or the Bructeri themselves) spoke Germanic or Celtic (this was a mixed linguistic zone in the 1st century), most scholars regard her name as Celtic, which makes it more likely that she, herself, was a Celtic speaker. Cagwinn (talk) 15:12, 6 July 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Veleda (also Velleda) spoke Germanic 

message: The Gaulish article currently makes the claim that "In the 5th century AD, the existence of Gaulish is attested in modern German Switzerland.[citation needed]".
Can anyone offer a reference for this claim, and if so, insert the reference into the article?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.158.211.148 (talk) 15:25, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gaulish in 5th-century Switzerland? 

message: I am removing the claim "The senator Dio Cassius was appalled to hear Gaulish being spoken by soldiers at Rome.[citation needed]". After reading Cassius Dio's Roman History, I conclude the only possible basis for this claim is the following passage (Roman History Book 75), and it does not mention Gaulish:
"There were many things [the Emperor] Severus did that were not to our [the Senators'] liking, and he was blamed for making the city [Rome] turbulent through the presence of so many troops and for burdening the State by his excessive expenditures of money, and most of all, for placing his hope of safety in the strength of his army rather than in the good will of his associates in the government. But some found fault with him particularly because he abolished the practice of selecting the body-guard exclusively from Italy, Spain, Macedonia and Noricum, — a plan that furnished men of more respectable appearance and of simpler habits, — and ordered that any vacancies should be filled from all the legions alike. Now he did this with the idea that he should thus have guards with a better knowledge of the soldier's duties, and should also be offering a kind of prize for those who proved brave in war; but, as a matter of fact, it became only too apparent that he had incidentally ruined the youth of Italy, who turned to brigandage and gladiatorial fighting in place of their former service in the army, and in filling the city with a throng of motley soldiers most savage in appearance, most terrifying in speech, and most boorish in conversation."  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.111.240.251 (talk) 23:56, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cassius Dio quote on foreign soldiers 

message: The statement about the Council of Tours in AD 813, repeatedly pushed back into the article by IP user "Shylock" , is still baseless WP:Original research. If "Shylock" thinks there is something self-evidently relevant about Gaulish to be gleaned from that reference, he needs to provide reliable references from the modern linguistic literature that explicitly make such a connection, because in reality, there really isn't any such relevance. The only thing we can glean from that remark in the primary sources is that by 813, people were perceiving vernacular Romance as sufficiently distinct from classical Latin that special linguistic accommodation was called for. In that sense, the date is indeed frequently quoted as linguistically relevant for the history of French, but that has nothing to do with Gaulish. For Gaulish, the only thing we could get out of that reference is that by 813 it was no longer of comparable importance in everyday life as Germanic and Romance. We can't even take it as a terminus ad quem for the extinction of Gaulish, as "Shylock" seems to think, because it's perfectly compatible with a hypothetical scenario where Gaulish might have still been spoken in some pockets. The fact that the authors of the 813 decree mentioned only vernacular Romance and Germanic as the common vernacular languages doesn't entail that these were the only vernacular languages in existence within the Frankish empire (after all, Breton, for one, most certainly was spoken, as were Basque, Slavic and probably any number of other languages in the outlying ranges of the empire); it only means that these two languages were the first that came to mind as being the predominant languages of most of the population. Fut.Perf. ☼ 10:44, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: You have repeatedly attempted to delete primary sources claiming them to be irrelevant (first Julius Caesar, now the Council of Tours AD 813), even though you do not contest the obvious conclusions (your own words: "by 813 Gaulish was no longer of comparable importance in everyday life as Germanic and Romance"). Please read the WP guidelines on primary sources. You may not realise it, but it is selfish to draw these self-evident conclusions yourself but not allow other wiki readers to have access to the same primary information. Shylock --86.154.102.162 (talk) 11:10, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Read WP:OR. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:15, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  And you read WP:Primary and secondary sources It says: "A primary source may only be used on Wikipedia to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge.". By your own admission, the straightforward conclusion that you have drawn from the source is "By AD 813, Gaulish was no longer of comparable importance in everyday life as Germanic and Romance". And that should go into the article, along with the AD813 source quote. I want to suggest to you that we agree on an independent referee to adjudicate this case. Suggestions? Shylock--86.154.102.162 (talk) 11:31, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  It's much easier: you start citing reliable secondary sources, or you shut the fuck up. Fut.Perf. ☼ 11:40, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

text: Thanks, Dbachmann. I am not particularly wedded to the AD813 evidence for the demise of Gaulish if there is better evidence available for the timescale. In this context, you interestingly hint "if we cannot find any decent 7th or 8th century reference, the 813 date might still serve as a post date to fall back upon" and "we positively know the language was gone by 800." Can you provide a reference for your two statements? We could then cite your reference in the wiki article, and put the problem to bed. Shylock--86.170.123.101 (talk) 20:13, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Oh for chrissake. There is no evidence either way. Look at the freaking secondary literature, at last. Authors are vague about when it went extinct. They are deliberately vague, because they recognize that we don't fucking know. We don't fucking know because there is no fucking evidence. The 813 date isn't evidence, for anything, and anything else isn't evidence either. Gaulish went off the historical radar some time around the middle of the first millennium. Whether that means it actually went extinct at that time, or whether it held out in some unrecorded corners for one, two, three, four centuries, there is simply no way of knowing. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:21, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  We know from one of the letters written by Sidonius Apollinaris to his brother-in-law Ecidicus c. 474 AD (Epistulae, III.3) that the Gaulish nobility had finally abandoned Gaulish for Latin around the middle of the 5th century (Sidonius attributes this to the work of Ecidicius, himself). As to when the peasants abandoned the language, this is hard to say (most peasants weren't literate, so they would not have left any inscriptions around for us to find). Most scholars suggest Gaulish was dead by the 5th, but there is evidence that at least some knowledge of the language survived a bit longer among the literate classes.Cagwinn (talk) 21:35, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

text: Hope I am doing this right.... first time user here. It seems the AD813 date to use in saying that the Council of Tours "that priests should preach sermons in rusticam romanam linguam" doesn't mean that there was linguistic unity around a "rustic romance language". It may have very well have been an effort, of many, to unify the country linguisticaly via a recognized common second language. I am not sure it is possible that at any time Gaul or France has had linguistic unity before the 20th century. Jfjoubertesl (talk) 00:49, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  813, again 

message: I just wanted to point out that the Sidonius passage is about Celtic sermo, not lingua. This is not a hard and fast distinction, but by classicists attentive to Latin usage, it's usually taken to mean that the young nobles wanted to shed their Gallic provincial accent (their manner of speaking, not a language as such). It's not that Gauls of the bishop's social class would've been speaking Celtic as their native language (lingua) in boyhood during the late 5th century. On the usage of sermo, see for example J.N. Adams, The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC - AD 600, especially pp. 122, 174, 198–199 (where in a letter to Arbogastes, Sidonius is concerned about the survival of classical Latin as distinguished from vulgar Latin), and 241. The passage is presented in the article as if it's proof that Gaulish was a living language among the upper classes in the late 5th century. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:35, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: "Sermo" was also used of Celtic languages proper; for example, Tacitus when describing similarities between the Gauls and Britons: ""sermo haud multum diversus" ("the language is not much different"). Cagwinn (talk) 17:47, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

text: (ec) Thanks for sharing this observation. This of course beautifully illustrates the danger of Wikipedians relying on their own interpretation of primary sources. I notice that our quotation of that passage ostensibly refers to Stifter, a reliable secondary source, but Stifter in fact says himself that "This is a highly rhetorical, clichéed statement, which does not allow any inferences about the state of the language." . Fut.Perf. ☼ 17:48, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: That's backwards reasoning, Cagwinn. One could also say that had Tacitus wanted to say lingua haud multum diversa, he would've. The author of the Dialogus in fact contrasts sermo, the manner of speaking one uses in conversation, with oratio, oratory. When Latin authors mean to talk about languages in the linguistic sense, they use lingua. Tacitus was making observations about daily life, including how people spoke, so he used the word sermo; but of course in this passage he did mean that the Gauls and Britons had closely related languages, and it would be splitting hairs to argue otherwise. But that doesn't mean that sermo and lingua are or can be used interchangeably, or that the words have self-evident significance to the history of Gaulish without recourse to scholarship. Cynwolfe (talk) 18:27, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  "Backwards reasoning"??? Umm, excuse me??? That is a direct quote from Tacitus. The reasoning is his, not mine. Get in your time machine and take it up with him, not me. Also, see Lewis's second definition (with examples from primary sources) of sermo, "a language, the speech of a nation, etc.": http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=sermo&la=la&can=sermo0#lexicon  Cagwinn (talk) 20:11, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Then with equal courtesy I would suggest that if you're going to do original research you should trade in your elementary Lewis for a real Latin dictionary, because that is certainly not the case in the OLD nor even the "big" Lewis & Short. You're arguing that sermo must mean "language" here (in the usual sense of lingua) because Tacitus says the sermo of the Gauls and Britons hardly differ, and we know that both spoke Celtic languages. To me that's backwards because the meaning of sermo isn't determined by what we know about the language of the Britons and Gauls; it's determined by Tacitean usage of sermo. Tacitus didn't choose to say lingua; he said sermo, which has a different shade of meaning. I don't want to play "my dictionary is bigger than yours," but the OLD (and L&S) makes the distinction between lingua and sermo quite clear. The first six OLD definitions of sermo are variations on "speech, conversation, dialogue". The seventh and penultimate, with examples from Tacitus, is "the speech of a particular group, period, etc., a language, dialect": a spoken language and particularly in the context of Tacitus's sentence the everyday speech of the people. In the given sentence, I believe it's correct to think that in this passage there's only a negligible difference between "language" (lingua) and "language as used for conversation" or "the way a particular people speak" (sermo). It would be special pleading to argue that Tacitus means that Britons and Gauls spoke Latin sermone haud diverso, that is, with a similar accent or speech characteristics. That would be a minority viewpoint. But while the distinction between sermo and lingua is hardly discernible in this and some similar examples, sermo always refers to the way people speak or express themselves, not necessarily to a linguistically distinct language as lingua typically does. Interpreting Sidonius's passage requires all kinds of context about the Gallic aristocracy and their education, and his own self-conscious classicizing and nostalgia for standards of Latinity. Its meaning can't be regarded as self-evident and requires secondary scholarship. Cynwolfe (talk) 22:55, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  Wow, you really have an amazing ability to read into other people's words that which they did not say!! It's almost alchemical! Somehow you magically manage to turn my comment "Sermo was also used of Celtic languages proper" into I am "arguing that sermo must mean 'language' here". Take a deep breath. Clean your glasses off. Re-read what I actually wrote, not what you wish I had written, so that you could argue with me. Cagwinn (talk) 02:00, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: It's entirely possible that I'm missing your point in the ad hominem fog. You seemed to be responding that since Tacitus uses sermo in a passage to observe that the spoken language of the Gauls and Britons in everyday life was more or less the same, then when Sidonius uses sermo, it's OK to take it to mean "language" in the sense of lingua. There's no special meaning of sermo  in reference to Celtic. The context in Sidonius is the acquisition of eloquence, where sermo has a well-established meaning. The interpretation of the passage is askew: the youth didn't give up Gaulish in favor of "eloquent Latin"; they learned to speak "correct" Latin, without a trace of their Celtic speech, so they could master oratorical style. At any rate,  said what needed to be said. Although the list of passages seems taken from Stifter, they're put forth breathlessly as evidence, without his skepticism and cautious contextualizing. Cynwolfe (talk) 13:47, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Wow...OK, let me spell it out for you as simply as I can: sermo sometimes means "manner of speaking/mode of expression/style/diction", other times it means the language of a people - Celtic, Greek, Latin, etc. I have given you an example from Tacitus; here is one from Cicero de, Or. 3, 11, 42: “quae philosophi Graeco sermone tractavissent, ea Latinis litteris mandaremus,”. It can also refer to expressions in other languages, or even single words, as in Cassiodorus, Exp. in Psa. 21, 1: "δέος sermo Graecus". Cagwinn (talk) 16:23, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sidonius and ''sermo'' 

message: Oddly, Marcellus of Bordeaux is absent in the list of Latin authors as evidence for the survival of Gaulish. See  Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language, p. 192. Marcellus offers Gaulish vocabulary items, which apparently he regarded as useful for preserving "knowledge traditions", if you will, such as medicine and magic. He seems to have thought some of his readers would still be familiar with or be interested in the Gaulish names of plants and such. Marcellus's article regrettably lacks a section on his significance as a source for Gaulish. Again, this is the kind of evidence that easy to overinterpret on the basis of wishful thinking.
I see that this article has been controversial of late, so I'll leave my suggestions at that, and wish not to wade in further. Cynwolfe (talk) 19:00, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Marcellus of Bordeaux 

message: Do you find it worth mentioning somewhere in the article that the Swiss metal band Eluveitie uses reconstructed Gaulish in many of their songs?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.23.164.78 (talk) 20:33, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use in popular culture  

message: link to the article :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanum
I noticed someone was interested in having a translation of the article in reference.
I translated it although I do not know whether it may be transmitted, Specifically by means of this talk page.
Please let me know what can I do.
Bernard HUET - Latresne France
bh.huet@wanadoo.fr  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.12.100.88 (talk) 12:35, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Welcome to Wikipedia, and thanks for volunteering! If you don't have a Wikipedia account yet, you could submit your draft via the page Wikipedia:Articles for creation. Or I could prepare a stub page for the article for you and you then enter your text there directly. Please let me know (via this talkpage or my user talkpage) how you would like to proceed, and don't hesitate to ask me if you should encounter any difficulties. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:26, 18 April 2015 (UTC)

text: Great, thanks! I have re-posted your text to Draft:Fanum, where we can continue to work on it at leisure. I'll take care of some basic formatting and checks (not sure if I'll find the time today though.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:18, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  response to a request for translating an article about fanum (French to English) 

message: please change
|editor1-last=Koch|editor2-first=John T.|editor2-last=Minard|editor2-first=Antoine
to
|editor1-last=Koch|editor1-first=John T.|editor2-last=Minard|editor2-first=Antoine
John T. is the first editor's first name, not the second editor's first name. 198.102.153.1 (talk) 22:45, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Done Stickee (talk) 00:51, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 13 July 2015 

message: In the subsection "Noun cases", there is a table presenting declensions for touta (tribe), mapos (son), uatis (prophet/poet), dorus (entrance) and bratir (brother). There are 78 entries in this table.
My problem is, why are ALL these 78 entries asterisked? Is not a single one of these 78 forms attested anywhere? And in the unlikely case that that is so, can we not provide better attested nouns for this table?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.131.171.87 (talk) 07:35, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: We don't have full declensions attested for any noun in Gaulish, so unfortunately we must rely on reconstructed models. Cagwinn (talk) 18:27, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

text: I have now made a start with toutas (genitive) which is attested, and have removed the asterisk. I do not have a lot of literature at hand, so please everyone, help remove false asterisks, and justify any such removal, as I have done just now.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.131.171.87 (talk) 20:07, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Implausible declension table? 

message: Modern Gaulish is a conlang similar in scope to Brithenig and other "modernizations". It is well-developed and deserves to have its own article. An editor recently added a very long and detailed set of additions here, which will serve quite well for the article on Modern Gaulish, but as it is it overwhelms the article on historical Gaulish. I suggest the new material be moved to a new article, and shorter information with links be added to this article regarding modern revival.  -- Evertype·✆ 12:36, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Did you see any independent published coverage of it? I didn't. The refs were all either to general linguistic literature on ancient Gaulish that didn't appear to treat "Modern Gaulish" at all, or to self-published websites by the inventors themselves. Am I missing something? Fut.Perf. ☼ 13:30, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modern Gaulish 

message: In the Vaclav Bazek source, there are additional noun declension patterns noted as n-stem and consonant-stem nouns, using *ku and *riks (attested gen. cuno-, nom. rix) present. Should these be included into the page or otherwise backed up with additional source information prior to inclusion?
-Andecombogios 25 Dec 2018, 7:04 (UTC)
:A given Gaulish noun (or verb) declension should not be stated to hav existed unless it is actually attested. Given the fragmentary attestation of Gaulish, it is likely that there ar declension patterns which occurred but ar not found (or only parts of the paradigm ar found) in the known records.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 18:02, 9 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Additional Declensions 

message: :Category:Gaulish language was placed in :Category:Gallo-Romance languages. I removed said category, because Gaulish was a Celtic, not Romance language.--Solomonfromfinland (talk) 18:03, 9 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category 

message: I propose merging Cisalpine Gaulish into Gaulish. Other varieties, such as Transalpine Gaulish, don't have stand-alone pages, and the amount of content on the Cisalpine Gaulish page doesn't seem to merit having its own page, especially given that there are only a few surviving inscriptions and (as this page notes) "Scholars have debated [...] to what extent Cisalpine Gaulish should be seen as a continuation of Lepontic or an independent offshoot of mainstream Transalpine Gaulish." Moriwen (talk) 15:14, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd second that, with some caution. I find a separate page for Lepontic justified (given that there is a greater and more distinct corpus for that variety), but it's a bit of a judgement call where to include Cisalpine Gaulish, here or in Lepontic. Trigaranus (talk) 16:56, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: That sounds entirely sensible to me, and I'll happily leave it to those with more expertise in the topic than I have to make that judgement call. Moriwen (talk) 17:07, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

text: Oppose merge, Cisalpine Gaulish, due to its detached geographic area, orthography and interesting relationship with Lepontic as well as surrounding languages, makes it worthy of a separate article, IMO. And as Moonraker has said, the fact that the topic is notable enough to have enough sources to warrant a separate article, is already a solid reason to keep that separate article. -- Troopersho (talk) 13:32, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger Proposal 

message: "French has Gaulish loanwords. French now has about 150 to 180 words known to be of Gaulish origin, most of which concern pastoral or daily activity.[58][59] If dialectal and derived words are included, the total is about 400 words. Though overall low, this is still the highest number among the Romance languages.[60][61]"
I think there are several problems with this section:
1. Not to bury the lead: the main assertion that "this is still the highest number among the Romance languages" seems unlikely for two reasons:
1.1. It is contradicted elsewhere in Wikipedia, namely at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_vocabulary#List_of_Portuguese_words_of_Celtic_origin where it is stated:
  "Although there is not a comprehensive study or wordcount on how much Celtic, (particularly Gallaecian[8] and words from the Hispano-Celtic group) survived in Portuguese (and Galician);[9] it is fair to say that after Latin, this is the second largest component in the Portuguese culture and language.[10] Projections on Celtic vocabulary (some words may have come via French borrowings starting in the 12th century), toponyms and derivations in Portuguese, indicate well over 1,500 words. The Celtic substratum is often overlooked,[11] due to the strong Latinisation of Celtic-derived[12] words in Portuguese."
1.2 The sources 60 and 61 given to support this assertion are seemingly too old (1935) or under-documented (what is "Lambert 185" and where can one read it?)
2. The secondary assertion that "the total [Celtic words in French] is about 400 words" seems too high to people familiar with this subject. One would expect the figure to be around 260 including all dialectal and obsolete words. If the figure were truly to be around 400, then I am willing to pay good money to see that list, and not in a contrarian kind of way, but in an academic research interest kind of way. Unfortunately, I do not believe this list exists.
3. On the other hand, a list of around 1,500 Celtic words in Portuguese does exist and I could supply it to make this point, were it not for that it would be classed as original research in this context here, and hence it would be a useless argument. This word list is in preparation to be published. The main reason for such a high number of Celtic words in Portuguese is the combination of a high number of Celtic roots together with a prolific and still-productive set of suffixation rules, such that for each root, some 15 words derived from it can easily be found in very conservative Portuguese literature, and those words usually disperse significantly in the semantic field, which corroborates their recent productivity.
4. I have not seen any recent references making the claim that "French has the highest number of Celtic words among the Romance languages" and it is admittedly an out-of-place claim in the subject, what with the fame of the paucity of Celtic words in French within this metier together with the fame of the abandonment with which Portuguese words from Celtic are studied while still consistently turning out in recent research. It sounds like the opposite of the impression one gets while studying this subject, which is why I am positing that this assertion may come from a point-of-view which may be equivocated and outdated. KindSeriousMan (talk) 06:57, 2 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  French has the highest number of Celtic words among Romance languages?