Gallaecian language
Gallaecian, or Northwestern Hispano-Celtic, is an extinct Celtic language of the Hispano-Celtic group. It was spoken at the beginning of the 1st millennium in the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula that became the Roman province of Gallaecia and is now divided between the present day Norte Region in northern Portugal, and the Spanish regions of Galicia, western Asturias and the west of the Province of León. Overview. As with the Illyrian, Ligurian Abe Thracian languages, the surviving corpus of Gallaecian is composed of isolated words and short sentences contained in local Latin inscriptions or glossed  by classical authors, together with a number of names – anthroponyms, ethnonyms, theonyms, toponyms – contained in inscriptions, or surviving as the names of places, rivers or mountains. In addition, many isolated words of Celtic origin preserved in the present-day Romance languages of Portugal and Northwest Spain, are likely to have been inherited from ancient Gallaecian. Classical authors such as Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder wrote about the existence of Celtic and non-Celtic populations in Gallaecia and Lusitania, but several modern scholars have postulated Lusitanian and Gallaecian as a single archaic Celtic language. Others point to major unresolved problems  for this hypothesis, such as the mutually incompatible phonetic features, most notably the proposed preservation of "*p" in Lusitanian and the inconsistent outcome of the vocalic liquid consonants, so addressing Lusitanian as a non-Celtic language and not closely related to Gallaecian, although cultural influences were likely. Characteristics. Some of the main characteristic of Gallaecian shared with Celtiberian and the other Celtic languages were (reconstructed forms are Proto-Celtic unless otherwise indicated): Some characteristics of this language "not" shared by Celtiberian: Gallaecian appears to be a Q-Celtic language, as evidenced by the following occurrences in local inscriptions: ARQVI, ARCVIVS , ARQVIENOBO, ARQVIENI[S], ARQVIVS, all probably from IE Paleo-Hispanic "*arkʷios" 'archer, bowman', retaining proto-Celtic "*kʷ". It is also noteworthy the ethnonyms "Equaesi" ( < PIE "*ek̂wos" 'horse'), a people from southern Gallaecia, and the "Querquerni" ( < "*perkʷ-" 'oak'). Nevertheless, some old toponyms and ethnonyms, and some modern toponyms, have been interpreted as showing kw / kʷ > p: "Pantiñobre" (Arzúa, composite of "*kʷantin-yo-" '(of the) valley' and "*brix-s" 'hill(fort)') and "Pezobre" (Santiso, from "*kweityo-bris"), ethnonym COPORI "the Bakers" from "*pokero-" 'to cook', old place names "Pintia", in Galicia and among the Vaccei, from PIE "*penktó-" > Celtic "*kenχto-