Re: Bagaudae/Bacaudae - What does "bag" mean?

Christopher Gwinn writes:
<<....I can highly recommend two books to you -
Pierre-Yves Lambert's "La langue gauloise" and Xavier
Delamarre's "Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise". These are simply
two must-haves for anyone interested in Gaulish. The 2000 edition of
Xavier's book has about 800 entries (which does not exhaust every
Gaulish word or name recorded - I have compiled my own list of
Gaulish words and names that contains thousands of entries), and I
understand that the new edition has been significantly augmented.>>

I appreciate the advice and will try to look into it.

Christopher Gwinn writes:
<<Having said that, I should note that Latin and Greek authors were
pretty good at recording Gaulish words and names - we don't find
nearly the amount of corruption that you seem to imply>>

But how would you know? It's one thing to talk about full Gaulish sentences.
It's another to talk about place names and individual words like Bagaudae.
Our historical experience with 'pre-literate' names coming through a literate
language just does not show this kind of regularity. In fact, preliterate
languages just do not show this type of regularity with names and such.
(Although, in saying that, I'm not sure that Gaulish was a preliterate
language. Caesar claims that the Gauls wrote -- but in Greek.) Heck, Roman
inscriptions are full of abbreviations, misspellings and shorthands. Why
would you expect them to be particularly careful about foreign words.

I simply don't have the faith you guys have in isolated foreign words in
Greek and Roman texts.

The fact is that when we take a common everyday English word like "money" or
"America" , we couldn't in a million years have guessed its real source if it
hadn't been clearly laid out for us. And that's why I believe -- with words
like "Bagaudae" -- one is really out there guessing. Sure, sometimes it's a
clear path right from *PIE. But just as often, modern naming shows us that
the purest accident can be involved.

My problem with Bagaudae is that one can take Latin scribes writing a hundred
years later (possibly quite later) at their word -- right down to the
diphthong -- but then one can disregard what they say Bagaudae meant.

Is the problem really with the way the word <bocht> should look in Gaulish?
Well, perhaps the analysis is wrong. Or incomplete. Or perhaps something
that was written down as rough idea of what the word sounded like has somehow
become written in stone.

I don't know that I'm right in this case. But I do know that the degree of
certainty that is claimed about what these words can or cannnot mean is just
not at the level claimed.

Christopher Gwinn writes:
<<The Gaulish equivalent of bocht would have been *boxt- or *boct- (and the
root, without the -t- suffix, would have been *bog- in Gaulish), which is a
far cry from Bagaudae/Bacaudae. A Gaulish equivalent of Irish bocht is,
thus, not a good candidate.>>

But on the other hand the fact that neither *boxt- nor *boct- appears in any
Gaulish form might also suggest that this expected form was not the form
actually used for a common word like "poor" or "peasant". If the word
Baguadae did indeed mean "peasant" as it is apparently glossed by the Romans
themselves, then that might suggest that either the Gaulish word took a
different route, that it was a word unique to Gaulish or that the Romans
simply misheard it. (BTW, why isn't there a Old Irish word that neatly fits
<Bagaudae> combatants niche the same way with the dipthong yielding *bago:d-
or something like that? This should have happened even if the word were
copied by Irish Clerics right out of the Roman texts.) In any of those cases,
Bagaudae is not forced into the historically implausible "combatants."

Now, I don't know why *boxt- or *boct- would be expected, but I suspect, if
something like it did mean "peasant" in some form or dialect of Gaulish --
which presumably did have internal variance over all those centuries -- it
would have been surprising for Romans to report it as "bocht". I'm not sure
how the Romans would have heard or written "bocht" or "boch't", but such
sounds would probably have been made discrete syllables or they would have
been unpronounceable for the Romans.

Christopher Gwinn writes:
<<(but the Welsh cannot come from Latin baccha:tio, "bacchanalian", which is
unrelated to ba:ca, I believe)>>

What McBain's said was Old Irish 'bagad', Welsh 'bogod' (if I have that order
right) was from the Latin <bacca>, troop, gathering, which I guessed was a
middle Latin form of the Greek <Bacchae>. Perhaps it was from the berry word,
but the Bacchae would fit just fine as a loose mob terrorizing the country
side -- if we go by the tragedy.

Christopher Gwinn writes:
<<The vast majority of scholars believe Bagaudae/Bacaudae to be a native
Gaulish name.>>

There's no trick in that. The real question is -- if it's not a Gaulish word
-- who would even think to look. And its pertinent to note that "all
majority opinions start as minority opinions and inevitably return there..."

Christopher Gwinn writes:
<<Well, why don't you find yourself a copy of the Dictionary of the
Irish Language (DIL), and stop relying on incomplete and outdated
online dictionaries? I guarantee you that bag and its derivative
bagach are in there.>>

I will do you the courtesy of doing that as soon as I can get over to the
library. But I do hope that I don't find that <bag> and <bagach> are not
actually attested but are instead reconstructed or interpreted based on
<bagaudae>. That would be a severe disappointment.

Regards,
Steve Long