From: dgkilday57
Message: 67900
Date: 2011-07-05
>Caesar tangled with the Germans several times. He needed Germanic interpreters to learn about the business of coordinating attacks with lunar phases, and some of his own lieutenants spoke Gaulish. That he was aware of the difference between Germanic and Gaulish is also shown by his comment about Ariovistus acquiring fluent Gaulish during his years occupying part of Gaul. Had Belgic been a Germanic dialect, it would be astonishing if Caesar were unaware of it.
> --- On Sat, 7/2/11, dgkilday57 <dgkilday57@...> wrote:
> >GK: Only one of the three Ventas is connected to the Belgae. The others are Venta Icenorum and Venta Silurum. Looks like the poor Veneti got it from everybody (:=)). But seriously, I think the link to the discussion mentioned by Brian Scott is useful, and the notion that "venta" was a borrowing into Celtic worthy of further study. On the Venet/Vened problem cf. also ch. 3 here: http://books.google.com/books?id=5aoId7nA4bsC&pg=PA87&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false
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> [...]
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> The fact that only one of the three Ventae was explicitly associated with the Belgae by ancient authors is not fatal to the hypothesis about <Venta> which I proposed. In Caesar's time, the Continental Belgae were culturally and linguistically distinct from the Gauls.
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> ****GK: Do you have a notion (or better) about the specifics of this distinctiveness? There is a discussion in the cybalist archives (inconclusive) trying to make sense of Caesar's famous statement. The best I could come up with is that Caesar's initial description of the Belgae fits the Nervii very well (they are thus his prime "Belgan" reference point). If we then add the fact that the Belgae crossed over from Germania, chased out the locals, and had Germanic associates (some mentioned directly as such others (the Nervii et al.) possible by implication) the idea dawned that the "3rd" language of Gallia (for Caesar) besides Gaulish and Aquitanian was simply...Germanic. Despite the fact that many Belgae were actually Gaulish-speaking (including those who conquered portions of Britain). Cf. also final query below after your other analyses.*****
>Interesting. This suggests another possible sense for <Bannaventa>. I know nothing about pre-Roman burial practice around Daventry, however.
> [...]
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> Kitson notes (p. 79) that *-went- "has not been recognized as occurring in Celtic lexical items ... Yet it must be presumed to have been available at an early period, especially since it was productive in the neighbouring stock Italic." I cannot agree with this presumption. <Maluentum> is probably Illyrian rather than Italic, and its replacement <Beneventum> is a creation of the Hannibalic War. Extrapolation from Italic to Celtic morphological behavior is risky anyhow, considering that the /nt/-participle is highly productive in Italic but not at all in Celtic. Moreover it is semantically difficult to regard <Bannaventa> and <Glannoventa> as formed within Celtic using the suffix *-went- in its original sense. <Bannaventa> (also <Bannavanta>, <Bennovenna>) referred to a hill-fort of the Catuvellauni near modern Daventry, and probably to another place which St. Patrick called home. Nobody seems to doubt that
> the first element is identical to Gaelic <beann> 'peak, hill, height'. But why on earth would a single hill, or a place occupying one, be called 'Full of Hills'? Such an adjective properly applies to a district, not a single place.
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> *****GK: Just in passing. J. Harmatta suggests that the ethnonym "Sadagarii" ('full of hills'(people) in Iranic) refers (5th c.)to transplanted Roxolani in Scythia Minor, so called because if their barrow burial practice.*****
>I prefer to consider NWB as a late dialect of Continental Belgic. At this point I have no criteria for distinguishing Insular from Continental Belgic, or internal dialectal differences, so I am just covering bases here. There may well be too little surviving information to draw any plausible inferences. As for the position of Belgic within Indo-European, my working hypothesis is that it belongs with Illyrian (sensu lato), so the closest well-attested language to it would be Messapic. We do have an apa-Name down there, <Salapia> (not 'salt-water', but 'involving tide-water or overflowing water') as well as <Messapia> itself, perhaps 'place in the midst of water'.
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> NWB students may object that Derventum is a long way from the Nordwestblock as delineated by Kuhn. Yes it is, but we have a good example of a similar outlier, not quite so far south, among river-names. The apa-Namen are largely restricted to the NWB, but we have a medieval river Latinized as Cantapia in three French departments (recorded 997 CE in Mayenne, now Chantache; 1025 in Eure-et-Loir; 1177 in Calvados), and a town Chantepie southeast of Rennes very likely resulting from folk-etymological deformation of *Cantapia to a phrase 'sing-magpie' (cf. Chantemerle, Chanteloup, Chante Renard, etc.). (The notion that the attested <Cantapia> actually originated this way from *canta-pica (P. Skok, ZRPh 32:560, 1908) cannot be taken seriously.) At any rate, it is not implausible that a large part of what was northern Celtic Gaul in Caesar's time had been Belgic-speaking a few centuries earlier.
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> ****GK: Would I be correct in assuming that you consider Belgic to have been a NWB dialect?****