Ancient Gaulish and British Divinities: Notes on the Reconstruction of Celtic Phonology and Morphology

Abstract

The linguistic study of Celtic divinities attested on Latin inscriptions has proved instrumental in disclosing a number of facts about ancient religion, the relationship with the Roman rule, and the spread of indigenous or syncretic cults. In fact, minor divinities were worshipped on a local basis only, but even under such unfavourable circumstances they managed to become partly integrated in the religious system of the Roman Empire: they acted in the sphere of the higher gods for a time before they vanished for ever, and they must have been much more common than our fragmentary sources suggest. Crucially, the study of their names also provides priceless clues about the early stages of Celtic phonology and morphology, it also helps illuminate insufficiently known aspects of the evolution of Continental and Insular Celtic and their interaction with Latin. In this work, the authors focus on several hitherto misinterpreted Celtic divine names from Britannia (MEDOCIO, ARNOMECIE, BRACIACAE, ARCIACONI, COROTIACO) and Gaul (MEDVTONI, COBRANDIAE, CENTONDI, ROQVETIO, SINQVATI) and try to test their relative importance for Indo-European language reconstruction, distant cultural relationship of ancient populations, ancient religion with special attention to the interaction of major Roman divinities with minor Celtic ones, Latin and Celtic phonetics and morphology, loan phonology and the spread and adaptation of the Latin alphabet to write texts in the indigenous Celtic languages and foreign names in Latin epigraphy.