Ligurian language (ancient)

The Ligurian language was spoken in pre-Roman times

and into the Roman era by an ancient people of north- Ligurian (ancient)
western Italy and current south-eastern France known as Native to Liguria
the Ligures. Region Northern
Mediterranean
Very little is known about ancient Ligurian; the lack of Coast straddling
inscriptions and unknown origin of the Ligurian people South-east French
prevents its certain linguistic classification as a Pre-Indo- and North-west
European[5] or an Indo-European language.[6] The Italian coasts,
linguistic hypotheses are mainly based on toponyms and including Northern
names of persons. Tuscany and
Corsica.
Era 300 BCE (?) – 100
CE[1]
Contents Unclassified (Pre-
Language
Ancient sources family Indo-European ?,
Paleo-European ?,
Ligurian as a Pre-Indo-European language
or Celtic ?[2], para-
Ligurian as an Indo-European language and its Celtic?[3])
relationship with Celtic Language codes
Ligurian as substrate ISO 639-3 xlg
See also Linguist List xlg (http://mult
References itree.org/codes/
xlg)
Sources
Glottolog anci1248 (htt
p://glottolog.or
g/resource/langu
Ancient sources oid/id/anci124
8)[4]
Strabo indicates that the Ligurians were different from the
Celts:

As for the Alps... Many tribes (éthnê) occupy these mountains, all Celtic (Keltikà)
except the Ligurians; but while these Ligurians belong to a different people (hetero-
ethneis), still they are similar to the Celts in their modes of life (bíois).

Because of the strong Celtic influences on the language and culture, the Ligurians were known
in antiquity as Celto-Ligurians (in Greek Κελτολίγυες Keltolígues) in some other sources.[7]

Herodotus (5.9) wrote that sigunnai meant 'hucksters, peddlers' among the Ligurians who
lived above Massilia.

Ligurian as a Pre-Indo-European
language
Scholars, such as Ernst Gamillscheg, Pia Laviosa Zambotti
and Yakov Malkiel,[8][9] consider ancient Ligurian as a pre-
Indo-European language, with later and significant Indo-
European influences, especially Celtic (Gallic) and Italic
(Latin), superimposed on the original language.

The thesis is that the Ligurians were survivors of the

ancient pre-Indo-European populations that had occupied
Europe, at least from the fifth millennium BC.[10] These
populations would have had their own linguistic strain,
which they would have preserved until the onset of waves Map of Italy and its languages. The
of Indo-European migration. Later, the latter would Ligurian group is N4. The Ligurian is
conquer the territories, imposing their culture and increasingly attested as a non-Indo-
language on the Ligurians. European language.

Ligurian as an Indo-European
language and its relationship
with Celtic
Xavier Delamarre argues that Ligurian was a Celtic
language, similar to, but not the same as Gaulish. His
argument hinges on two points: firstly, the Ligurian place-
name Genua (modern Genoa, located near a river mouth)
is claimed by Delamarre to derive from PIE *ǵenu-,
"chin(bone)". Many Indo-European languages use 'mouth'
to mean the part of a river which meets the sea or a lake,
but it is only in Celtic for which reflexes of PIE *ǵenu-
mean 'mouth'. Besides Genua, which is considered
Ligurian (Delamarre 2003, p. 177), this is found also in
Genava (modern Geneva), which may be Gaulish.
Liguria in Roman Italy.
However, Genua and Genava may well derive from
another PIE root with the form *ǵonu-, which means
"knee" (so in Pokorny, IEW).[11]

Delamarre's second point is Plutarch's mention (Marius 10, 5-6) that during the Battle of
Aquae Sextiae in 102 BC, the Ambrones (who were a Germanic tribe from Jutland) began to
shout "Ambrones!" as their battle cry; the Ligurian troops fighting for the Romans, on hearing
this cry, found that it was identical to an ancient name in
their country which the Ligurians often used when
speaking of their descent (outôs kata genos onomazousi
Ligues), so they returned the shout, "Ambrones!".

A risk of circular logic has been pointed out – if it is

believed that the Ligurians are non-Celtic, and if many
place names and tribal names that classical authors state
are Ligurian seem to be Celtic, it is incorrect to discard all
the Celtic ones when collecting Ligurian words and to use
this edited corpus to demonstrate that Ligurian is non-
Celtic or non-Indo-European.[12]

The Ligurian-Celtic question is also discussed by Guy

Barruol (fr) in his 1969 paper The Pre-Roman Peoples of
South-East Gaul: Study of Historical Geography.

Ligurian as substrate
French historian and philologist Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville held that Ligurian was the
first Indo-European language spoken in Western Europe and was related to Sicel. In his work
Premiers Habitants de l'Europe (2nd edition 1889–1894), Jubainville proposed an early Indo-
European substrate language for Corsica, Sardinia, eastern Spain, southern France and
western Italy, based on the occurrence there of place names ending in -asco, -asca, -usco, -
osco, -osca as well as -inco, -inca.[13] For examples of the Corsican toponymy cited by
Jubainville, see Prehistory of Corsica.

Other linguists expanded on the idea. Julius Pokorny adapted it as the basis for his Illyro-
Venetic theory. Paul Kretschmer saw evidence for Ligurian in Lepontic inscriptions, now seen
as Celtic. Hans Krahe, focusing on river names, converted the concept into his theory of the Old
European hydronymy.[14]

See also
◾ Prehistory of Corsica

References
1. Ligurian (ancient) (http://multitree.org/codes/xlg) at MultiTree on the Linguist List
2. Kruta, Venceslas (1991). The Celts. Thames and Hudson. p. 54.
3. Kruta, Venceslas (1991). The Celts. Thames and Hudson. p. 55.
4. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Ancient Ligurian"
(http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/anci1248). Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max
Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
 5. "Liguri" (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/liguri). Enciclopedie on line. Treccani.it (in
Italian). Rome: Treccani -Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana. 2011. "Le documentazioni sulla
lingua dei Liguri non ne permettono una classificazione linguistica certa (preindoeuropeo di
tipo mediterraneo? Indoeuropeo di tipo celtico?)."
6. "Ligurian language" (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/340884/Ligurian-languag
e). Britannica.com. 2014-12-16. Retrieved 2015-08-29.
7. Baldi, Philip (2002). The Foundations of Latin. Walter de Gruyter. p. 112.
8. Ernst Gamillscheg, Romanen und Basken. Mainz & Wiesbaden: Akademie der
Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz, 1950. (in German)
9. Yakov Malkiel, Old and New Trends in Spanish Linguistics, published July 1952 (172)
1951-1952.
10. Pia Laviosa Zambotti, La civiltà dei più antichi agricoltori liguri, in „ Rivista di Studi Liguri"
(Anno IX, N. 2—3, Maggio-Dicembre 1943, pp. 96—108) (in Italian)
11. Indogermanisches Etymologisches Woerterbuch (https://web.archive.org/web/2007092621
1921/http://www.ieed.nl/cgi-bin/response.cgi?flags=eygtnrl&single=1&basename=%2Fdat
a%2Fie%2Fpokorny&text_recno=571&root=leiden)
12. [1] (http://www.celtnet.org.uk/gods_v/vasio.html) Celtic Gods: The Gaulish and Ligurian
god, Vasio (https://web.archive.org/web/20130518143426/http://www.celtnet.org.uk/gods_
v/vasio.html) at the Wayback Machine (archived 2013-05-18)
13. Jubainville, H. D'Arbois de (1889). Les Premiers Habitants de l'Europe d'après les
Écrivains de l'Antiquité et les Travaux des Linguistes: Seconde Édition (in French). Paris:
Ernest Thorin. pp. V.II, Book II, Chapter 9, Sections 10, 11.
14. Mees, Bernard (2003). "A genealogy of stratigraphy theories from the Indo-European
west". In Anderson, Henning (ed.). Language Contacts in Prehistory: Studies in
Stratigraphy. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamin Publishing Company. pp. 11–44.
ISBN 1-58811-379-5.

Sources
◾ Barruol, G. (1999) Les peuples pré-romains du sud-est de la Gaule - Etude de géographie
historique, 2d ed., Paris
◾ Delamarre, X. (2003). Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise (2nd ed.). Paris: Editions Errance.
ISBN 2-87772-237-6
◾ Strabo (1917) The Geography of Strabo I. Horace Jones, translator. Loeb Classical Library.
London, William Heinemann.

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