Talk:Noric language

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Contents 1 Evidence 2 Merge 3 Move 4 Possibly slavic?

[edit] Evidence

Is there any direct evidence for the existence of this language? While the inhabitants of Noricum obviously spoke something, and while it's not unlikely what they spoke was a Celtic language, I don't think there should be an encyclopedia article on a completely unattested language. None of the sources on Celtic languages I've consulted has any reference to a Noric language. A Google search reveals only Wikipedia mirrors and conlangs. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 8 July 2005 16:51 (UTC)

no, I'd say, just redirect to Noricum. If any statement about the language can be made, make it on that article. dab (ᛏ) 9 July 2005 06:25 (UTC)

There is some discussion between Xavier Delamarre and David Stifter on the continentalceltic@yahoogroups.com mailing list, around July 2003, that discusses "the recurrence of -aes genitives in Noricum-Celtic". Its a slim basis for a dialect, let alone a separate language, though. The inscriptions discussed are CIL 03, 05061 = ILLPRON 01341, ILLPRON 01247 and AE 1997, 01217. --Nantonos 21:32, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Well, a discussion on a mailing list isn't a published source. I'm redirecting to Noricum until someone can provide something published. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 21:57, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Here it is over a year later and I finally found a tiny bit of info: there are two inscriptions, which are described at the external links I've added. It's not much to go on. Angr 23:14, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Since this article is unlikely ever to be expandable beyond a stub, I've simply redirected it to Noricum and put the little info there is about the language there. —Angr 18:17, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

And yet another year has gone by: another user undid the redirect and reestablished the stub, so I destubbified it by adding everything I could find out about the two inscriptions. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 19:49, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Merge

Well done Angr for merging Eastern Celtic into this article; I was just about to do it myself! Q·L·1968 ☿ 19:01, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I didn't realize at first that they were the same. At first I thought "Eastern Celtic" was the name for the (entirely hypothetical) language of the Celts in what is now Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine. Place name evidence and archaeology shows that there were Celts there in Roman times, and obviously those people spoke something, but with nothing but place names to go on, it didn't seem worth having an encyclopedia article on. So I PRODded it. Then I discovered that Noric language had been un-redirected from Noricum last month, and looking through its external links, I realized that "Eastern Celtic" is just another name for Noric, so I merged them. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 19:47, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

That's just what I thought, and when I looked at the sources I found the same thing. Presumably we could have treated the language of the Celts of eastern Europe as a section of the articles about Galatian or Gaulish. But now that there's this Noric article in the middle...

Do give a second thought to the idea of moving; practically all language (and dialect) names are adjectives that can be used as nouns, or vice versa. What I'm afraid of is that naïve readers may be fooled into saying, "The language of Noricum wasn't Gaulish, it was Noric", as if the appearance of this article makes its separate classification a fait accompli. Q·L·1968 ☿ 12:41, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I'm becoming doubtful of the appropriateness of the label "Noric" at all. The only source I can find that labels these two inscriptions as "Noric" is [1]. There are actually other Celtic inscriptions from Austria besides these two, but I can't find evidence that they're labeled anything besides simply "Celtic" or "Continental Celtic". I'm somewhat hampered by not having access to JSTOR and by being too lazy to go to the library; I have to rely on what I can find on the Internet and in books I myself own. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 18:11, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Move

As we can't establish whether the Celtic speech of Noricum was a distinct language or not, would it not be prudent to move this article simply to Noric? This seems to be the Wiki format for dialects and periods of a language (Ancient Greek, Newfoundland Irish, Moselle Franconian). Q·L·1968 ☿ 19:01, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I dunno. I think it looks bad for a language article to have a name that's just an unqualified adjective like "Noric". For the others you can say the articles are on a type of Greek, Irish, and Franconian respectively, but unless we want to call this "Noric Gaulish" or "Noric Celtic", I don't see any reason not to keep the word "language" in the name. It was a language, after all, even if it wasn't a distinct language from (say) Cisalpine Gaulish. —Angr ^{If you've written a quality article...} 19:44, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Possibly slavic?

Lately I've been following the work of a slovene historian, doing research on the venetic theory, by which Celts would have evolved out of western slavs and taken on different languages when they mixed with the old european population. The theory makes a lot of sense to me, it is also the oldest theory of slovene origin, based on the writing of a germanic historian, writing that the Venets were "Sclaveni et Antes"(Sloveni - western slavs and Anti - extinct tribe of southern slavs), which formal slovene history claims was simply a mistake but also marks it as the first time western slavs were mentioned, claiming that's when they settled there. Ok I'm gonna stop with the theory and evidence now, it isn't what I wanted to write about. Some modern slovene historians have taken to interpreting celtic inscriptions found in Slovenia using the slovene language and yielded some surprising results(still not sure about the whole theory and stuff though). So when I came to this site, I simply tried reading the text out loud in slovene and was absolutely baffled!!! It made perfect sense to me. This is how I'd write it in modern slovene: "Arte bud z bragdi." in literary slovene that would be: "Arte bodi z brati."

The first word would be a name, either Arte or Art(extinct vocative case added an e to names). The second word "bud" would mean be and is still alive in many slovene dialects. The third word "z" would mean with, also used in modern-day slovene. "Bragdi" seemed a bit weird at first, but I tried pronouncing it with different Os and then I came to a sound that is extremely similar to an "o", but these days considered an A, that is also used in many dialects. When one pronounces Bragdui, it's obvious that it is just a dialect variation of the plural form(probably also exists in some slovene dialects - there's over two hundred, so I can't possibly know them all). the "gd" part reminded me of the slovak(the language closest to slovene) word for sister which is "segra", while the slovene is "sestra". Could it have been sesgdra at some point? Anyway, when you read it out loud, especially if you're reading fast it sounds exactly like "brati."

So my explanation is: "Arte bud z brati," slovene "Arte bodi z brati," english "Art(e) be with (your) brothers." This would suggest a memorial to a person named Arte or Art. The weird thing still is that there is no spaces to support this. Were there any lines on the original inscription? Some celtic tribes, most notably -again- the Venets have been known for separating words with vertical lines. What also strikes as odd is that the word with, here "z", has two forms in slovene which are "z" and "s". "S" is only used before words starting with the letters C, Č, F, H, K, P, S, Š and T. "Z" appears before all others. If this interpretation would be incorrect, it would be an extremely unbelievable concidence that the correct form(s/z) was used and that the last word was in the correct gramatical case. 195.210.215.226 (talk) 18:30, 11 February 2008 (UTC)