11-22-2009, 10:37 AM
I have been doing some personal research into the Gaulish language. That is, the common language, or variations of the common language spoken by most of the populace of Gaul before the Romans invaded. I have realised that there are very few known words and no sentence structure seems to be known. Most of my information comes from the Internet, since there does not seem to be any accessible information in books describing the language in sufficient detail. I do not particularly like the Internet, because a lot of the material is unreferenced.
From the information I have found, I have produced my own bi-lingual dictionary of English and Gaulish. I have published on my groups' website: http://members.optushome.com.au/valenti ... guage.html . The problem is that there only seems to be about 180 known words hock: , and this makes it hard to make proper sentences. I have borrowed some words from Latin to fill some vital gaps. I am wondering about word order. In his writings in the Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Ceaser notes that Latin and Gaulish were similar and that Roman messages had to be written in Greek so that the Gauls could not interpret them if they intercepted a message. I reason that since no record of Gaulish sentence structure exists, it may be best to use Latin sentence structure.
If anyone here speaks Latin, can they confirm my findings about Latin:
- Each sentence only has one verb.
-The basic word order is Subject, Object, Verb. E.g. I, (the) ball, kick.
- Latin is a very precise language and a ten word sentence in English can be four words in Latin.
If anyone could clarify this, or if anyone knows any more information, help would be appreciated
From the information I have found, I have produced my own bi-lingual dictionary of English and Gaulish. I have published on my groups' website: http://members.optushome.com.au/valenti ... guage.html . The problem is that there only seems to be about 180 known words hock: , and this makes it hard to make proper sentences. I have borrowed some words from Latin to fill some vital gaps. I am wondering about word order. In his writings in the Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Ceaser notes that Latin and Gaulish were similar and that Roman messages had to be written in Greek so that the Gauls could not interpret them if they intercepted a message. I reason that since no record of Gaulish sentence structure exists, it may be best to use Latin sentence structure.
If anyone here speaks Latin, can they confirm my findings about Latin:
- Each sentence only has one verb.
-The basic word order is Subject, Object, Verb. E.g. I, (the) ball, kick.
- Latin is a very precise language and a ten word sentence in English can be four words in Latin.
If anyone could clarify this, or if anyone knows any more information, help would be appreciated
Andrew Valentine
De Bello Gallico: <a class="postlink" href="http://members.optushome.com.au/valentined/dbg/index.html">http://members.optushome.com.au/valenti ... index.html
De Bello Gallico: <a class="postlink" href="http://members.optushome.com.au/valentined/dbg/index.html">http://members.optushome.com.au/valenti ... index.html