2. Lusitanian
First an apology because I don't know quite what ended up happening in EB1 with Lusitanian. It looks as if the project was abandoned before it was finished and Celtiberian names used instead.
I got a bit obsessed with this a while ago, particularly with a possible link between Lusitanian and Ligurian or Lepontic. The reason for this is the word PALA. It appears on an inscription, probably a memorial, usually classified as Lepontic. The inscription is written in an old Italic alphabet similar to Etruscan, on two staves with round heads; one reads slaniai : uerKalai : Pala and the other Tisiui : PiuoTialui : Pala. The two staves look like elongated Basque Hilarri.
We've got more writing in Lusitanian than in Dacian or Thracian, but still very little and we don't have as many place or personal names because it looks as if the Lusitanian rulers may have spoken Celtic. There are a whole three and a half Lusitanian inscriptions which are fairly easy to look up - they're even on Wikipedia. One says OILAM TREBOPALA INDO PORCOM LAEBO COMAIAM ICCONA LOIMINA OILAM USSEAM TREBARUNE INDI TAUROM IFADEM REUE which is usually translated as something like "A sheep (or ewe) for Trebopala and a pig for Laebo one of the same age for Iccona Loimina, a sheep of one year of age for Trebarune and a breeding bull for Reue." The inscription makes it hard to say Lusitanian is Celtic, because it's kept Indo-European P (porcom) which Celtic didn't (Irish orc "piglet") and the word for bull has the root tauro- instead of *tarwo- we'd expect from a Celtic language. Also there isn't a word for "and" like indi in any known Celtic language. In On The Indo-European Origin of Two Lusitanian Theonyms, Witczak thinks Trebopala is a goddess whose name means "Protectress of the Home" or "Protectress of the Tribe" and that Laebo should be *Lahebo, a dative plural of Laho, the equivalent of the Roman Lares. He also thinks (as do others) Iccona is a similar goddess to the Gaulish Epona.
But what if pala doesn't mean "protectress"? what if it's some sort of sacred stone like in the Ligurian/Lepontic inscriptions? Katia Maia-Bessa suggested this in her paper Syncrétisme Religieux dans la Lusitanie Romaine (I'm afraid it's in French) but without actually citing Ligurian or Lepontic. It got me thinking about a link and the possibility that both languages are "Old European" - Indo-European languages which in the early Iron Age got replaced by Celtic.
Apart from the inscriptions the other source for Lusitanian is dedications to local deities from the Roman period and usually in Latin. Unfortunately none of them say "pala" anywhere. However, Ligurian was said to have been much more widely spoken before the Etruscans, Gauls and Romans moved in, and sometimes a sign of a place having once been Ligurian is said to be a name ending with -sc-. There are only two -sc- names in Roman Iberia; Metallum Vipascense and Magasca and they're both in Lusitanian territory. This is getting a long post and I should start talking about what use it could be in EB2...
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