Preview: The Boii

[oudysseos]

THIS IS WONDERFUL. Now the Sweboz are not alone, the Getai gets a new (un)friendly neighbour, and the horrible horrible Romans have more potential Romaioktonoi waiting to kill them.

As for the Celtic voicemod, how different is Boii Celtic (if that's the term) compared to the sort that the Aedui/Averni or Lusotannan speak?

Truthfully this is a very difficult question to answer. The only primary source of a Boian language are a half dozen names from a series of coins called Biatecs. These names are a little weird; Nonnos, Devil, Busu, Bussumarus, Titto, and Biatec or Biatex. We can also consider the sources for the so-called Noric language, which exists in only 2 inscriptions. The Ptuj inscription, for example, reads ARTEBUDZBROGDUI, probably 2 names, and which indicate a reasonable affinity to better known Gaulish sources.

So, we don't really have enough evidence to reconstruct a separarte Eastern Celtic language, nor are we really sure how different the various Celtic languages were at this point. It is important to note that differences in written sources does not necessarily indicate major differences between regional languages- none of these languages were literate, and so did not have a corpus of written material to impose regularity of spelling and style (something that has only happened relatively recently for English). The written sources of Celtiberian show some differences to Gaulish written sources, but it is always possible that whoever was doing the actual writing (chiseling) was not a native speaker**, and was adapting the sounds he heard to Greek (or whatever). There was no IPA phonetic alphabet- how an individual scribe wrote down a foreign language was basically up to him. Plautus, for example, wrote longish speeches in Punic, but he used the Latin alphabet phonetically to do so- so we shouldn`t expect that he is exactly correctly representing Punic spelling.

To bring this back to the various Celtic languages in EB- I, personally, am certain that there were many regional dialects and even distinct languages spreading from Britain and Iberia all the way to Anatolia- but I think that it is very likely that they were all more or less mutually intelligible- like Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, rather than German, Dutch, and English, to use a modern example.

Doing voicemods is a lot of work- and, as I said, we really don`t have enough material to do a Noric voicemod that`s very different from the other Celtic voicemods. We hope to revise the current one, but that is a long-term goal.

** Pure conjecture on my part. The inscriber could also be a native who learned some other people`s letters- and as a corpus of material accumulates, people learn from previous examples, thus developing a `correct` spelling.