The indefatigable Trevor Joyce sent me Steven Morris’s Guardian story about laudable lexicography:
It is not likely to be a hefty volume because the vast majority of the material has been lost in the mists of time. But the remnants of a language spoken in parts of the UK and Ireland 2,000 years ago are being collected for what is being billed as the first complete dictionary of ancient Celtic. The dictionary will not be huge because relatively few words survive, but experts from Aberystwyth University say they expect they will end up with more than 1,000 words.
Sources for the dictionary will range from Julius Caesar’s account of his conquest of parts of northern Europe to ancient memorial stones. It will include words from about 325BC up to AD500. Dr Simon Rodway, a senior lecturer in the department of Welsh and Celtic studies at Aberystwyth, said it was exciting to be involved in compiling the first dictionary of its kind.
He said: “These disparate sources have never before been brought together in a way that offers such an insight into the nature of Celtic languages spoken in these islands at the dawn of the historical period. The picture of the linguistic landscape of Britain and Ireland will be of interest not only to linguists but to historians, archaeologists and archaeogeneticists.” […]
He said the bulk of the material would come from the Roman period in Britain, from the first to the fourth centuries AD, and from the middle of the second century onwards in Ireland. He said: “There’s much less from Ireland from that period, because it was never part of the Roman empire.”
Another source is inscriptions on stones in places such as Cornwall and Ireland that use the Ogham alphabet, a system of straight lines designed to be carved on to stone, metal, bone or wood. “In north-west Europe, in the early period, we don’t have very much written history. If you’re in the Mediterranean, you’ve got Greeks and Phoenicians and Romans and Etruscans writing stuff all the time. Once you get to the north of France and Britain you don’t have much at all. We’ve got placenames and the personal names and you can start to try and reconstruct some sort of a narrative out of that.”
The plan is to produce online and printed versions of the dictionary.
Since there’s not a huge corpus, maybe I’ll live to see it completed. And speaking of things Celtic, also courtesy of Trevor comes Siobhán Long’s Irish Times piece on the 2025 traditional singer of the year, “Birr-born Thomas McCarthy” from a Traveller family (I love “Birr-born”):
Thomas’ most recent and widely lauded album, released in 2017, is a collaboration with Romani gypsy, Viv Legg, titled Jauling the Green Tobar, where “jauling” is a Romani word for walking and “tobar” an Irish Traveller word for the road.
“Jaul” is Romani ʒal ‘go’ (1 sg. past gelem) from Sanskrit yā́ti (PIE *yeh₂-); as for the second word, I’m guessing it’s a Traveler deformation of Irish bóthar ‘road’ (from Proto-Celtic *bow-itrom ‘cow path’) — the Irish word tobar means ‘well; spring.’
Gallia is not northern Europe.
Well, it is if you’re sitting in Rome.
Exactly.
Looking up tobar led me to OED and Green’s entries saying that it’s thought to be the source of (old, mostly British) slang toby, ‘the highway as the resort of robbers’, ‘highway robbery’. Green has plenty of citations, almost all from the 1800s with the last in 1958.
Plus the whole Mediterranean-coast part of what’s to us southern France was the province of Gallia Transalpina (known by various other names as well), which had already been Roman-controlled since before Caesar was born.