A Celtic language in Anatolia

 

Did you know that in Anatolia, in modern Turkey, people spoke a Celtic language called Galatian?

They did. See that green blob furthest on the right.

History was wasted on me in school. Truly, I didn't appreciate it. Now I listen to the Fall of Civilizations podcast, read biographies of Mohammed and Genghis Khan, and spend hours on Wikipedia trying to get the gist of things.

Thanks to scrolling Wikipedia, I found this tidbit about the Celtic language Galatian. Since Wikipedia has its limitations, I looked to a couple other sources, too.

My major takeaway is that three tribes from Western Europe traveled through the Balkans to Anatolia. The tribes have wonderful names: the Tectosages, Tolistobogii, and Trocmi. Together, members of the tribes ventured east as part of a great Celtic migration in 279 BCE and maintained their language for at least a few hundred years.

Why this little tidbit of history means something to me: I know my ancestry only as the British Isles. To connect those islands with Anatolia, a place I have traveled more extensively and been enlivened by, lights something in me.

I increasingly appreciate history as a study of change. The world changes, changes, changes. What is will not always be. What has been may be again.

In other words, this tidbit dissolves some idea I might have about stasis and isolation. Even thousands of years ago, people traveled, spoke to each other within and across languages, and traded known objects for novel ones. People saw new places and sometimes stayed.

The story of Galatian language also connects to this recurring question: Why do we speak the languages we do?

For example, why do I speak English? Why this English – my specific idiolect – with its current word bank, pronunciation, and ways of construction? Why not a Celtic language?

The answer I imagine as a long story, drawing on trade, politics, war, migration, imperialism, colonialism, economics, landscape, ecology, urbanism, education, philosophy, media, and many more fields.

I wonder if an inquiry approach would have changed my experience of history in school. I doubt I would have posed the questions above. I would have posed a question, though, had someone prompted. And I may have found this inner flame, which guides me to search, read, think, and reflect with so much pleasure.

Sadly researchers have not much found much preserved Galatian language. Mostly people's names. I did read through the names, looking for familiarity, but they seem truly foreign to me.

Additional sources: 2016 university thesis on "The Ethnic Identity and Redefinition of the Galatians in the Hellenistic World"; 2002 review of The Galatian language : a comprehensive survey of the language of the ancient Celts in Greco-Roman Asia Minor.

Image from Wikipedia: By QuartierLatin1968,The Ogre,Dbachmann; derivative work Rob984. - Derived from File:Celts in Europe.png, omission of the early modern stage. Sources for data: See File talk:Celts in Europe.png, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50243888