Ligurian (ancient language)

The Ligurian language was spoken in pre-Roman times and into the Roman era by an ancient people of north-western Italy and current south-eastern France known as the Ligures.

Very little is known about ancient Ligurian; the lack of inscriptions and the unknown origin of the Ligurian people prevent its certain linguistic classification as a Pre-Indo-European or an Indo-European language. The linguistic hypotheses are mainly based on toponymy and onomastics.

Ancient sources regarding the Ligurians


The question of the Ligurians' ethnolinguistic origins and identity has remained unresolved. They may have been a pre-Indo-European people; spoken an early Indo-European language, such as a third primary branch of the Italo-Celtic group or an earlier Celtic language (i.e., separate from Gaulish); and/or gradually come under increasing Gaulish and other influences.

Strabo, around the beginning of the first century, wrote of the region around the Alps: "many tribes [éthnê] occupy these mountains, all Celtic [Keltikà'] except the Ligurians; but while these Ligurians belong to a different people [hetero-ethneis], still they are similar to the Celts in their modes of life [bíois]". He also mentioned that earlier (Greek) sources referred to the Salyes (Latin Salluvii)—then the western neighbours of the Ligures—as the Ligyes, and to their territory as Ligystike. Scholars of the Classical Era usually considered the Salyes to have originated as either a hybrid of Gauls and Ligures or the result of the westernmost Ligurians coming under the influence of a Celtic elite.

Even in antiquity, because of the strong similarities of the Ligures' language and culture to those of the Gaulish Celts, some Greek scholars referred to them as Κελτολίγυες Keltolígues ('Celto-Ligurians').

Herodotus noted that the Ligurians who lived above Massilia referred to travelling hawkers as sigunnai, a word that strongly resembled the ethnonym of the Sigynnae, a nomadic tribe located at the time in Eastern Europe. However, the term may have been derogatory, and the Sigynnae are generally considered to have been Scythian (or members of another Iranian-speaking tribe).

Ligurian as a non-Celtic Indo-European language
French historian and philologist Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville held that Ligurian may have been the first Indo-European language spoken in Western Europe and related to Sicel. In his work Premiers Habitants de l'Europe (2nd edition, 1889–1894), Jubainville proposed that Ligurian may have been the first Indo-European language spoken in Corsica, Sardinia, eastern Spain, southern France, and western Italy, based on the occurrence there of an apparent substrate, represented by place names ending in -asco, -asca, -usco, -osco, and -osca, as well as -inco and -inca. The hypothesis of a wider Ligurian substrate has never been generally accepted or conclusively rejected.

Other linguists expanded on Jubainville's idea. Julius Pokorny adapted it as one basis of a hypothetical "Pan-Illyrian" (or "Illyro-Venetic") branch of Indo-European, supposedly found across Western Europe. Paul Kretschmer saw evidence for Ligurian in Lepontic inscriptions (although these were later generally seen as Celtic). Hans Krahe, focusing on river names, converted the concept into his theory of Old European hydronymy.

Ligurian as a Celtic or Italo-Celtic language
An identification of Proto-Italo-Celtic (or "Pre-Celtic") with Ligurian was proposed by Camille Jullian (1859–1933). In 1934, Henri Hubert noted that this theory had never been widely supported or conclusively disproven. (Hubert added that its standing had not been assisted by an association with another of Jullian's hypotheses, that there had also been something akin to an Italo-Celtic "unified empire".) The Ligurian–Celtic question is also discussed by Guy Barruol in his 1969 paper "The Pre-Roman Peoples of South-east Gaul: Study of Historical Geography".

Xavier Delamarre argues that Ligurian was a Celtic language similar to, but not the same as, Gaulish. His argument hinges on two points: firstly, the Ligurian place-name Genua (modern Genoa, located near a river mouth) is claimed by Delamarre to derive from PIE ǵenu- 'chin, chin bone'. Many Indo-European languages use 'mouth' to mean the part of a river that meets the sea or a lake, but it is only in Celtic for which reflexes of PIE ǵenu- mean 'mouth'. Besides Genua, which is considered Ligurian, this root is found also in Genava (modern Geneva), which may be Gaulish. However, Genua and Genava may well derive from another PIE root with the form ǵonu- 'knee' (so in Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch).

Another possibility may be inferred from a second point made by Delamarre: according to Plutarch, in 102 BC, during the Battle of Aquae Sextiae, Ligurian troops fighting for the Roman Republic were facing the Ambrones (a Germanic tribe from Jutland), who began to shout "Ambrones!" as a battle cry. The Ligurians, hearing this as identical to an ancient alternate name for their own people (outôs kata genos onomazousi Ligues), returned the shout: "Ambrones!" No indisputable evidence has been found that the Ambrones of Jutland had partly Celtic origins, and tribes in other parts of Europe also had similar names, suggesting that either the two ethnonyms were coincidental homophones or that a more distant connection existed.

Ligurian as a Pre-Indo-European language
Scholars such as Ernst Gamillscheg, Pia Laviosa Zambotti, and Yakov Malkiel posit that ancient Ligurian was a pre-Indo-European language, with significant late Indo-European influence, especially Celtic (Gaulish) and Italic (Latin), superimposed on the original language.

Their thesis is that the Ligurians were survivors of the ancient pre-Indo-European populations that had occupied Europe from at least the fifth millennium BC. These populations would have had languages of their own families, which they would have preserved until the onset of waves of Indo-European migration. Later, the latter would conquer the territories, imposing their culture and language on the Ligurians.

A risk of circular logic has been pointed out: if it is believed that the Ligurians are non-Celtic or indeed pre-Indo-European, and if many place names and tribal names that classical authors state are Ligurian seem to be Celtic, it is incorrect to discard all the clearly Celtic ones when collecting Ligurian words and to use this edited corpus to "demonstrate" that Ligurian is non-Celtic or non-Indo-European.