Ligurian (ancient 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 was 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 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, -osca as well as -inco, -inca.[8] (For examples of the Corsican toponymy cited by Jubainville, see Prehistory of Corsica.) 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.[9]

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.[10] (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".[10]) 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.[11]

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 which 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,[12] this 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-, which means "knee" (so in Pokorny, IEW).[13]

Another possibility may be inferred from a second point made by Delamarre:[14] that (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, who heard 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.

Scholars, such as Ernst Gamillscheg, Pia Laviosa Zambotti and Yakov Malkiel,[15][16] posit that ancient Ligurian was a pre-Indo-European language, with significant late Indo-European influence, especially Celtic (Gallic) 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, at least from the fifth millennium BC.[17] 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 Celtic ones when collecting Ligurian words and to use this edited corpus to demonstrate that Ligurian is non-Celtic or non-Indo-European.[18]