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In that case (bolded part) you would have a sound change common between Thracian and Greek, by which earlier *w > Ø. However, this was not the case in Mycenaean Greek (or some archaic dialects of classical Greek), which preserved *w. Either way, this, q.e.d., does not put Thracian close to...

Here's your problem: there's a strong agreement that within the Indo-European languages as a whole, the Slavic and Baltic languages are most closely related. There's a lot of common sound laws that these two have in common, which is why we speak of Balto-Slavic languages. Apart from being an...

The technique of digital unwrapping was used to unwrap a burned scroll from En-Gedi, at the Dead Sea, demonstrating that the scroll held a part of the bible, the book of Leviticus...

If you look at the modern Insular Celtic languages (e.g Irish, Breton and Welsh) and compare them with the better-known extinct Continental Celtic languages (Celtiberian and Gaulish), that concept is useful. My point is that the earliest attestations of Goidelic and Brythonic were essentially...

One issue that I may add: the ethnic name "Belgae" is unrelated with "Volcae". Note that the former are "Βελγαι", the latter "Ουολκαι" in Greek.

The Greek digraph 'gg' means /ŋg/ (as in the English word 'anger'). Notice that Strabo actually spells the name "Vercingetorix" as "Ouerkiggetorix" (Ουερκιγγετοριξ) in his geography. "Vlach" and "Wallach(ia)" is the same thing. :smile: The Wallachs speak a Romance language (Romanian).

The Gauls in southern Gaul, adjacent to the Greek colonies such as Massilia (modern Marseilles) used the Greek alphabet to write their own language. If you scroll down in the document that Sile shared here earlier, you can see some examples of Gaulish written using Greek: Also, please note...

Sorry, but to claim that biblical Gothic is a forgery means basically entering the realm of cranks/conspiracy theorists. The script used in the Gothic bible translation are no "Langobardic runes", but they're the Gothic alphabet, which is essentially a mixture of Greek, Latin and Runic alphabet...

The problem with the usage of the letter Zeta in Archaic Greek is that in native Greek words, it seems to have represented either /dz/ or /zd/. However, the point is here that we know that Zeta (and Latin 'z' too) represented all kinds of foreign phonemes not found natively in Greek. A famous...

As the proverb goes, 'if it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, walks like a duck, you might as well call it a duck'. The ethnic/linguistic affiliation of a lot of historic ethnic groups is a difficult issue, but usually we do have a set of ethnic names, personal names, place names, deity...

"Gothic" and "Getic" are not the same. Like I said before, we have two attested varieties of Gothic, 'biblical' Gothic (from the 300s) and Crimean Gothic (from the late 1500s). Both languages are unanimously Germanic, but the key point is that they are East Germanic languages that do not share...

Pre-Proto-Germanic would refer to the language stage of Proto-Germanic before Grimm's Law came into effect. And yes, it would have been a language much closer to PIE (or late PIE, to be accurate). Euler1 wrote an extensive book on the issue, even if I disagree with his conclusion that Grimm's...

The name (for the ethnic group in what is now Scotland) is always spelled with 'c' in Latin, and with Kappa in Greek. The meaning is thought to be something like "very hard (i.e. tough) ones: Modern Welsh has "caled", Old Irish has "calad".

If I may, you're mixing up orthography and phonology. The Lepontic (and other Celtic-speaking peoples in the Alps, note that the example you quote above is Cisalpine Gaulish and not Lepontic) used variants of the Etruscan alphabet, which had no separate letter for /g/. Originally, the letter 'c'...

The language situation is far more complicated than that. You could say that the Swiss Germans are effectively bilingual: their everyday language is Swiss German (which is not per se mutually intelligible with Standard German, though Swiss German is to some degree mutually intelligible with the...

My apologies for abridging that earlier, but I cut it short because I felt it would have gone too far off topic when we're talking about the Austrian narrative. I'll agree with you however that all of those instances could have been reason enough for Britain and France to declare war on Germany...

History happened? First, Switzerland has not one official language but four (in addition to German, it has French, Italian and Romansh). For Austria, the story is decisively more complicated. Austria used to be part of the Holy Roman Empire (until the Napoleonic Wars, when the HRE was...

Don't argue with me, argue with Diodorus, Pausanias or Strabo. :redface: Its not a joke but a folk etymology. While he doesn't use the expression 'milky', here's what Diodorus of Sicily writes (book 5, chapter 28): "Οἱ δὲ Γαλάται τοῖς μὲν σώμασίν εἰσιν εὐμήκεις, ταῖς δὲ σαρξὶ κάθυγροι καὶ...

My bad. :embarassed: I made a typo about the Galatai. And you're correct there, I'm fixing that in the original post. Beyond that, it isn't a joke: for the usage of "Galatai" as a synonym for "Galli", this is exactly how Greek language authors (Diodorus of Sicily, Pausanias, Strabo, etc.) use...

I'm quoting myself here, because this is relevant: If the word 'Celt' (*Keltos) was the endonym of the Gauls for themselves, then it would be logical if that name was rendered as "Keltoi" (Κελτοι) into Greek. You can find the Latin analogue of "Keltoi" too, Celtae (for example found with...