A database recently completed and carried out by four universities and the Ministry of Economy allows interpretation of more than 3,000 Iberian, Celtiberian and Tartessian texts
If Javier Velaza, professor of Latin and dean of the Faculty of Philology of the University of Barcelona, had climbed in 219 before Christ to the walls of Sagunto during his siege by the Carthaginians, he could have gone in the correct Iberian its besieged inhabitants. These -who would have understood his words- could have responded by throwing an arrow at him or, exalted by his speech, turn him into the warrior that would lead them to victory. Velaza is one of the few experts in the world who is able to pronounce the Iberian (as he does with the Celtiberian or the Tartessian), but he does not understand anything of what he says. Or almost.
Now, a powerful database (hesperia.ucm.es) puts at the disposal of those interested everything that linguists have unraveled from the Tartessian, Celtiberian, Iberian and Proto-Basque languages (known as Paleohispanic languages). This computer translator is about to be finished after 20 years of work (started by the recently deceased Javier de la Hoz), and will allow closer to the interpretation of the more than 3,000 existing texts. Includes photographs of the inscriptions and the coordinates of their location. Also, at the end of February, the book Paleohispania Languages and Epigraphies (Oxford University Press) will open these investigations to the English speakers. The Ministry of Economy and the specialists of four universities (Basque Country, Complutense of Madrid, Barcelona and Zaragoza) have made this possible.
To this surprising situation has come -part of the works of the historian Manuel Gómez Moreno or the linguist Jürgen Untermann- for the discovery in 1992, during the dredging of the port of Huelva, of six small pieces of pottery written in an unknown language, in addition of the discovery in Sagunto of a rudimentary Rosetta stone. However, experts do not like this term because they do not know if the words in Latin and Iberian correspond.
In any case, what is certain is that an element linked to the languages that were spoken in the Iberian Peninsula between the 8th and 2nd centuries BC: all used related writing systems even if they did not understand each other. It was not properly an alphabet, but a system that specialists call semisilabarios. Broadly speaking, it would be a mixture of alphabet (with vowels and consonants), as well as a list of labial, dental and velar occlusive syllables. That is, a hypothetical Iberian scholar trying to memorize it - and if he had the same sequence as the Latino, who did not have it - would have to repeat something like: a, ba, be, bi, bo, bu, da, de, di , do, du ...
The history of this writing starts in the eighth century BC in what is now Huelva. Afterwards, they borrowed from neighboring towns, such as those who inhabited the Algarve or the Tartessians to record a hundred funeral steles.
Almost three centuries later, in the coastal strip that extends from the French Roussillon to Almeria, began to write a completely different language: the Iberian, but curiously also used almost the same signs. These facts mislead the experts, because it is contrasted that some words in Iberian ended in d, a sound that does not exist in the signatory (da, de, di, do ...). So the conclusion is that they copied the Huelva system and adapted it to their needs: they invented the final d, for example.
Some 2,300 inscriptions have been found, including in 1923 the so-called Arquitrabe de Sagunto, a parallelepiped block broken by its center and incomplete. It has two lines, the first in Latin and the bottom in Iberian.
In the peninsular center another language was spoken: the Celtiberian language, whose translation is more advanced since it is an Indo-European language and easily comparable with other more known ones (such as the Celtic, the Welsh, the Germanic ...). More than 800 entries have been discovered. This town wrote on bronze and the most famous text of those that have survived is included in the so-called Bronzes de Botorrita. There are four plates, three of them in Celtiberian and one in Latin that are related to a judicial process.
Likewise, two other languages have been detected with the same alphabet in the Peninsula: the Lusitanian language, with only six inscriptions on rock, and the proto-words, to which perhaps a few texts written in a variant of the Iberian sign correspond. Almost everything can be pronounced, but little translated. Velaza highlights, however, the important advances that have been made in the last ten years. "Computer science will help us, although it is not enough. But the future is exciting, "he concludes. In fact, the professor already pronounces it.
https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/02/...71zR9Q9ECi3ocZ54A1diaE4_ouBOvbEi0x695vVKMXYy0