FIRST DICTIONARY OF ANCIENT CELTIC LANGUAGES BEING CREATED BY LINGUISTS

A group of linguists is travelling back almost 2,500 years to accomplish an equally ambitious task: assembling the dispersed remnants of ancient Celtic speech into the first comprehensive dictionary of the Celtic languages spoken in Britain and Ireland. In a time when technology is used to revive lost worlds from fragments of data. The initiative, which is headed by Dr Simon Rodway at Aberystwyth University, unites linguists, historians, and classicists with the common goal of recovering languages that have mostly disappeared from written history. The team is compiling all traces of ancient Celtic terminology into a single scholarly reference with the help of multi-year research funding.

Ancient Celtic languages left few written remnants, in contrast to well-documented classical languages like Latin or Greek. A patchwork of evidence is what's left. Roman and Greek writing contains embedded place names and individual names. Brief glimpses of language in use can be found in Ogham script-carved stone inscriptions. Raw and personal examples of common speech are preserved even on curse tablets, which are small sheets of lead engraved with requests for supernatural justice.

There are also tantalising hints of Celtic vocabulary in Roman governmental papers, including letters, administrative records, and even military correspondence. When combined, these traces enable linguists to reconstruct use, sound, and meaning patterns from languages that were previously believed to be irretrievably lost.

The team expects their final dictionary to have just about 1,000 terms because so few of the ancient Celtic writings have survived. Despite their small size, each entry has a significant impact. A new understanding of the languages that gave rise to contemporary Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Manx, and Breton is promised by each entry, which is meticulously documented and contextualised.

Researchers want to determine how many different Celtic languages originally existed and how they interacted with other tongues spoken in prehistoric Britain and Ireland by comparing ancient terms across areas and sources. Long-standing notions regarding migration, cultural interchange, and language diversity in early Europe may be altered by the findings.

The dictionary will also address long-standing issues regarding language diversity in prehistoric Britain and Ireland. To assess theories regarding languages that preceded or coexisted with early Celtic forms, scholars aim to compile data from various sources. This is a crucial step in comprehending how old linguistic landscapes influenced the evolution of speech on these islands.

Rodway and his team are accomplishing more than just word preservation by assembling these ancient inscriptions, classic texts, and obscure lexical remnants. Every word that has been rebuilt returns a piece of the human experience, from identification and daily life to belief and conflict. The initiative enables ancient Celtic voices to be heard once more—not as echoes or footnotes, but as a language system that was once fully alive—by giving these relics shape and purpose.