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This work tries to cast some light on a number of indigenous names of north-eastern Italy. It specifically addresses a selected number of names from Brixia and its environment, which lies in the west of Venetia et Histria, and close to the border of the Gallia Transpadana, covering an area that runs from the Oglio to the Adige rivers, around the Garda Lake. Most of these names have one thing in common: they are hardly ever found anywhere else, and, as a consequence, they have obtained a label: Jürgen Untermann called them Brescianisch, thus tacitly paving the way for considering them as a trace of an independent, unknown and unclassified dialect. That these names are not attested outside this area is not necessarily diagnostic of their not being Celtic or Italic, though the path leading to their classification may prove winding and indirect. Their etymology and attribution to either Celtic or Venetic will be thoroughly discussed. The study of the Venetic name fersimo comes to confirm the evolution of the complex superlative suffix *-is-m̥(H)o- > -izʊmo- > -īmo- is common to Sabellic and Venetic, where only the name meitima provided evidence for this change. Some misidentified or overlooked derivational and compositional patterns are addressed, such as the superlatives in -umus, the Celtic compounds in -gassi- and the probably both Italic and Celtic compounds whose first member is an Indo-European root-noun *ḱlu- ‘hearing.’ The personal names qverra, dievpala, endvbro, rvtvba, rvtvmanne, barbarvtae, aprofennivs are Venetic and decidedly bely the widespread notion that Italic did not preserve Indo-European compounds as personal names. The Celtic personal name vorvodisivs and the personal or divine name boxarvae are considered as belonging to a very ancient layer of Indo-European composition and, when possible, are connected to other compounds belonging to the same “semantic paradigms.” The analysis shows that it is premature to label these forms as Brescianisch — a new Indo-European dialect not attested in indigenous sources, which is in fact little more than a label for an onomastic landscape whose members are otherwise unattested but can be unproblematically linked to Continental Celtic and Italic.

The so-called “Lugano alphabet” is a northern Italian script that derives from the Etruscan alphabet. It was used to write Celtic texts belonging to the Lepontic language, uncovered in the centre of the Gallia Transpadana (Lombardy in Italy and Ticino in southern Switzerland), ranging from the 6th c. to the 1st c. BC, and a later variety called Cisalpine Gaulish, again located in the Transpadana (Lombardy and Piedmont in Italy), whose earliest texts date from the 4th c. BC, and which represents a later wave of immigrants or invaders. This dialect is distinguished from the former by a few morphological traits, like the patronymic suffix -ikno vs. Lepontic -alo-. While the Lugano script is deciphered in its entirety, some pending issues remain as to the actual use of some of its letters, its evolution and possible external influence from related alphabets. This work will address the problem of the so-called “butterfly sign,” a letter transliterated as , which shows different shapes, some of them easily confusable with , and goes back to Greek san. For the “butterfly sign” a high number of synchronic values and etymological origins has been proposed. The article attempts to show that its use overlaps with that of zeta, transliterated as . Both may have had a single value, and the reflected phoneme is in both cases a voiceless affricate that goes back to Indo-European /st/, /ts/ or /ds/, to epenthesis of /t/ in a sequence *-ns#, or to affrication of /d/ in coda position. The author also evaluates the possibility that the occurrence of san and tau gallicum in some contexts, specifically in codas, is due to mere phonemic reallocation not mediated by sound change.

The linguistic study of Celtic divinities attested on Latin inscriptions has proved instrumental in disclosing a number of facts about ancient religion, the relationship with the Roman rule, and the spread of indigenous or syncretic cults. In fact, minor divinities were worshipped on a local basis only, but even under such unfavourable circumstances they managed to become partly integrated in the religious system of the Roman Empire: they acted in the sphere of the higher gods for a time before they vanished for ever, and they must have been much more common than our fragmentary sources suggest. Crucially, the study of their names also provides priceless clues about the early stages of Celtic phonology and morphology, it also helps illuminate insufficiently known aspects of the evolution of Continental and Insular Celtic and their interaction with Latin. In this work, the authors focus on several hitherto misinterpreted Celtic divine names from Britannia (MEDOCIO, ARNOMECIE, BRACIACAE, ARCIACONI, COROTIACO) and Gaul (MEDVTONI, COBRANDIAE, CENTONDI, ROQVETIO, SINQVATI) and try to test their relative importance for Indo-European language reconstruction, distant cultural relationship of ancient populations, ancient religion with special attention to the interaction of major Roman divinities with minor Celtic ones, Latin and Celtic phonetics and morphology, loan phonology and the spread and adaptation of the Latin alphabet to write texts in the indigenous Celtic languages and foreign names in Latin epigraphy.

This work deals with a number of arguably misinterpreted names found on inscriptions from Emona in Central Slovenia. While many of them have been recently attributed to an Indo-European, otherwise unknown dialect (associated with onomastic data referred to as “Iggian” or “North Adriatic”), the author shows that contact linguistics and Celtic dialectology are instrumental in their correct analysis, and that they all can be classified as either Eastern Gaulish or Italic. In the author’s view, existence of such linguistic or onomastic systems as “Iggian” or “North-Adriatic” is uneconomic and based on alleged phonetic and morphological features that remain unconvincing. An in-depth analysis of the names, including some novel readings of several Pannonian inscriptions, reveal that they are often the product of scribal misunderstandings or lack of experience, which can be explained based on the achievements of historical and typological phonetics and morphophonology in a wide Indo-European perspective. Historically, the studied names bear witness to the impact of late Venetic migrations to synchronically Celtic-speaking urban nuclei: the analysis shows that the Venetic layer seems to be superficial in Emona and mostly consists of forms attested elsewhere, which are occasionally reflected as they would be perceived by native speakers of a Celtic language. As for the names of Gaulish ancestry attested in Emona, they seem to have been transmitted by Gauls who were literate in Latin and well aware of the standardised transcription of Gaulish names. The analysis reveals regular differences between the scribal traditions of Ig and Šmarata, which, in their turn, support the phonetical and morphological argumentation.

This work deals with the proper names attested in the lead tags of Siscia in Pannonia, the territory which, in the author’s view, reveals an intersection of at least four different branches of Indo-European: Latin, Venetic, Celtic, and Illyrian, and thus holds clues to multiple linguistic discoveries. Documents from Siscia contain names of different filiations. While most names are unmistakably Roman, and others are Greek and even Semitic, they also feature some Celtic instances, occasionally never attested before. The author has selected a number of proper names that can be labeled as Italic or, probably unduly, as Venetic, and that have been paid no attention thus far. The linguistic evidence, however limited, shows that these names may tie up well with an Italic series of names and adjectives whose ultimate morphological origins are sometimes disputed. An in-depth analysis of the etymology of these proprial forms that draws a wide range of Indo-European and other related data presents a most convincing testimony of the degree to which the ancient Pannonia was a linguistic patchwork resulting from language contacts between Celtic and Italic peoples with Illyrians. Such an analysis, although far from being exhaustive as to the areal distribution and linguistic attribution of the onomastic data, however, enables the author not only to suggest plausible interpretations for the names under study but also to clarify some specific problems of Indo-European morphology and morphophonemics, as well as to trace some unmanifested ties both within and beyond the Italic language family.

Ancient inscriptions containing divine names and religious terms are of the utmost importance for the appreciation of Celtic religion in its various forms. These sources have never been systematically documented and analysed, which constitutes the goal of the F.E.R.C.AN. project launched in 1998 by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. For the time being, a number of publications have been produced on the outcome of the F.E.R.C.AN. workshops, in which new findings and etymologies, terminological problems, several questions concerning the sociology of religion, and methodological issues are discussed. In a nutshell, some preliminary results of the F.E.R.C.AN. project are: a more nuanced view of all the elements contained in the votive formulae; the distinction between theonyms and epithets; the identification of several layers of theonyms; and the detection of theonymical synonyms (the so-called interpretatio Romana). This review deals with most of the questions addressed by the participants of the Trier workshop in 2015, highlighting a number of specific etymological and methodological issues.

This work aims to clarify a number of issues concerning the etymology of personal names attested in Latin epigraphy in the Alpine region, especially in Gallia Transpadana, Venetia et Histria, Pannonia, and Noricum. The author selected a number of comparative and superlative proprial forms which may be classified as Celtic or Italic and attempted to establish their language attribution based on the analysis of their etymology, geographic distribution and the sound changes that they presumably underwent. The author also offers an explanation of the different and apparently contradictory types of vowel syncope characteristic of the Gaulish superlative forms, which is based on a hypothesis about the successive accent shifts, before and after the split-up of the Celtic language family. Additionally, this analysis has some bearing on the interpretation of several South-Picene inscriptions, namely that from Penna Sant’Andrea. The paper also seeks to make a methodological point by exhibiting how much the evidence of proper names with clearly discernable patterns may contribute to the understanding of particular issues related to the phonology and morphology of the whole group of languages. Such information may lead, in its turn, to new etymologies, and therefore to better understanding of some particular features of the Celtic languages in their early period.