akerbeltz

Hm. No. Allowing for some flexibility, Proto-Celtic is the common ancestor of Gaulish AND Brythonic and Goidelic. So from a temporal point of view, you can't have Proto-Celtic contemporary with Gaulish. It would be like having Indo-European alongside Ancient Greek. That aside, experts in Proto-Celtic are rare and finding one willing to contribute will be ... daunting.

Well if they're specifically Britons then someone should probably procure Brythonic rather than Old Irish but I don't have any contacts for that. How are the Britons identifiable i.e. will they be geographically on mainland Britain or will it just involve a generally insular Celtic appearance of units and buildings? If so, could they be switched to being Hibernians (i.e. ancient Irish, for which Old Irish would be fine)? A lot of P-Celts, if there's Gauls AND Britons.

GunChleoc mentioned that there was some agreement over using Old Irish for one of the ethnicities but I can't remember if that was Celts or Gauls (I'm a fairly new to this forum) and since I can't find a specific thread, I opened a new one. I've asked a colleague to help with the old Irish - mine is pretty ropey but he's an expert. So at the moment the minimal set is as follows: What is it? Coté? My lord? A thigerna? I will walk Rega I will go out against Rega @#$% I will build Con·utsa I will work land Trebfa I will gather together Tecalfa I will herd Bia oc ingaire I will fish Ad·cichlus I will attack! Do·fius I will repair Lesaigfer I will hunt Do·sifius I will heal Ícfea I will march! Cichsea I will retreat! Teichfea Battle cry In comram beós! I will garrison Géba dúnad Most are fairly straightforward (though somewhat hypothetical as not many first person future forms have been recorded). The battle cry broadly translates as on "with the combat, let's keep at it, who's next" Thoughts welcome but if that's a go, I'll see about recording these.

Ok, here's what I've got so far - I'll post them with comments for now in case anyone has some good suggestions. The general principle is that I'm working off the work of Larry Trask and Koldo Mitxelena who did the lion's share of the reconstruction of Proto-Basque based on internal reconstruction and general comparative linguistics wherever possible (i.e. I'm ignoring all the crazies). What is it? Zer da? Amusingly the reconstruction of first item appears to be identical to modern Basque. Yay, easy one. My lord? Enne andotsa? Ene is generally seen as the more ancient possessive and single n is the result of old fortis *n. It's normally written as N in linguistics but we don't know the exact value so I'm doubling it as nn and will assume long /n:/ with historical lenition of /n/ > zero and /n:/ to /n/. *Andotsa is a reconstructed form seen as a male counterpart to the attested ander- root for a woman/lady. I will walk Nabilke Fairly easy one. The modern dubitative/conditional element -ke is generally accepted to have started life out as a future tense marker. As far as be know the other elements have not changed i.e. the first person marker n-, present tense -a- and the root -bil- 'go, walk'. I will go out against %sen buruz nabilke This may be a translation problem. Going against someone involves the someone, plus a genitive marker (the root of which is reconstructed as -en) plus the word head + instrumental -z. Or would it be ok to translate "I will go out against them"? I will build Daraikeda Ok, this involves the root eraiki 'build'. Most verbs beginning with e- and ending in -(k)i are seen as ancient and most likely were all conjugated synthetically (as opposed to periphrastically). So while modern Basque would use the periphrastic construction eraikiko dut, I'm treating it as a synthetic verb. So d- is the third person absolutive, -a- the present again, -rai- the root, -ke- the future and the reconstructed ergative ending -da (modern -t). I will work land Lur darabilkeda I'm still thinking about this one, tricky, as many agricultural terms are borrowed. At the moment I'm going with "I will use/work ground". The first root is same as modern Basque, the verb is like the above verb, with the root erabili 'use'. I will gather together Biltu daituzkeda Modern bildu would have been *biltu 'collect', the verb again uses the elements described above with the root -u- ('have') plus plural markers -it- and -z-. I will herd Zaintu daituzkeda Like above with *zaintu < modern zaindu. I will fish Arrantzan daihardukeda Elements as above, with the verb iharduki 'be busy with something'. I will attack! Eraso daukeda I will repair Berri daukeda I will hunt Enizi daukeda I will heal Oso daukeda As the verb above but minus the plural markers. Most items appear not to have changed much except for the loss of intervocalic -n- so ehiza is reconstructed as *enizi. I will retreat! Atzea nabilke Nabilke as above. The modern form would be atzera but the allative ending -ra is likely modern and historically it is only -a. I will garrison Zani daukeda Pretty much as above. Battle cry (irrintzia) / Goa! There's a choice of either the generic gora > *goa 'upwards!' or that haunting ululating cry the Basques do. I will march! This is my biggest headache. There's nothing workable that springs to mind that doesn't involve a loanword. My current thining is to take a Latin word and give it a phonetic workover as if the Basques had borrowed it back then. Any comments welcome - I wanted to post these and get feedback before recording so I don't have to re-record.

Pleasure Perhaps it might make sense to split them into Iberians and Vascones? I think merging them will be something of a major headache down the line. I'll post the basic set of translations shortly. Haven't gotten round to doing the sound yet.

Hi folks, I'm the "colleague" that GunChleoc kept referring to regarding the Basque/Old Irish translations. Since I'll be working on the Gaelic localization with her, might as well pick up another account I agree that not using Spanish is preferrable to begin with. Using Iberian is something that we can probably forget about to begin with. We can read the script but apart from a half dozen translations which seem probable, we don't know the meaning of any of them (ignoring "decipherments" by fringe "linguists" like Arnaiz-Villena). The il-/ir- root in any case (if it means settlement) seems to have been a Sprachbund (i.e. shared across language boundaries) with Proto-Basque so that's not a problem for using Proto-Basque. Celtiberian is somewhat better attested and readable but if we're mainly using some form of Basque, mixing the two will turn into an evil headache very fast. It would be like saying "For the Saxons, because Saxon is poorly attested, let's use a mix of Finnish and French". There will be endless posts and arguments about which feature to pick from which language. There won't be much usable material from Aquitanian, most of it comes from funeral stelae which follow the Roman pattern of "erected by X for Y" so we mostly have a bunch of names. On the bright side, procuring Proto-Basque is not impossible (I'm working on it, I already have the short list, I just wanted to double-check a couple of things before posting). Fortunately a lot of work has been done on reconstructing it and in any case, some phonetic changes and loanwords aside, Basque is an unusually conservative language (the reason for why we can read the little Aquitanian we have so easily). Zezen, by the way would be a bad choice for "monument", the Basques of old sacrificed goats, not cows