fi rst four centuries c.e. Th e Brythonic language known as
Breton arrived in Brittany (France) around the fi ft h century
c.e. as British people moved to the Continent fl eeing Ger-
manic warriors who were invading Britain. Scholars believe
that the residents of Scotland spoke Brythonic languages
before Goidelic-speaking Irish people displaced them in the
fi rst or second century b.c.e. and brought Goidelic languages
to Scotland.
People in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man spoke
Goidelic languages, which include the Gaelic tongues of Irish,
Scottish, and Manx. Th e name Goidelic comes from the Irish
Celts’ name for themselves, Goídil. Goidelic is not closely
related to Brythonic, but it seems to be linked linguistically
to the Celtic languages of Spain; this has led scholars to be-
lieve that the ancestors of the Irish Celts traveled from Spain,
probably arriving in Ireland around 350 b.c.e. Th ese people
moved from Ireland north into Scotland and the Isle of Man
in the early centuries c.e., bringing Goidelic languages with
them. Th e Romans called the Irish people Scotti and named
the territory north of Britain Scotia aft er its Irish settlers.
Scotia eventually became Scotland.
People on the Iberian Peninsula, modern-day Spain
and Portugal, spoke Celtiberian. Historians have found little
information to help them reconstruct Celtiberian, but they
know that locals were speaking it during the Roman Republic
and Roman Empire. A few Celtiberian inscriptions survive;
Celtiberian writers used a unique script that appears to have
been a hybrid of Greek and Phoenician writing systems.
Proto-Germanic is the ancestor of the Germanic lan-
guages, which include German, English, and the Scandinavian
languages. People probably began speaking Proto-Germanic
around 500 b.c.e. in northern Germany and southern Scan-
dinavia. Th e earliest fi rm evidence of Germanic languages
comes from a single inscription on a helmet dated to the sec-
ond^ century b.c.e., but besides that almost nothing is known
about Germanic languages before the fi rst century c.e. Dur-
ing the fi rst fi ve centuries c.e. Germanic tongues split into
three groups: North, East, and West Germanic. Between 300
and 700 c.e. Germanic peoples migrated widely throughout
Europe, spreading Germanic dialects that were probably
mutually unintelligible. Th e earliest well-known Germanic
language was Gothic, the language of the Visigoths. Th e best
source of information on Gothic grammar and syntax is a
fourth century c.e. Gothic translation of the Bible.
People north of Greece in the territory that includes
modern-day Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, Hungary,
and Slovakia spoke Th racian languages. What little is known
about Th racian languages comes from inscriptions written in
Greek characters and reconstruction from modern Bulgarian
and Romanian. Greeks and Romans colonized most of this
territory, and the inhabitants gradually adopted Greek and
Latin as their primary languages. Th racian languages had
completely disappeared by about 400 c.e. Greek and Latin
were the most important languages of the Classical Period
(480–323 b.c.e.), and many Europeans learned one or both of
them. During the Roman Empire the use of Latin in particu-
lar became widespread throughout Gaul, Spain, and Britain.
Greek was more common in eastern Europe.
A few European languages did not come from the Indo-
European family. Before Celts arrived in Spain, people on the
Mediterranean coast spoke non-Indo-European languagesIn the late 1700s scholars noticed that the languages
they knew shared certain similarities. Take the word
for father: father is pater in Greek, pater in Latin, fadar
in Gothic (an early form of German), and pita in San-
skrit (the language of ancient India). The word for
man was wir in Latin, wair in Gothic, were in Old Eng-
lish, and virah in Sanskrit. Clever scholars deduced
that these languages must have all come from a com-
mon root. They called this root a protolanguage and
envisioned languages taking the shape of a family tree
with a protolanguage splitting into sublanguages that
could become protolanguages themselves; for ex-
ample, Proto-Indo-European could split into Proto-
Celtic and Proto-Germanic, each of which split into
several new languages.
This discovery led to the invention of a new fi eld
of study called linguistics. Linguists look for rules that
show how languages evolve. They fi nd the oldest ex-
amples they can of known languages and trace the
language forward in time, analyzing the way words
and grammar change. Languages change in predict-
able ways. For example, the d sound often turns into
a t sound. A short e can become a short a. Linguists
apply these rules to available information to recon-
struct old languages. Jacob Grimm, better known
(along with his brother, Wilhelm) for his Grimm’s Fairy
Tale s, was one of the fi rst linguists to reconstruct a
language; in the early 1800s he compiled a compre-
hensive study of the development of German dialects
from a common Germanic source.
Linguistic information allows historians to trace
the paths of different peoples who moved around Eu-
rope in ancient times. Scholars of Celtic believe that
Gaulish and Brythonic are more closely related to
each other than are Goidelic and Celtiberian because
of a sound difference. They classify Gaulish and Bry-
thonic as P-Celtic and Goidelic and Celtiberian as
Q-Celtic because sounds that are pronounced p in
Gaulish and Brythonic languages are pronounced q
in Goidelic and Celtiberian. This is why many schol-
ars believe that the Celts who colonized Ireland came
from Spain, not nearby Britain.RECONSTRUCTING ANCIENT
LANGUAGES616 language: Europe