Lusitanian language

Lusitanian
One of the inscriptions of Arroyo de la Luz.
Native to	Inland central-west Iberian Peninsula
Region	Beira Alta, Beira Baixa and Alto Alentejo Portugal and Extremadura and part of province of Salamanca Spain
Extinct	2nd century AD
Language family	Indo-European Italic (?) Para-Celtic (?) Lusitanian
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Linguist list	xls
Glottolog	lusi1235

Lusitanian (so named after the Lusitani or Lusitanians) was an Indo-European Paleohispanic language. There has been support for either a connection with the ancient Italic languages or Celtic languages. It is known from only five sizeable inscriptions, dated from circa 1 CE, and numerous names of places (toponyms) and of gods (). The language was spoken in the territory inhabited by Lusitanian tribes, from the Douro to the Tagus rivers, territory that nowadays falls in Portugal and Western Spain.

Lusitanian is an Indo-European language but it was quite different from the Celtiberian languages of the Iberian Peninsula. It is not considered a Celtic language under existing definitions of linguistic Celticity. The Lusitanian inscriptions retain Indo-European p in positions where Celtic languages would not, most unambiguously in PORCOM 'pig' in one inscription, PORGOM in another, a feature considered non-Celtic. Prósper, in her Lusitanian etymologies (2002; 2008), demonstrates that not only does Lusitanian not agree closely with the usual Celtic reflexes but that it is closer to Italic, in which case there were two well-differentiated branches of Indo-European in the Iberian Peninsula before the Romans, with Lusitanian belonging to the non-Celtic branch. Villar and Pedrero (2001) connect Lusitanian with the Italic languages. They base their finding on parallels in the names of deities and some lexical items, such as the Umbrian gomia, Lusitanian comaiam, and some grammatical elements. Prósper also sees Lusitanian as predating the introduction of Celtic and shows that it retains elements of Old European, making its origins possibly even older.

On the other hand, Koch says there is no unambiguous example of the reflexes of the Indo-European syllabic resonants *l̥, *r̥, *m̥, *n̥ and the voiced aspirate stops *bʱ, *dʱ, *ɡʱ. Additionally, names in the inscriptions can be read as Celtic, such as AMBATVS, CAELOBRIGOI and VENDICVS. Dagmar Wodtko argues that it is hard to identify Lusitanian personal or place-names that are without question not Celtic. Some argue that the p- in PORCOM does not alone mark Lusitanian as not Celtic, and that it could be classed as a Celtic dialect, but one that preserved Indo-European *p (or possibly an already phonetically weakened [ɸ], written P as an archaism). This is based largely on numerous apparently Celtic personal, deity, and place names.