Alt-celtischer Sprachschatz: The Ukranian Contribution
Alexander Falileyev
University of Wales
Abstract
Celtic presence in the territory of what is now the Ukraine has been studied from different standpoints. Most considerable results have been achieved by archaeologists. Since the first finds of La Tène artefacts as early as 1844 much has been unearthed from Ukrainian soil to prove the fact that the western parts of the country were indeed inhabited by Celtic tribes. As archaeologists maintain, the earliest indications of Celtic material presence in Transcarpathia can be traced to the V-IV c. BC.
Penetration of Celts in the area, however, begins only in the later part of the III century; see a useful summary by V. Bidzilja and M. Schukin in Slavjane i ich sosedi (Moscow 1993), 67-84. Further east Celtic influence can be traced in the so-called “La Tènized” archaeological cultures spread as far as the Dnepr (see e.g., V. Eremenko, ‘Keltskaja vual’ i Zarubinetskaja Kultura (St. Petersburg 1997); but note also S. Pachkova in Stratum Plus (2004/4), 74–87).
The linguistic aspects of Celtic presence in Ukraine have also been considered. For obvious reasons it is not concerned with searching for borrowings from Celtic directly into Ukrainian. No inscriptions of Roman date which could contain Celtic place- or personal names are found in the area; and the ancient authors do not offer much information on the onomastic landscape of the region. Therefore, a linguistic study of Celtic presence in the area is confined to the analysis of toponymy. Sometimes existing linguistic attributions and etymological interpretations of the place-names are clearly naïve: for example, it is difficult to agree with some scholars who maintain that a Celtic tribal name Belgae is reflected in a Ukrainian place-name Belz.
More interesting and thought-provoking observations have been made, of course. For example, the late O. Trubačov (Nazvanija rek pravoberežnoi Ukrainy (Moscow 1968), 210-1) suggested that the river-names Tynja (Тыня), Tnja (Тня) and perhaps also Otavin might be Celtic in origin. Having ruled out other linguistic attributions, he refers to a mountain-name Taunum in Germania which he believes is Celtic.
One perhaps should consider here, however, a set of river-names collected by X. Delamarre in his Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise s.v. tauo- < tauso- ‘silencieux, tranquille’. Although there are certain problems with the semantics and etymology of the Gaulish word, and not all the examples quoted in DLG may be relevant (see G. R. Isaac, Place-Names in Ptolemy’s Geography (Aberystwyth 2004), comments to ‘Britannicae Insulae’, s.v. Taoúa p.e.), the river-names from Ukraine, if they are indeed Celtic, may also belong here