Linguistic analysis of votive strings in Germania inferior

The second volume of the series Fontes epigraphici religionum Celticarum antiquarum deals with those religious inscriptions which, found in the Roman province Germania inferior, had or might have had a Celtic linguistic background. Its first tome scrutinizes for the first time within a rigorous linguistic framework all the invocations contained in them. The books central section analyses systematically 35 full theonymic strings addressing single deities together with 2 strings addressing divine pairs and 61 strings addressing groups of mother deities, called M ATRES and/or M ATRONAE, by means of the same twenty-two parameters. Special attention is paid to the relative chronology of the various divine names as well as to their dialectal features and their actual word formation, always with an eye to possible contacts with other Celtic names of all kinds and even to the panthea of the Classical antiquity, given that a linguistically Celtic invocation needs not necessarily refer to a specific Celtic deity. The books third section recapitulates the linguistic layers and the semantic categories to which the divine names belong, together with the syncretistic phaenomena observed. It also offers a typology of the Nethergermanic theonymic strings and, in its last chapter, a linguistic study of all the personal names of dedicants and beneficiaries with an evident or just probable Celtic background: i.e, names with a Celtic etymology as well as Latin translation and assonance names on a possibly Celtic basis. Methodological remarks on the study of Celtic religions phases and the classification of divine names according to syntactic function, linguistic type, semantics, and history constitute the two chapters of the first section, while the book is completed by a double appendix on the Celtic speakers separation from the remaining Indo-European speakers and on the populations splittings that originated the different Celtic dialects.

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