Celtiberians: Problems and Debates
Francisco Burillo Mozota
Centro de Estudios Celtibéricos de Segeda
Seminario de Arqueología y Etnología Turolense
Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales, Teruel
The city of Contrebia Belaisca is the site that has yielded (and indeed is still yielding) the
longest Celtiberian texts. The publication of the third bronze plaque found there, for instance, has
resulted in a review of many of the basic concepts that constitute our knowledge of the
Celtiberian language. Jürgen Untermann points out the existence of Celtiberian phonetic and
morphological features that bring the language closer to Italic, such as the ablative ending in -o-,
which is characteristic of standard Indo-European but nonexistent in the Celtic languages. This
leads him to suggest that "as indicated by the new evidence and discoveries, we must decide
whether Celtiberian ought to be excluded from the Celtic-language type and linked, for instance,
with Italic tongues, or whether the notion of proto-Celtic as thought in comparative linguistics is
in need of a fundamental revision" (1999: 648).
Francisco Villar is of a similar opinion with regard to reviewing our traditional
understanding of common Celtic and points out new elements of the Celtiberian language that
are not found in other Celtic tongues, such as the voicing of the /s/ in an intervocalic position and
the sonant-consonant-vowel context. Nonetheless, his interpretation of these variations differs
from those of Untermann. Villar defends an unusual understanding of the Indo-Europeanisation
process in the Iberian Peninsula and emphasises that "the characteristics that appear to link
Celtiberian with Italic but are not present in other Celtic languages have two causes: the
influence exercised by an Indo-European Italic-type substratum that preceded Celtiberian, and
the language that affected and coexisted with Celtiberian until the Roman period" (2000: 430).
Pre svega mislim da je odlična jer nemam odgovor, a bojim se da ga na tako postavljeno pitanje koje u sebi sadrži konstataciju zvanične istoriografske dogme niko nema odgovor, jer da ima već bi Tandoorije našao po literaturi.
