AILSA CHANG, HOST:
There are more than half a million words in the Oxford English Dictionary. Some trace their origin as far back as the 11th century. For centuries, linguists and academics have kept careful track of those words and their origins, but not every language gets cataloged in the same way. Take, for example, ancient Celtic. Those are early languages used by the peoples of the British Isles thousands of years ago, and some of those words can be found in modern Irish and Welsh.
Simon Rodway is a professor at Aberystwyth University on the west coast of Wales. He's trying to put together the surviving pieces of this language. He and his colleague recently set out to make the world's first dictionary of ancient Celtic words. Welcome, welcome.
SIMON RODWAY: Thanks for having me.
CHANG: Oh, my goodness. Thanks for being with us. OK, so as we said, there are about half a million words in the Oxford English Dictionary. How many words are in the dictionary that you are making?
RODWAY: Well, we're still at an early stage, but, I mean, I'd say we've probably got over a thousand. But we're not going to get many more than that because the records of the Celtic languages in Britain and Ireland are not great.
CHANG: You say about a thousand words of ancient Celtic, but is that, like, a very small proportion of what you suspect is the total amount of words that were used in history?
RODWAY: Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's just a tiny little glimpse into the language. I mean, we're particularly looking at the ancient Celtic languages spoken in Britain and Ireland. Of course, they were spoken on the continent of Europe as well, over a great swathe of the continent of Europe, in fact. That kind of helps us because we can see similarities and differences. And in the Roman period, when most of Britain is part of the Roman Empire, the Romans were very literate. They wrote everything down. They were hugely bureaucratic, so we have a lot of letters. We've got legal stuff. We've got inscriptions.
CHANG: Yeah. Thank God for bureaucracy sometimes, huh?
RODWAY: Yeah, quite. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, of course, they were using Latin, which is the official language of the Roman Empire, but they were recording place names. They were recording people's names. They were recording some words, which had obviously got into Latin.
CHANG: And can you talk about these texts a little more, these texts that are primarily in Latin but where you find the occasional ancient Celtic word embedded.
RODWAY: Yeah, sure. I mean, we've got quite a few of these, mostly written in Latin, but they've got Celtic names and so on. And what's really interesting, really exciting, is we've got a very small number - we're literally talking about four or five texts that are written entirely in Celtic. And most of these are curse tablets.
CHANG: Curse tablets?
RODWAY: That's right.
CHANG: Ancient Celtic curse tablets?
RODWAY: That's right. Ancient Celtic curse tablets.
CHANG: (Laughter) What are these curses about?
RODWAY: Well, I mean, mostly, they're curses against thieves who have stolen the belongings of people, particularly in Bath. In Bath, you've got some Roman baths. They're incredible. And people used to go there and bathe in the waters, which are naturally hot. So quite often, because it was kind of like a tourist attraction, there were thieves there. So people would take off their clothes and they get in the bath, and they come out and they find that somebody had stolen their clothes.
CHANG: I see.
RODWAY: What they do then is they would find somebody who had a sheet of lead, and they'd scratch a curse on that lead tablet, asking a god or a goddess to do all sorts of horrible things to the person who'd taken their belongings, and they throw that into the spring, which was consecrated to the goddess.
CHANG: OK, so Simon, how do I say goodbye to you in ancient Celtic?
RODWAY: Goodbye. Well, I mean, we could perhaps hypothesize that an ancient Briton speaking the ancestor of Welsh might say something like - in Welsh, one of the ways we say goodbye is (speaking Welsh).
CHANG: (Speaking Welsh).
RODWAY: (Speaking Welsh).
CHANG: OK. Simon Rodway at Aberystwyth University, (speaking Welsh). It was lovely to talk to you.
RODWAY: (Speaking Welsh). Thank you. And you, too. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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