Case and genre in gaulish: From Mont Auxois to the Pont D'Ancy

A close textual examination of case-marking and role in Gaulish suggests that the instrumental (and ablative) formants and functions inherited from Indo-European remained largely independent in use from those of the other oblique cases. Although a distinct morphological locative seems to have been given up at a prehistoric stage, the Gaulish of the Roman period appears to have preserved a much fuller and more synthetic system of grammatical case than did any of the medieval Celtic languages. The practice of projecting Insular Celtic behaviours onto Continental Celtic (or even cross-linguistic abstractions derived from broader linguistic theory) should not serve as a substitute for analysing Gaulish inscriptions from the perspective of interlingual intertextuality and of properly contextualized epigraphic genre. Gaulish should be understood principally as a closely historicized inscriptional language, its attested expressions constrained by typical ancient Mediterranean epigraphic pragmatics, yet representing an idiosyncratic development of Celtic linguistic tradition nonetheless.