The Tilde

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The (more than likely false) cognates between Turkish and Irish via the lovely Galatians of Anatolia

A while ago, during one of those times you didn’t realize you’d been on Wikipedia for hours until you got up to turn the lights on, I came across the article for the now-extinct Galatian people. A group of Celts who migrated from Gaul (modern-day France) to Anatolia (modern-day where-I-live), mostly to annoy the Greeks and to presumably assassinate Alexander the Great’s father. Coincidentally us Turks and the Galatians share a capital, which actually is quite the unpopular choice; Ankara (or then, Ancyra), it’s only been a state’s capital 2 other times. That’s one more common interest along with our shared displeasure of the Greeks.

What I’m really into though, is their language (how surprising) of which we know 120 whole words ! That’s exactly the same amount as the total number of words in Toki Pona, which is relevant because I said so. It’s actually quite difficult to find papers on the Galatian language, and even more frustrating for me since my whole deal is phonology – and when the question is of a language (that doesn’t even have any historical texts written in it) people stopped speaking ~1700 years ago, I’m left with a conlang wiki page claiming it to have 3.6 million speakers in the Galatian Republic as of 2016. So no phonology talk here.

But I did find a dissertation from the University of Wales that claims a bunch of cognates between Irish and Turkish to be factual, these words can be found in this paper on pages 71 and 72. So, I’ll try to find attested etymologies for some of them. Those I don’t mention here are long shots, like “turşu” and “tuirse” having a common ancestor (meaning “tired, worn out”). You can probably see why I’m not even really considering some of these.

abar- : unknown root, but it’s cognate with Kyrgyz “apırtuu” which makes it unlikely to have originated from Galatians

alçı : shared root with Old Turkish “aşu”

bıdık : shared root with Armenian պստիկ (pstik)

dolan : from Proto-Turkic *toluġ

düdük : from Proto-Turkic *tǖtük

geniz : from Proto-Turkic *keŋiŕ

kepenek : shared root with Old Turkish “kebel-” (meaning to dress)

salak : derived from Ottoman Turkish “sal-“

tavan : unknown root (I swear I read years ago in Starostin’s database that it has a shared root with Old Turkic “taban” but I mean it’s not really a trusted source anyway, plus I can’t find it now so…)

yıl- : from Proto-Turkic *yï̄l-

yor- : from Proto-Turkic *yor-

Other than these, the Turkish word “sabun” possibly comes from Galatian since the Greeks may have taken that from them, and then it would have spread from there.

The most obvious guess here would be the word “galata” in Turkish having originated from Galatians, since they themselves are called that. But the word “galata” first appears near the 9th century, leaving a 600-year gap (300 on a good day) which makes this etymology slightly less likely. The accepted root for this word right now is Greek “galatâs”, which means milkman. I’d say that’s one of the better Turkish place names out there, when you have “Batman” or “Afyon” (opium). Afyon actually derives from Ancient Greek *hopós, which itself comes from *swokʷós, that’s juice in PIE (abbreviated on purpose because I’m eating pie right now !). A Latin descendant of this word actually uses the Gaulish form *sappos, to then become “sappinus”; as in “sap of pine”. I promise I’m not just typing whatever that comes into my head now, trust me I meant to come back to the Gauls, it’s not a coincidence ! And to end this on a positive note, the Albanian descendant of that PIE root, “gjak”, means blood. Hooray !

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