Toorians-Aduatuca.pdf

Legendary Place Names: Coastal Micro-Toponomastics in Alor Through the Lens of an Abui Myth

13th ICAL (International Conference on Austronesian Languages), Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, July 18-23, 2015 , 2015

This presentation reconstructs a number of Abui (Papuan) place names and micro-toponyms from the coastal area of Alor Island (South-East Indonesia) through the analysis of a legend involving two gods of Abui traditional religion and the replacement of the first with the second one. The myth appears as diachronically 'multi-layered', from ancestral times to the 'arrival' of Christianity in Alor Island and the consequent identification of the 'bad' (or 'weaker') god as a demon and, then, as the devil. The story allows the etymological and historical-semantic explanation of around eight place names (toponyms and micro-toponyms), drawing a map of that 'mythological' space and landscape that is still real, attested, existing, known, and recognized by Abui native-speakers. The etymological and historical / diachronic analysis of place names, in this case, is fruitful not only in the reconstruction of their origins and in map-tracking, but it involves also an anthropological study of cultural aspects of the oral tradition of Abui religion. The story here described is considered true (not a legend) by Abui people and all the place names part of that story are 'felt' and assumed by Abui people according to the features they have in the legend. These place names and micro-toponyms, therefore, show to have a relevance that goes beyond the etymological reconstruction, allowing important remarks in the fields of anthropology and history of culture and a close association between diachronic toponomastics and anthropological linguistics.

Tocharian and the West

Priscis Libentius et Liberius Novis lndogermanische und sprachwissenschaftliche Studien/ Festschrift für Gerhard Meise zum 65. Geburtstage, 2018

In this short paper I examine the lexical isoglosses connecting Tocharian, Italic and Celtic, in particular, in the field of legal and religious lexicon. I find that these are largely non-existent. This finding may shed light on the question of supposed archaisms of the legal and religious lexicon preserved uniquely in Italic and/or Celtic in the West and Indo-Iranian in the East.

The Language (s) of the Callaeci

e-Keltoi: Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies, 2006

Although there is no direct extant record of the language spoken by any of the peoples of ancient Callaecia, some linguistic information can be recovered through the analysis of the names (personal names, names of deities, ethnonyms, and place-names) that occur in Latin inscriptions and in ancient Greek and Latin sources. These names prove the presence of speakers of a Celtic language in this area, but there are also names of other origins. This is the case with the Artabri 3 , the Nerii 4 , the Supertamarici 5 , the Praestamarici 6 , and the Cileni 7 . In other instances the naming formula found in some Latin inscriptions provides the information that a particular group of people was Celtic 8 . This is the case, for example, with one of the peoples occupying the banks of the Tamara River (today's Tambre River), the e-Keltoi Volume 6: 715-748 The Celts in the Iberian Peninsula 716 Luján Martínez Supertamar(i)ci. The inscription CIL II 2902 = 5667 reads as follows: And AE 1997.863 (= HEp.7.397), an inscription from Crecente LU, reads: