Celtic place-names are found as far east as the Dniester
and Dobrudja, and as far north as Westphalia. The language of the
Galatians in Asia Minor must have stood in a very close relation to
Gaulish. Indeed few traces of dialectical differences are to be observed
in continental Celtic. Unfortunately no literary monuments written in
the ancient speech of Gaul have come down to us, though Caesar makes
mention of religious poems orally transmitted by the Druids, and we also
hear of _bardi_ and _vates_. But a large number of personal and
place-names have been preserved. The classical writers have, moreover,
recorded a certain number of Gaulish words which can generally be
identified without difficulty by comparing them with words still living
in the modern dialects, e.g. _pempedula_, "cinquefoil," cf. Welsh
_pump_, "five," and _deilen_, "leaf"; _ambactus_, Welsh _amaeth_;
_petorritum_, "four-wheeled chariot," cf. Welsh _pedwar_, "four," and
Ir. _roth_, "wheel," or _rith_, "course." We have further between thirty
and forty inscriptions (three in north Italy) which we may without
hesitation ascribe to the Gauls. These inscriptions are written in
either N. Etruscan or Greek or Latin characters. We are thus in a
position to reconstruct much of the old system of declension, which
resembles Latin very closely on the one hand, and on the other
represents the forms which are postulated by the O. Ir. paradigms. Hence
Gaulish is particularly valuable as preserving the final vowels which
have disappeared in early Irish and Welsh. The few verb-forms which
occur in the remains of Gaulish are quite obscure and have not hitherto
admitted of a satisfactory explanation. The statements of ancient
authors with regard to the Belgae are conflicting, but there cannot be
much doubt that the language of the latter was substantially the same as
Gaulish. Caesar observes that there was little difference between the
speech of the Gauls and the Britons in his day, and we may regard
Gaulish as closely akin to the ancestor of the Brythonic dialects. It is
difficult to say when Gaulish finally became extinct. It disappeared
very rapidly in the south of France, but lingered on, possibly till the
6th century, in the northern districts, and it seems unnecessary to
discredit Jerome's statement that the speech of the Galatians in Asia
Minor bore a strong resemblance to the language he had heard spoken in
the neighbourhood of Trier. There is no evidence that Bret