Aquitanian language in the context of "Aquitanians"

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⭐ Core Definition: Aquitanian language

The Aquitanian language was the language of the ancient Aquitani, a people living in Roman times between the Pyrenees, the Garonne river and the Atlantic Ocean. Epigraphic evidence for this language has also been found south of the Pyrenees, in Navarre and Castile.

There is no surviving text written in Aquitanian. The only evidence comes from onomastic data (roughly 200 personal names and about 60 deity names) that have survived indirectly in Latin inscriptions from the Roman imperial period, primarily between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, with a few possibly dating to the 4th or 5th centuries. The Gascon language has a substrate from Aquitanian, with certain words related to Basque.

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Aquitanian language in the context of Aquitani

The Aquitani were a tribe that lived in the region between the Pyrenees, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Garonne, in present-day southwestern France in the 1st century BC. The Romans dubbed this region Gallia Aquitania. Classical authors such as Julius Caesar and Strabo clearly distinguish the Aquitani from the other peoples of Gaul, and note their similarity to others in the Iberian Peninsula.

Their old language, the Aquitanian language, was a precursor of the Basque language and the substrate for the Gascon language (one of the Romance languages) spoken in Gascony. Between the 1st century and the 13th century, the Aquitani gradually adopted the Gascon language while part of the Roman Empire, then the Duchy of Gascony and the Duchy of Aquitaine.

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Aquitanian language in the context of Iberian alphabet

The Iberian scripts are the Paleohispanic scripts that were used to represent the extinct Iberian language. Most of them are typologically unusual in that they are semi-syllabic rather than purely alphabetic. The oldest Iberian inscriptions date to the 4th or possibly the 5th century BCE, and the latest from the end of the 1st century BCE or possibly the beginning of the 1st century CE.

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