Análisis lingüístico de la teonimia de Britania y Galia (Narbonense, Lugdunense y Bélgica)

Abstract

The main aim of this doctoral thesis is the thorough and individual revision of the indigenous theonymy of four Roman provinces of Western Europe, namely Gallia Narbonensis, Lugdunensis, Belgica, and Britannia, in that order. By means of this analysis, those divine names that have received insufficient or no attention from the point of view of comparative linguistics will be revisited, in order to shed new light on the phonetics, morphology, compositional and derivational mechanisms of Western fragmentary Indo-European languages. In addition, material, chronological, and geographical criteria will also be considered in this research, especially when they can provide relevant information about the religious framework of a divine name or its expansion. Furthermore, all readings of the tituli sacri containing theonyms or epithets will be reviewed in search of alternative readings that will allow for a more accurate analysis. The primarily linguistic and, where appropriate, religious study of these divine names is structured in four chapters, each of them devoted to one of the aforementioned administrative subdivisions of the Roman power. Thus, each investigation will follow in alphabetical order with a uniform arrangement of content —sc. epigraphic-archaeological commentary, exact theonymic comparanda, previous etymological approaches, etymological proposal, and toponomastic and mythological comparanda—. Once each chapter is finished, a classification table showing the distribution of the studied divine names according to their semantics and their possible etymology shall be displayed. The introduction to the thesis deals with theoretical and methodological aspects necessary for the understanding of both the work itself and the complex dialectal panorama of Indo-European Europe during the last centuries before our era and the first centuries of this one. Since we will mainly work with Celtic divine names, specifically Gaulish, several sections concerning the linguistic reality of Gaulish and the history of the discipline are also provided at the beginning of the work. Finally, after the central part of the work, some brief general conclusions of the study and the various indexes of common and proper forms cited during the thesis can be found.