Conversations: The Real Gauls of Classical Times with Dr. Antone Minard

This week Liv and Michaela speak with Dr. Antone Minard about the Gauls and the Gaulish language. Lots of fun linguistic facts to be found inside this one, including the etymology of broccoli. Submit your question for the next Q&A via email http://mythsbaby.com/questions or a voice note https://www.speakpipe.com/LTAMB. Get ad-free episodes and so, so much more, by subscribing to the Oracle Edition at patreon.com/mythsbaby http://patreon.com/mythsbaby. Enter ourpodcast guest https://www.mythsbaby.com/contact form if you'd like to be on the show as a conversation guest! CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. I try to provide direct warnings when there is reference to anything with overtly traumatic themes but be aware that Greek mythology regularly features assault, death, and many other potentially triggering events. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here:mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Liv Albert?

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• 2:17Speaker 03

  Hello, all you wonderful people and welcome back to another episode of Let's Talk About Myths, Baby. Here we are today with an episode conversation with Dr. Anton Minard from the University of British Columbia. He was a professor of mine. I've taken a Latin class with him and then last semester I took a class on the Gauls and the Gaulish language. It was delightful, so very confusing and I'm trying to think of smart things to say about it, but all I really remember is being so terribly confused the whole time, but also in the most delightful of way because I got to learn so much and to realize what gaps I had in my education,

• 3:00Speaker 03

  what gaps there was in traditional academia for these kinds of topics and how little we talk about it. The approach to Celtic and Gaulic studies is, especially in antiquity, is extremely different than what it is for classical research. And it's just, I don't know, it was just very fascinating to me and I was really excited the whole class and I wanted to bring a bit of that to you guys, the wonderful confusion and excitement that we can have from stepping into a new territory and step into a new territory we did. We talked about language, we talked about words and sounds and we talked about, you know,

• 3:40Speaker 03

  transmission of culture and of ideas and how can we approach a people who didn't leave us the same exact evidence as we are used to from antiquity. So with that, I'll let you guys get on with it. It was a fun conversation and hope you enjoy.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Conversations, the real Gauls of Classical Times with Dr. Anton Minard.

• 4:35Liv Albert?

  But I'm curious, like, so I guess maybe you can start with the background, Michaela. You know, this was sort of your idea because

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:44Liv Albert?

  You're her professor. Yes. Maybe, maybe take it away, Michaela.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Sure. So I took a class with, with Dr. Minard last semester on the Gauls and the Gaulish language. And it was a class where I feel like by the end of it, I was like, I'm still confused.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Which I kind of adored too, because I think I kind of, one of my things like that I love about studying modern antiquity is sort of like the, almost like you can't say anything for a certain about it all. And I like that because it leaves things open that we can still explore. But I, I, I had an idea of who the Gauls were going into the class. And after like the first week, I was like, oh, I'm wrong. Like, or it's very simplified. My idea of them was just sort of being these like, oh, I've been translating a lot of, of, of Herodotus lately. So Barbaros is still in my head, but like barbarian or like these foreign, these other, this other

• 5:42Speaker 03

  group from sort of the, like, my brain kind of just went mid to southern France region, what is modern day France now. But, you know, look in the class, it was like, oh, like all of France, and then even going into England and everything. And I was like, oh, yes, um, Boudicca, of course, that makes sense. And And yeah, I think that's kind of where my impression of the Gauls started was just sort of like Vercingetorix, Boudica, all these things. And so I don't know, maybe a great place to start was like, who were the Gauls?

• 6:14Liv Albert?

  Like, yeah, absolute base level. Can you like, because here's two, not even just you saying that, because now I'm, I'm already into it. But, you know, I, I realize all I would think of it as just they're one of sort of the many kind of counters to Rome, you know, during their long tenure of like being terrible on the world stage. And I think I'm feeling a little connected to the modern moment. Um, no, but like, there's this ah, um, the, that's kind of all I think of is just them as this kind of other to Rome. But so is that kind of what you're

• 6:48Speaker 04

  Well, that's, that's how the Romans think, thought of them.

• 6:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, exactly. Is that kind of the big, the, the issue that you were kind of talking about? We'll, we'll get into the immediate question, absolutely. But like, before we started recording, Michael, you mentioned the propaganda. So now I just want to clarify, like, is it that we, a lot of what we know about the Gauls is through the eyes of the Romans? Is that the main issue or similar?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  Yes, I, I feel like

• 7:11Liv Albert?

  I know, I'm asking whoever can answer, I guess.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah. That, that was like my impression, I think, because I think just sort of like, um, Caesar's to Bello Gallica, and then like, which I like had translated a bit last year of, um, and then like, sort of like the, the, the statuary images, you know, like the bleeding Gaul or the injured Gaul or whatever. And I'm like, that's kind of like all my touch point for the Gauls, Gauls were.

• 7:38Liv Albert?

  But they were a whole people outside of Roman propaganda?

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, not even a whole one people.

• 7:45Liv Albert?

  Yes. Okay. So where, what is the region maybe and the kind of timeline of, of the Gauls?

• 7:52Speaker 04

  So like, before even getting into regions and timelines, I, I'll just say, This all came about, this whole course that Michael was talking about came about because our department at U B C changed its name a few years ago to Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies. And I've been teaching there for a long time, here and there, you know, putting in my hands where it's needed. And my specialty is actually Celtic Studies, which you can't really do in Western Canada because there just isn't a place to do that. And I said, you know, who's an Ancient Mediterranean people? The Gauls. And everyone more or less said, yeah, okay, we know that, but so what? Not, not, you know, not perhaps quite so disrespectfully.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  But the thing is, people do classics degrees and spend great careers doing wonderful things, reading about the Gauls without ever actually thinking of anything from the Gauls' perspective. And in in terms of location, where they were, it's absolutely enormous because, yes, all of France, yes, chunks into Switzerland, Germany, the Low Countries. Budica was mentioned earlier. The people in Britain are probably not Gauls, but they're certainly very closely related. And unfortunately, what we really have is lots of tribal names here and there. And how do you tell when one people with a very, very similar language, very, very similar material culture,

• 9:19Speaker 04

  very, very similar relationship with Rome, how do you tell if they're Gauls or Britons? Well, unless they actually say it themselves, you can't really always. But then the Gauls actually go quite far. So we've got these little people, Galatians, that people mostly know from the Bible. There's a book written to them saying, you know, you should be more Christian or whatever. But those people were Gauls, speaking a language that we we only have about a hundred and forty words of that one, but those words show us that it pretty clearly is Gaulish, or at least Gaulish as it went forward through time. So we have these people and as for when they are, well, you know, when does anybody start?

• 10:00Speaker 04

  But certainly they're around for the entire history of Rome, just up there to the north. They eventually invade Italy and take over some of what had been Etruscan territory. And you've got, again, all these very, very Celtic tribal names like the Seonones in northern Italy. And they're just there, some of them, of course, incorporated into Rome and become Roman citizens. And so that brings up fun questions of, well, are you a Gaul or are you a Roman? Most famous example of that is probably Virgil. So P. Wergilius Maro, that seems to be a Gaulish name. But there are some people who would rather like it not to be, who make linguistic arguments against it.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  And frankly, there's not really enough data to come down firmly on either side. But one of the arguments is why does this guy write the most Roman epic ever? And one of the hypotheses is, well, maybe he did that because he kind of had something to prove. Because he perhaps wasn't as Roman in his heart of hearts as other Romans perhaps felt that he should have been. So it's this vast, vast territory. And we don't know when Gaulish stopped, but again, seems to have limped along through the traditional fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. So there were Gaulish speaking Gauls within the Roman Empire, but also near the Roman Empire for its entire history.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  And in terms of material culture, when people dig things up, they seem to be doing lots of really, really complicated things, artwork that is absolutely amazing, trade networks that are very, very far flung. Some of the descriptions in Caesar talk about, you know, building these ships in their ports. So a fairly complicated ancient civilization that just mostly gets talked about to us through Roman sources. And so then they do become just these other barbarians.

• 12:01Liv Albert?

  That is so interesting and so like widespread. So, and so the whole time period of Rome is really interesting to take in as well. But I just, I guess, want to put like a really fine point on it. So is the reason why we kind of think of them in that way? Just a matter of like, not a lot of their writing survived for us? Whereas it's just material culture and so we don't have the Like texts or?

• 12:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, so for for the writing aspect, we have maybe two or three inscriptions that amount to about a paragraph each. Otherwise, it's isolated words. And for isolated words, we have thousands and thousands and thousands, including a lot of place names. And a lot of words that were borrowed from Gaulish into Latin. So my favorite example of that is car, which comes from Latin carus, which comes from the Gaulish was probably carus is some sort of wagon or or cart. But there's a lot of really, really basic words that seem to have come from Gaulish. My my other favorite example is broccoli, which has a very convoluted path.

• 13:10Speaker 04

  But it's originally the kind of plant with the sort of sharp spears, which are sort of like a badger's teeth. And ultimately, it comes back to brocos, which is the Gaulish word for badger. So so there's lots of little bits here and there where Gaulish affects us. But of those two or three paragraph length things we have, we can't actually read the whole things. Because we just don't know enough the language, not enough survive. We can make really, really good guesses as to a lot of words, but not quite enough. And there just isn't a text for us to read, because for whatever reason, when they wrote things down, they didn't do it in such a venue that it was going to come forward to us.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  Um, because they didn't come forward as a political entity. So by the time people were copying and recopying things, they were copying Latin texts, but not Gaulish ones. So if there were any, they're gone.

• 14:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's so interesting. And like one of those, I mean, there's so many things like this in the ancient world where you're like, it is both fascinating and like sad and heartbreaking. But also just like so damn interesting to think about the ways these things like do and do not survive. I'm just generally obsessed with like the why of things like that, especially for a people that were around for the entirety of the Romans. Like, that's a fascinating thing to then imagine that so little of their. Yeah, or like that they just didn't, we don't have anything that, yeah, that allows you to translate or what have you like, it's just.

• 14:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:45Liv Albert?

  Emphasizing it over and over, apparently.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  Why did it go? We don't know because it seemed to have kept going for a long time under Rome and over not the Gauls but the Britons. That's a really interesting story there because we know when the Romans conquered Spain, when the Romans conquered Gaul, when the Romans conquered wherever. By and large, the indigenous language and culture eventually assimilated to Rome. But there were a couple of places where it didn't do that. Uh, you know, one is Northern Africa. Berber survives to the modern day. So even though all of Northern Africa was Latin speaking, at least on the west side of it, the Proto-Berber language survived to become the modern language.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  And some of that may have been because there were reserves south outside of Roman territory. We're not really sure. But the same thing happened on the island of Britain where people obviously spoke Latin. We have really, really good evidence that the Latin that was spoken on the island of Britain kept going. And medieval British Latin, it's not just that medieval people went and learned Latin somewhere, but that there was a tradition of doing Latin in what is now England, what is now Southern Scotland, what is now Wales for the entire time. But the Bretonic language also survived to become modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton at the same time. So hundreds of years of must have been bilingualism. And then Latin ceases as a spoken language, but it clearly persists in reading and writing

• 16:16Speaker 04

  throughout the Middle Ages. And then, you know, eventually in the modern period, we start reading the Roman sources and redoing the grammars and getting rid of those weird little local words. But both traditions are continuous for hundreds of years. So why did that happen in Britain, but not in Gaul? When clearly it started to happen in Gaul, there were hundreds of years where it was bilingual and we just don't know. Or maybe the historians know. I'm not a historian.

• 16:45Liv Albert?

  I mean, fair. No, that's, oh, that's really interesting. And I'm realizing like I don't even, I have an English degree. I feel like I should know like a vague amount of that kind of linguistic history, but I don't remember any of it. But it's, it's, that's just generally fascinating. And

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Well,

• 17:03Liv Albert?

  sorry, go ahead.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  I say, if you have an English degree, people who study the history of English really, really, really try not to talk about other things that are going on on the island and people who are not English, because it's kind of awkward. There's a tradition of presenting the English language and culture as the inheritors of Rome. So the narrative sort of Rome left, we're here, we are the children of Rome. Let's go on and do our modern states on the model of Rome. But in point of fact, the English were not on the island when all of this was going on, and they came in to fill a power vacuum, did some conquering, maybe a little oppressing here and there. It was medieval times, things happened.

• 17:50Liv Albert?

  The English?

• 17:52Speaker 04

  But there's some awkwardness there in saying that our language and culture really made a huge effort to displace people who were the genuine continuance of at least Roman colonization. And so very often, that's sort of skipped over a little bit in the curriculum.

• 18:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, and like, I did a double major a long time ago now, but like I, it was English Lit and Classics. And so it was very often that I had these kinds of crossovers, but they were always like the ways that, you know, early English writers or, you know, Middle English were writing about like Greek, classical, Roman, you know, Latin, all these things like, but there, there's still that huge disconnect from the native languages of that area, which, yeah, I just didn't even think about. I, I've been thinking a lot. I've been watching a lot of BBC, this show called Escape to the Country, which is the most comforting thing in the world. And it goes to like all over England and Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  All the time.

• 18:53Liv Albert?

  Do you? Amazing. Well, I've been thinking about all of these languages and like all of this stuff so much because I just have had that show on repeat. And so now I'm thinking all about, okay, like right Cornish and Welsh, I'm so interested in. And that's just

• 19:08Speaker 04

  We actually. But we watch it a lot because we go visit my mom on a Sunday and my husband is from Wales. And so often these shows are people looking at houses in Wales. So it's kind of something to watch that we can sort of all relate to. But very, very often they'll take this couple who's relocating from a London suburb. And they're buying this gorgeous house in the country. And we watch it and we go, you know, everybody in that village is going to speak Welsh. They are so going to regret this purchase because they're not thinking about that. They're thinking about the house. They're not thinking about what is it going to be like to live here? And they're just sort of assuming that it will be their sort of village experience without realizing that there is a cultural change.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  And I think, you know, we look at the ancient world and and there's going to be some of that as well. You can see that the Roman network was really good at moving people, moving goods. There's a common language that they have, but there's still going to be a distinctive local culture. And I think one of the things that interests me about the Gauls is we've got Caesar's writing. And Caesar, everybody knows he has an agenda. He's using rhetorical devices to do his thing. But at the same time, we've spent two thousand years training ourselves to admire Caesar and mock ourselves after Caesar. And so it's really hard to read him critically and think that he might be lying to us because we kind of like him.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  And, you know, he's clearly very good at what he does. But at the same time, he's not always telling us the truth. And for whatever reason, I'm not going to speculate his psychology. But I I think if you look at the Gauls from a Gaulish perspective, you see quite a different story. Because, you know, think, okay, we're we're we're fighting against Caesar because someone needs to fight against Caesar. So Caesar can be covered in glory. You don't think, well, actually, did they really want to be conquered by Rome? Why would you? And and historically, the narrative is just, oh, well, things are better. Rome is more civilized. But that just doesn't seem to be true.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  They they seem to have been fairly parallel in terms of their level of civilization, whatever that means. You know, material culture, complexity.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  I don't know enough about the archaeological side of things to say, oh, yes, Rome was a more built up city or what have you, but I really don't think that that makes the measure of civilization anyway. It's just that you need a reasonably complicated culture doing its own thing and that you clearly have.

• 21:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and I do know enough about Roman history to say that they were good enough at propaganda that we can assume that that's what this is, you know, but because that's that's so true. Yeah. I mean, it's it's better under Rome just screams of propaganda.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I also think there's something to say about like, um, Rome, the city herself versus periphery Roman towns where like, you know, low, small, little local villages that are like Latin Roman in culture. They're not going to function the same way as Rome does and that it's like, so who's to say the same thing isn't happening in Gaul without that much, you know, obviously with Rome, we have a much more, um, obvious city that has been around for a bit and still is around and built up, but to say that the complexity that existed within Rome, just because they built monuments, you know, didn't also exist with the Gauls. Um, they just didn't build, you know,

• 22:45Speaker 03

  a giant amphitheater or

• 22:47Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, that's true of all the ancient cultures, right? Like just because you didn't build a big stone thing that lasts three thousand years. Doesn't mean that any that you're any less, you know, interesting at your height or at any time. But

• 22:59Speaker 04

  But I sometimes think our, our, the unity of Rome that we see looking back is a creation of the post Roman early medieval period where the church really needs to promote this narrative of look, there is one thing and we're it. And so then you project that backwards into the past. And of course, every single ancient text we have, either it's an inscription that's been dug up in a field somewhere, or it's a medieval copy of an ancient text. And this is something I go around our, my classical classicist colleagues all the time and say, you're a medievalist, admit it, admit it. Because we really don't talk about the fact that our texts

• 23:41Speaker 04

  aren't actually the words as Caesar spoke them in the first century, but a much later copy of a copy of a copy that we think is pretty close based on a lack of evidence to the contrary.

• 23:55Liv Albert?

  Yeah. I think about that all the time and I never know enough to like, you know, really dive too much deeper, but I'm fascinated by that and just the disconnect between when these things would have been written as compared to the actual thing that survives today. Like, it's just, who knows what they might have done in between. And I think the Romans are to blame for a lot. So I think we can assume, we can assume. Okay. Speaking of the Romans slash the Gauls, I guess, as a result. But so what do we know? Like, you're coming at this linguistically, so I won't ask you about the material culture. But, but when it comes to just, I guess, the

• 24:37Liv Albert?

  language or the people, like, what, what are we able to glean outside of the Roman, if anything, that you know of?

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Okay, so it's a nice, simple question I could answer in three words or less. No. So my field, my degree is actually folklore and mythology, but my training within that is as a Celticist. And Celticist is sort of like a classicist, except instead of Greek and Roman cultures, as your focus with Greek and Latin as your languages, our main languages where the bulk of the evidence is, is Old Irish and Middle Welsh. So the same sort of training. The trouble is, there's a lot less stuff written in Old Irish and Middle Welsh. And so we make a lot

• 25:25Speaker 04

  more use of the comparative method of saying, well, there's this, how can we fill out the gaps? And where we can, use archaeology and material culture, something that's nice that you can point to and say, look, this is totally a thing. No interpretation involved, it's totally a thing. But a lot of times, we have to reach farther afield and compare. That works really, really well for languages. It works a little bit less well for narrative and cultural ideas. And of course, there's sometimes a huge time gap. So the Irish material is earlier than the Welsh, but much, much later than the Gaulish material. One of the neat things is that we do find stuff

• 26:10Speaker 04

  that is ridiculously parallel that shouldn't be. So there's a medieval Welsh text called Kiluch Agolwen, which is a lovely story that's more or less a folk tale with extra that was written down for presumably literary purposes in the late medieval period. But it's got some characters. One of those characters is Mabon, and Mabon's mother is someone called Modron. And linguistically speaking, those are exactly the same names as Maponos, a Gaulish god, and Matrona, a Gaulish goddess. Matrona is the name that comes forward into modern French as Marne, as in the Marne River.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  And Maponos is pretty easily analyzable as well. So Matrona is the word for mother, like a Latin mater, with this augmentative suffix often used for god. So Matrona, I like to translate her as big mama, but great mother is more normal. Or Epona, which is the divine mare, as in horse. And then Maponos is just the masculine form of that, and that's the divine son. So this is someone whose name is literally the divine son, son of the divine mother, involved in these supernatural adventures. It's really hard to look at that and say there's no relationship to pre-Christian mythology.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  But then you have the problem of we are a thousand years into Christianity at this point. So there's no way it has anything to do with pre-Christian mythology. And so that's where the problem is, is there's clearly something there, but it doesn't make any sense that there would be something there. So we're trying to figure it out by just taking all the evidence that we have, putting it together, and trying to make it make sense. So because the Gaulish evidence is among the earliest, any words we can find, any texts, there is one of those sort of longer texts we have. And I would say which one, but I can't remember, Chamalier, maybe? Or one of the other ones.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  But it's got a phrase in it, and...

• 28:27Speaker 04

  It uses the word, I think it's bana something brichtum. And that's translated as the spells of women. And in fact, we find a similar phrase in Irish, where we've got women's spells with cognate words. And so that's possibly a coincidence, because why wouldn't women be doing spells? Somebody's got to do them. Uh, but also possibly a direct connection. So whenever we see something that's a little bit more complicated than mere coincidence, it gets investigated. So we can see that some of the magical practices found in Gaul are documented in these texts.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  We can see lots of god names, divine names, some of which have later reflections in medieval literature. The medieval literature is set in the past, and so it portrays the world of a warrior aristocracy, which is clearly not documenting the exact reality of sort of medieval society. Medieval Ireland and such aren't really feudal, but they're sort of somewhere between the warrior aristocracy and feudal society, if that makes sense. So, um, it was, uh, in the 1950s or 60s, Kenneth Jackson called the medieval material a window onto the Iron Age. And now we think, okay, actually, it's a, a really dirty window with a couple of panes missing and some boards over it.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  But nevertheless, it seems that you can look at the different Celtic cultures and find some commonality. So that's one way we look into the past. Obviously, the inscriptions, trying to just collect all these words and see what we can see, see what we can say about them. We do that. Archaeology is, is really great. And it, between looking at the words and the images and later stories, we're hoping to see something about the culture. And, you know, surprise, doesn't seem actually super different from Greece or Rome.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  You know, i- if you look at what Greece is like and what Rome is like, they've got some commonalities, a polytheistic system, there's dedicated priests, they have rituals, they do things, and there's some differences, what the rituals are for, who does them, how many gods there are, which ones are central. And more or less, the Gaulish stuff fits right in with that, as far as we could tell, which you would expect.

• 30:53Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm. Well, I was gonna say that, you know, e- everything you just described sounds like, you know, Homer as a window into the Bronze Age, like it is and it isn't, you know?

• 31:05Speaker 04

  And I think that's the, the source of the idea.

• 31:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, and just to see it like repeated, you know, in a different way elsewhere. I, I mean, it just reminds me of, you know, all the ways that these ancient cultures are connected, or not necessarily connected, but like, you know, share these similarities, particularly in things like folklore and mythology and just, I love the idea of the way humans seem to all come up with the same story, no matter what, you know, in, in different ways that we all seem to make it.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. And I think also- And of course, there's a, a flip side to that, it's just problematic, I'm sorry to talk over you, we gotta-

• 31:39Liv Albert?

  Go for it.

• 31:41Speaker 04

  Which is to say that a lot of the people doing the studying are studying the Celtic cultures from the perspective of England or France, and so they're seeing them as peripheral and especially anchored in the past, and especially magical, and especially all of these other standard colonialist tropes. And so in, in some ways, the 20th century was looking at the Gauls, but continuing to other them. Like, a lot of the early information is, we're seeing them through a particular lens, which is influenced by the way we kind of want to see them as inherently peripheral peoples. And what's starting to happen now, very, very slowly, is to say, well, wait a minute,

• 32:23Speaker 04

  what if they weren't peripheral? What if we thought that they were just them? And i- it's surprising how recent that perspective really is.

• 32:46Liv Albert?

  This episode is brought to you by Quince. You know the drill. Quince makes elevated, everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and premium stretch denim. I have been speaking into a microphone about Quince for a while now, and I have no complaints. I have a bunch of their stuff. I've got a couple cute sweaters that, I mean, it's nearing sweater season, so those will be back in the rotation anytime now. And I have this leather bag that I absolutely love. It's like this braided leather, and I use it like basically every day. Because that's the thing, they have really great basics. Like, they have

• 33:30Liv Albert?

  really great things that you can wear with so many other things. Just the options are endless. And as the weather gets colder, like all the sweaters in my closet, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe. From warm, responsibly sourced down jackets, and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves, to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry that adds the perfect finishing touch. And of course, everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And if we haven't learned anything in the last 10 years, isn't it just getting rid of the middlemen, you know? Making things more affordable.

• 34:12Liv Albert?

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• 34:38Speaker 05

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Yep, that was basically what I was gonna get at, and you said much more eloquently. It's sort of like if they're all at the same, sort of same levels, doing the same things, looking quite the same. What makes Greece better? What makes Rome better or bigger? You know, is it just because we have more written information from them? Is it just because we have more, obviously, Roman or Greek artifacts? Is it just that? Because what really then is the difference between the Greeks and the Romans and the Gauls? Or the, well, the Persians also have lots, so not them. But like, or the Thracians, or any other of these quote unquote periphery peoples? What is the difference? Yeah.

• 36:12Liv Albert?

  I mean, I don't know. We're all people. Sometimes questions like that, like just get at my, that part of my brain that's like, I don't understand. But that's, you know, I think that's potentially autism. We'll see. But either way, it's like this question of just, yeah. What, I mean, why, why? They're not peripheral. They're only peripheral to the Romans. Or, you know, I just think that question, that. Notion is so inherently like nonsensical that I have trouble, even though I know that it is a thing.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's when we go to the ancient world, you know, we get on our little bus taking us to the ancient world. The first stop is Rome and the second stop is Athens. And so from our perspective, everything else is peripheral because that's where we start. And I think it is because of the writing. I don't think it is as much because of the artifacts. I mean, it is true that you can wander around Roman Europe and Roman North Africa and Roman Levantine coast, I suppose, Asia. And see these big artifacts everywhere. And so that does kind of give you that larger presence, this monumental nature, but there's stone circles and there's all sorts of other monumental bits everywhere.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  But it is the narrative and the fact that we keep coming back to the narrative and build a whole culture around this narrative. That makes them so central for us and it's really hard to get out of that.

• 37:35Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  You know, like I, I still, I'm fascinated by the Gauls, but sometimes you just want to spend a little bit of time in the world that isn't quite so incomplete.

• 37:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, you know, I, what I love about my job is that I get to bounce around to whatever topic I like. Or have other people come and explain these things to me where I'm like, I know only how to research ancient Greece and beyond that. I'd like others to come to me, but you know, I can't imagine, I mean, it annoys me enough that we have like any missing plays. But objectively speaking, we have so much from the Greek world compared to elsewhere that it's like, yeah, I feel like I, no complaints here. I guess is what I'm saying, but it's, it's, I mean, obviously I'm glad that we have so much Greek, but it's, it is just something. I, I just, I now I'm just going to say it again, but I just wish we had more of elsewhere. I just want to know all of the things.

• 38:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah. It's not. Yeah. And I would like to hear someone's voice. Yeah. Yeah, or I was just going to say like, I think the literature.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  At least you hear somebody's voice and like there's something about that that is extremely humanizing to us because it's something we can all do and we all, you know, talking of it all, the communication of it all. So it's like, when you have the literature, suddenly it's like, oh, like, this is a person speaking from the past. And if it it it feels more, I don't, I guess there's more of a humanizing aspect to it and but like, the same is true elsewhere. It's just if we don't have that, there's like some sort of missing link, missing bridge.

• 39:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's just the nature of whether we have it or not. But you're so right about the way that, yeah, just literature broadly and reading generally, like, just very much connects you to like a different part, I think, of of like that realization that they were, you know, that people just like us or whatever. But yeah, it's just something, there is something different.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  Like the pot is just a pot until you find a pot that actually has someone's like thumbprint in it. And then suddenly it's like, oh, person, you know?

• 39:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  When we were looking in this class that Michaela took, I had them read a lot of articles about words. And

• 39:44Speaker 04

  I think the the universal reaction was, oh, my God, I cannot spend any more time thinking about the letter B in the ancient world.

• 39:57Liv Albert?

  I want to.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  People would write an article all about how to interpret the case ending on one little word. And, you know, this is what it takes to put this information together. But I think the the reaction from the students as a whole was more or less, look, here's my number. Why don't you call me when this project gets a little further? Because right now, I am not interested. Is that fair?

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think also, I think it's fascinating.

• 40:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  But still, I think it's interesting because it's like, the approach to Celtic studies or the approach to Gauls is such a different approach to the Greco Roman world because of the availability of evidence, right? Like, we are us who are more steeped in in classics, and that's where our grounding is. There are certain things that are more available to us that they were like, oh, that's why we're more comfortable with it. Versus, you know, the Gaulish stuff or the Celtic stuff, it's suddenly like, Oh, a lot of this is language and I don't understand the linguistic words. Then I'm confused and like not, not necessarily, at least from my point like why it's important.

• 41:13Speaker 03

  But I was like, I don't understand this, this fancy linguistics word and I'm going to Google it and, and think about it. And also go, I still don't understand, but it's like, for me, I think that was so like, um, caught me off guard in a way that was also kind of refreshing. And that it was like, oh, this is, it really emphasized, um, what is needed to approach. Different sort of peoples, you know, like the, this is the evidence we have. So you can't approach it from a classics standpoint, or like, you know, from just, uh, purely literature or, um, archaeological standpoint. Because that's just not there in the same way, but the working backward from, yeah, is this making sense?

• 41:59Speaker 04

  It is, because this is. This is the problem is with, we've got to work with what we've got and it isn't as humanizing and it isn't as fun. So when Caesar provides a lovely narratives about Gauls building a giant wicker man, stuffing it with human beings and setting it on fire. That's a narrative and that's great and that's something to work with. And if that's the only story you've got about the Gauls, then well, wouldn't it be fun to take that? And if you've got somebody else telling a story about cutting mistletoe with a golden sickle in the middle of the night at the dark of the moon for a ritual. That's great. And like when we were talking about these things in, in the class.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  I think the first reaction was a golden sickle. You can't cut anything with a golden sickle. But people really do just accept that.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  But, but you know, you've got these great stories and okay, I think we secretly know that these are exaggerated. For purposes of othering the other, but they're still great stories. And so we, we kind of want not to think too hard about them because we don't want to discard these stories.

• 43:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's not to, I don't even know, but I I've been working on a children's retelling of the Odyssey for the last like six months. So that's kind of all that lives in my brain. And it just makes me think of, there's like so many moments in the Odyssey that like, if you really think about it, there are like some wild stories about othering non-Greeks around the Mediterranean. But simultaneously are these like incredible stories that you don't want to lose and and it's, yeah, I mean, it the Odyssey is a little different because it's like entirely mythical versus Caesar being like, this happened in this exact place. But it's just, all I live in is Greek myths, so it makes me think of it, but it's still like.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  Well, it's a, it's a problem I've I've been trying to find for when I teach Greek and Roman mythology, I've been trying to find a novel for people to read. And there's a lot of really, really popular novels that are really, really well written, that are set in those worlds and every single damn one of them historicizes things. And so it's kind of, what if these myths were about real people doing real things in the real world? And I keep reading these things and going, well, what if they were about mythical people doing mythical things in a mythical world? Wouldn't that make a better story? And and it seems like we really, really, really want the past to be rationalized.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  And it's like, have you met people, they're not rational? That's that's not how we do things. So, you know, going back to the Gaulish human sacrifice, I the conclusion I came to after reading Caesar, reading various other sources comparing is, I don't know whether they did or didn't make a giant wicker being and set it on fire, but I absolutely know that people like to set things on fire, so I'm willing to believe that.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  I don't know whether they sacrificed human beings or not. I know why the Romans wanted them to, because then that's a way of saying we're Romans, we're better than that. But on the other hand, there is some archaeological evidence. I am inclined to believe that maybe they did sacrifice people, at least sometimes. But did they sacrifice people by burning them alive in giant wicker structures? I don't think so. I think they probably sacrificed them some other normal religious way and they probably, you know, set shit on fire because that's fun. And that was probably also religious, at least at times, because it certainly is an important ritual, seasonal ritual in later customs.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  But if I were Caesar, I think I would also find it really tempting to take those two things and put them together to suit my single purpose, rather than provide an ethnography that nobody is really interested in reading anyway in ancient Rome.

• 46:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I didn't know that that came from Caesar. Like, I I know of it as like a vague concept of a story, but um I'm just really glad to know about this wicker man filled with human sacrifices. It feels like a very Roman thing to write.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he's he's he's got a few other places where people get burned alive. He he seems to come back to that over and over again. And and again, like I said, that's that's clearly about the Roman need to make sure that you know that they don't ever sacrifice human beings, though they may occasionally kill them in ritual-esque ways for totally legal reasons in a religious context, but that's not the thing. Um, so, okay, fine. I'm not I'm not gonna argue with the Romans on that. You say it's not a human sacrifice. It's not a human sacrifice, whatever.

• 47:05Liv Albert?

  Everyone can just go and think about the episode we did recently on uh the Vestal Virgins. It took me a second. I almost didn't get that term. The Vestal Virgins. Definitely not human sacrifice.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  No, no, burying burying women in pits after they supposedly.

• 47:24Liv Albert?

  Michaela.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course. I'm sorry. That's not sacrifice.

• 47:26Liv Albert?

  For the gods.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  That's just uh the giving her a new holiday home. I don't know.

• 47:33Liv Albert?

  Um, well, sorry.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  No, you go ahead.

• 47:37Liv Albert?

  I'm just, I'm, I'm like, I'm not, sorry, that was just a complete brain blip. We're gonna pull it back to me phrasing things correctly. Um, I, I guess I don't really know, I don't know what quite to ask, but I would love to know more is basically what I'm trying to get at. But I'm curious, like linguistically, I'm fascinated by this stuff. I, I, I don't know what I'm asking, but now I just, I think I just want like, do you have fun linguistic things to share? Like, it just feels like there's gotta be a really nerdy, like, really, I don't know, I like crazy nerdy stuff.

• 48:15Liv Albert?

  So I just, any, like, I, as soon as I learn a new Greek word, my brain is like connecting it with all of these, you know, connections between English and whatever other languages I may or may not have a tiny bit of knowledge in. So I'm really just, I guess, just nerdily keen. Um, but is there connections between, you know, can we see, I guess, the, the connectivity between these languages? Like, I don't, I don't, maybe I would need to ask a better question.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  Okay, so, starting from, from the get go. So, the Celtic languages, Gaulish is a Celtic language, and I, I'm sure you know this, but I'm gonna say it anyway. So Celtic is the overarching thing. We, we tend to kind of have an over association of Celtic and Irish. Um, Celtic actually is, got a couple of branches in it. So there's continental Celtic, which is Gaulish, but also a few other languages like Celtic Iberian and Lapontic and fun things like that. And then there's insular Celtic, which includes Irish and friends and Welsh and friends. So the Irish half is Goidelec, so that's Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx. And then the Welsh half is Brethonic, which is Welsh, Cornish and Breton.

• 49:26Speaker 04

  And if you take it back to the earliest bits of the insular stuff we have, which are the few words that Tacitus and Caesar and other people document, that's clearly still very close to what Gaulish is. But all of that Celtic branch, its closest relative is actually the italic branch. So that Gaulish is closer to Latin than Greek would be, or Proto Germanic, or Armine, or anything else. So they're kind of close cousins in the Indo European family.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  And

• 49:58Liv Albert?

  I didn't know any of this, so thank you. No, no assuming knowledge.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  In some ways, it's pretty easy to borrow word from Gaulish into Latin, because they're going to have such a similar structure. So the word druid, for example, we think we know what it means. We think it's a compound. We think the first element is dru, which is probably a word for just hard thing cognate with Latin durus, as in, you know, endure or durable.

• 50:29Speaker 04

  And that word is what comes, the cognate in Germanic comes to be dor in English. And then in the Celtic languages, it develops a more specific association of oak. So the Welsh word for oak trees is deru. Daige in Irish is in dairy, the place name, and dairy girls. And various other things. So that's the drew part is probably something like tree, but possibly specifically oak tree. And then the wid is, it's like English wit. It means know or knowledge or some sort of thing with a no root. So tree knower. Again, if we go fast forward over into the medieval Irish stuff,

• 51:10Speaker 04

  we can see that one of the things they were super big into was the role of the poets. Again, think Homer, think Hesiod, absolutely the same sort of thing. Poets really, really important. Important texts are produced poetically, which is to say that they've got a meter. And there's a specific form that if you're well trained and have been doing this your whole career, you can come up with a fake genealogy on the fly. But if you are not a trained poet, it's harder to do. So it's a little bit of kind of control of information, let's say, or a little bit of way of of reserving the power of who controls the information.

• 51:54Speaker 04

  But the medieval Irish seem to use the trees as a mnemonic device. So you've got a list of trees in order. And so you've got your ash story, your beach story, your cedar story, or something like that. Those, by the way, are the tree streets in San Diego, which come in alphabetical order. I can't remember the actual Irish order.

• 52:16Speaker 04

  And we have other things that see stories as branches. So in Wales, you've got the Mappinogion, which has four branches, which seem to be four stories that are loosely, if at all, related, but understood as branches of a single, what, tree, macro story, something. So this, this idea of plant lore as a kind of mnemonic device, palace of memory sort of thing for holding lore, that seems to be a thing. And that's consistent with what we think we know about the Druids. The Druid word itself also survives. So in Irish, we've got the word drí.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  In Old English, we have the word borrowed from Brethonic, which is drí, D R Y. And then in Welsh, the tradition, the word comes to mean the bird, the wren, for some reason, but it is the same word. So we've got this word surviving. In Irish, it stops meaning Druid, whatever Druid means, and starts to mean wizard, particularly bad wizard in the stories going up against Saint Patrick or whoever. But that, whatever Druid is, it seems to be someone who was quite specifically trained as a poet. And there was a long period of learning the stories and learning how to compose and learning poetic meter,

• 53:39Speaker 04

  not dactylic hexameter, but it would have been something equally complex. And if you look at medieval Irish and Welsh poetry, oh, it's so gloriously complex. In Irish, just how you decide what rhymes with what else is just a giant mess. So basically, the B, D and G sounds, if they're palatal, they each rhyme with each other. But palatal B does not rhyme with non-palatal B, only with palatal D. It's just, I have to look at the chart every single time. And so we can assume that Gallic poetry was probably equally complex because you want something that only the poets can do.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  And we can also see that there seems to have been, based on what Caesar said, based on what we see elsewhere, and based on frankly, common sense, that these poets also had an educational role and a priestly role and seemed to be the storehouse of information. So what I would say is almost kind of a lawyerly role as well. And that is a little bit different from the Roman situation, where the courts and the poets seem to have separated sometime long ago. So they don't overlap. So to a Roman, that overlap is weird and perhaps primitive feeling because it probably was like that,

• 55:04Speaker 04

  you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago in Rome, when you didn't have quite such an elaborate court system. Um, we do see again a little bit in Caesar's Gallic Wars, some of the bits that we can believe. People have legalistic conflict with other people because humans. Uh, and I forget where I was going with any of that. I think that was language, but.

• 55:25Liv Albert?

  No, that was great. I just asked for nerdy linguistic thing. So.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, but also, um, sort of like the, the, the cultural information you can glean from that. I'm, I'm kind of thinking, so this is.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  All right. Sorry, illness. Um, okay. So just trust me. This is a little bit of Roundabout, but um, so I just finished reading this series uh, by Robin Hob called The Far Seer Trilogy. It's great. Ruined me. Loved it. Um, and in it, there are bards and it's very to me based on like medieval European um, culture. And in it, one of the biggest cultural things is that bards, um, whatever, if they witness something, whatever it is, it's like that said in stone. So if you like tell a secret around a bard, the, somebody else could call on that bard and be like, did this person say this thing?

• 56:17Speaker 03

  And the bard would be like, yes, like that is, they're, they're like the uh, the confirmers of things. And so um, this is like huge uh, um, importance to the role of a bard in their society. And I'm curious then, because you were just talking about sort of um, the bardic ways and then sort of the poem, poet's ways. Um, and is that, is that something that exists in later, um?

• 56:43Speaker 03

  Celtic culture and like Irish Welsh culture that sort of bards have that sort of like higher status culturally? And is that something that can then be sort of like pulled back from um and and possibly posit it a little bit to as as as sort of having some sort of like historical backing? Or historical precedent precedent throughout there, you know?

• 57:08Speaker 04

  So i- it's interesting because my first uh reaction to that is how can you confuse a druid and a bard? Those are not all the same thing. And so I was thinking about that while you were talking. Because there is a distinction, like a bard is a performer of poetry. And that is a thing and that's a word that we can recon- reconstruct and we can assume that the Gaulish for that would be bardos. And that there would be such a thing, but that wouldn't be the same as a druid because that would be more on the sort of literary and public performance side.

• 57:48Speaker 04

  And not the custodian of the serious poems that matter, that are a bit more central to a society. So, you know, a druid is somebody who knows the poetry and can understand and interpret the poetry, whereas a bard is somebody who can produce the poetry. And again, even today, in uh modern Welsh and Breton, barvas or baras in Breton are the words for poetry. And so like a bard would be sort of more of a poet in Irish, it takes a slightly different direction. But there's, there's different poets roles, there's in Irish tradition, there's the the bard character.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  There's also the filid, who's more of a seer, uh vaticinator, vaticinator, vaticinator poetry. And that we have described in Latin as as vates. So we can see these roles for different people with different kind of, shall we say, word-based supernatural or important texts that are around it. And we can assume that that was the case for the Gauls, but the details, of course, are are just lost.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  Because even looking at like ancient Greek culture, we have like the mantises, the seers, the whatever. And then we even have like the Pythia or female prophetesses that like, and you know, supposedly the Pythia herself is speaking, um, well. She she's gibbering and then the mantis or the her attendants or whatever are interpreting it into hexameter. And it's like, so like there there was a, there was like a.

• 59:32Speaker 03

  Oh, I do no words, I promise. There's a like.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Confirmation that comes from words, does that make sense?

• 59:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I do think that the Greek system is a lot more parallel to what we think. The Gaulish system would have been like than the Roman necessarily.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  And and again, probably only part of that is simply because a lot of the Greek data we have is earlier than a lot of the data we have for Rome.

• 1:00:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that that's what I was thinking, even just. You know, you're describing of a druid versus this bard. It makes me feel like this is not the same, I recognize, but like. It almost feels like Homer compared to every other poet. Just in the way that I think that they are seen now is like Homer is like a bigger. Than like just any other poet, um, but it's interesting to know.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, it it'd be like the poets who knew Homer. And, you know, kind of made a point of knowing Homer would be the Druid Sword and the poets who could perform. Homer for your kid's birthday party would be more the bard sword.

• 1:00:43Liv Albert?

  Right, yeah. And both have value, you know.

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, there there's like a confirmation or a legality to one. There's like. Um, one has more weight in it. If there's more like truth to it or.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  Like variability, veritability, verit. You can, you can, you can.

• 1:01:03Liv Albert?

  Verify what?

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:01:06Liv Albert?

  But no veritable is what you mean.

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like there's like that, like confirmation that's stronger. And it's interesting that comes towards because when you were also talking about um uh the linguistics behind Druid and like the the the etymology behind it. And you were talking about the oak tree. And now I I my my graph of myths, the myths is um not not the best. It's it could be better, but. Wasn't like Odin slash Woden like hung from an oak tree? Was that something like what's what's with the oak tree of it all? Is oak?

• 1:01:36Speaker 04

  Well, I think the the the thing about the oak tree, it's also um Jupiter's tree, right? Zeus's tree.

• 1:01:43Liv Albert?

  Zeus, yeah, the dona.

• 1:01:44Speaker 04

  Be.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Oh, I should know this.

• 1:01:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's as European trees go, it has very hard wood. It grows very big and it tends to survive lightning strikes. So.

• 1:02:00Liv Albert?

  Would be Zeus's tree.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's some things about the oak and also mistletoe doesn't grow in very many trees, but it does grow in oak trees.

• 1:02:10Liv Albert?

  Ah. Interesting.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  That's so.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  So so there's some things about it that are special that people who, you know, live with these things day in, day out would know and perceive and ascribe significance to.

• 1:02:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah. We also love plant myths here, so I'm just enjoying the the connectivity there. Can I ask you like a really, this is this is like something that has been. Make like just bothering me in the back of my head and I don't know if maybe you can answer it. This is really selfish right now. Can you tell me anything about? The way the letter B like as in beta and then as compared to V like. A- as in very, this is bad. What is the, you know how, you know what I'm talking about how B like became V slash vice versa? Cause it's true and kind of Irish also, right? Am I wrong in that? Okay. Can you explain that to me?

• 1:03:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, so what happens is uh B is a a voiced, that's sort of unvoiced, no, just got to get this straight. P is an. Unvoiced stopped, B is a voiced stop. So you use your vocal cords to make it. So the only if she sounds huh and buh is whether you have your vocal cords going. Um, V is also a vocal sound that's articulated in more or less the same place. So basically, whenever you make a consonant sound, you're doing a whole bunch of different things. And if you change any one of them, you get a different letter. But if you want to change, let's say, B to a Q, you have to change three or four things. But B to V is more or less only one change.

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  It technically, there's a sound, there's V and there's V, which are probably sound the same to you. But one has both of your lips and one doesn't. So the bilabial one is sometimes written linguistically with a beta and the the other one is more of a V. So it basically, if a sound change is going to happen to a B, there's only a few directions it can go. One of those is over to P, one of them is over to V. And so that's what happened with Greek is all of those sounds, like the original aspirated consonants P and T become F and Th as it just sort of shifts a little tiny bit.

• 1:04:29Speaker 04

  And then the ancient Greek B, D, G have the same, exactly the same sound change that happens to them in certain circumstances. In Irish where they go to V, the, the.

• 1:04:42Liv Albert?

  That's just, that's just fascinating. Oh, cause like, sorry, this is, I, I have, I have thought about this like a lot. I know. I don't know how much, I mean, I'm usually confident in my listeners wanting all the nerdy stuff, but sometimes I go real deep. This is something I've been thinking about, like probably way too often. Um, because like then, cause Latin stay to be like, we have a B sound, but then in Greek it'll be like a V sound.

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  Lesbians.

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  But when you say Latin stay to be, I'm gonna disagree with you there because of the Spanish.

• 1:05:15Liv Albert?

  Right, okay.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  So it stayed a B for a while.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Speaker 04

  But, you know, if I say, you know, Bato, that's, that's that kind of in between B and V sound. Uh, and so like, I remember talking to a friend of mine who, uh, was saying the word Bessica. Uh, and couldn't remember if it was spelled with a B or a V. And I'm like, well, it's spelled with a V. And they're like, how did you know that? You don't really speak Spanish. Like, yes, because it's the Latin word for bladder is Wesica. So I know that one. There's never a B because it started out as a V. You don't know that because you speak Spanish, but don't do Latin. Um, so it's a secret party trick, but no special knowledge, just what directly come from.

• 1:06:02Liv Albert?

  See, meanwhile, I just tried to talk about it with having no knowledge of like the why or the how. So I'm just always like, well, but you know, in Greek now it's a V, but don't ask me why. I, I just know that it is. And so I've been, but then I, I've learned enough about pronouncing just like Irish names. And I was like, oh my God, Irish is on the same thing. I need to, so thank you. I guess.

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I spent, I spend a lot of time just quizzing myself on Irish names, just so if it ever happens, I can be like, your name's, your name's Eva. I know what your name is.

• 1:06:35Liv Albert?

  Eva's an easy, easy one.

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:06:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  It's slightly more complicated because that, that BH is how it's often spelled. Um, in, in modern Irish, anyway, you can also spell it with a little dot over the top. And you can also just be medieval Irish and not spell it any differently at all and hope your reader knows. Uh, but sometimes it goes to W instead. So you've got Siobhan, but you could have Siobhan. And it just depends a little bit on dialect sometimes. And then the, uh, it also depends in a lot of languages, including Irish, whether it's, uh, what Irish people call slender between I and E. Or broad, whether it's between those kind of back vowels, A O U. So all sorts of fun things affect it. But I think in Greek, it just goes to V regardless.

• 1:07:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I think there's no, yeah, they, they make a, a B sound in modern Greek by putting an M and a P together, which I also love.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Liv Albert?

  Because it's like pronouncing it.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, yeah, it just, it makes me think of pronouncing it with as if I have a cold and then it works. Anyway, yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 05

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• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  We talked to, or we mentioned this earlier, but like the place names of it all. I think it's interesting from like a standpoint because like that's, we can see where the gulls were so easily with names of places and how that has stayed. And then you're also talking about, I think, kind of like on this as well, Virgil and his name.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  The the the gaulicness of the gaulishness of it. Um, so I just, I just thought that maybe we could talk a little bit about place names because that's kind of fun as well. It's because my, my favorite is always like Paris. Because I didn't know, like I, I knew in my heart that Paris, the city etymologically, etymologically cannot be same as Paris. The, the wussy prince of Troy, you know, but I didn't know why.

• 1:10:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, because it would be perfectly reasonable to expect that at some point in the medieval period, the Parisians went, you know what? We're actually Trojans like everybody else. But it turns out it's, it's a Gaulish tribal name, the Parisi, a tribe that was also up in Yorkshire in Britain. Which is one of our questions of like, were they Gauls, were they not? Well, they had the same name as a Gaulish tribe, possibly. Um, but yeah, there's so many place names that are Gaulish etymologically and we often know exactly what they mean. And it's just fascinating to me that we have so much of our geography and we go, oh, that's just a word. So like Milan in Italy is medio lanum.

• 1:10:46Speaker 04

  Medio means exactly what you expect it would mean if you were a Latin speaker in the middle of. And lanum, uh, one of the Celtic things is they basically forgot to say P. So lanum is planum, as in plain. So medio lanum is the city in the middle of the plain. It like, it couldn't be more obvious. And it's just clear Gaulish. So any Gaul wandering around medio lanum would have known exactly why this was called what it was called. But then it becomes Milan or Milano and it's like, I don't know, it's just a word. And so like every major city in what was one time Gauls. So for Vienna, we know, I think it was window bona, which is like the, the fair settlement or the white city or something like that.

• 1:11:31Speaker 04

  I don't quote me on that because I might be wrong on the details. Um, uh, Lyon in France was lugudunum, the fortress of the goddess Lugos. Uh, again, who's a god who survives into medieval Irish literature as Luh and in medieval Welsh literature as Chel. So. We've got not only a Gaulish god, but we find that he's got at least literary reflexes in the medieval Celtic world as well. And it was attested in Celtic appearing, so quite an important god that was, you know, acknowledged, shall we say, over thousands of square kilometers of Western Europe. And it just kind of gets forgotten.

• 1:12:15Speaker 04

  So there's so many place names. One of the things that came up when we were doing this class, it's on my mind because we did it recently, is people kept going, well, what, like, okay, you've told me that this place name is Gaulish and what it means, so what? Like, why should I care about that? What now? And it's like, well, one of the things is what Michaela said, is you can kind of map where these are and get a pretty good of approximation of where the Gauls were. But also, we see the Romans using these names. They're not renaming places most of the time. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they'll say, you know what? I like the name it's got, but Augusta would be better.

• 1:12:58Speaker 04

  Which they do with Lyon and which they do with London. In neither case does it stick, but in a few other places it did. And we get so many other places, like Noe Omago's new plane shows up all over Europe. And you think it's like Oneapolis, new town. It's not very creative, but enduring. And I say, a lot of these survive now. So Carmarthen in Wales is Caer, which is from Latin castrum, fortress. But the Marden part is from mori dunum, which means sea fortress. So it's Fort Sea Fort. And that incidentally is where we get the name of Merlin, as in King Arthur's wizard guy from, is a place name. So, you know, like, there's a lot.

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  Uh, these words survive for thousands and thousands of years and they outlast the culture, which I, I think is really fascinating. And a lot of the place names are tribal names as well. So like the Pictones, the painted people or attractive people or something uh becomes Poitou in France, which is just kind of like a little region. And, you know, Armorica, which is an old Dutch name for Brittany, that's Armorica. So the territory that is facing the sea or on the sea. So it's, again, it's a really boring name, but it persists and endures long after the people themselves are gone. And I, I just find it fascinating, particularly with how incurious we are as, as to so many of our own

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  proper names and words. So like most people I know, unless their last name is Brown or something like, I don't know what it means. I kind of know where it's from, but not really. And I say, but it's your name. How could you not know? But people don't and they, they don't really seem to care much.

• 1:14:50Liv Albert?

  I never thought about my last name. And now I'm annoyed that I haven't.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  I, I think I have because you, your last name is my papa's first name. Um, but I don't remember, which is not helpful and I'm sorry.

• 1:15:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Albert's just, it's just such a name, but like I do, I'm very, uh, from a very young age, I held it in tight in my heart that my first name legally is Alexandra, which is pretty Greek. And then also my middle name is Oliver, which just means olive in a bunch of languages. So I feel, yes, very proud of those ones. But that's, yeah, I, I, I'm very interested in words like I, to an annoying degree, Michaela and I joke about this all the time because I, I know less Greek than her by a lot. But I am, but I am way better at figuring out a random word just based on like varied context clues.

• 1:15:46Liv Albert?

  Cause I just have a brain for it. But I, yeah, I mean, this is something like I'm constantly like looking them up when I find them. And, and I'm actually going to the UK next month. Um, and so now I might be like even nerdier. But I, I mean, I absolutely love this stuff. It just, I need like a reason to look it up. But it's so interesting, like.

• 1:16:07Liv Albert?

  That's such an enormous swath of land, I guess, is the thing I can't get over. Like, it's just so much bigger than Greece. It's such a fascinating thing to think about the ways that the the history we have held on to and why and all of that, because that's just that's like such a huge amount of Europe for them to have taken up and we have all these place names, but we just don't have, you know, writing and oh, it's it's fascinating.

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  But and when we do have writing, because Caesar says, of course, the Gauls didn't write anything down. And now we say, well, I've got a few hundred inscriptions that say otherwise.

• 1:16:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:40Speaker 04

  Um, but it may be that they tended not to write down, let's say, poetry. Um, we don't know, maybe they did, maybe they didn't, or maybe they just did where Caesar never saw it. But the earliest Gaulish inscriptions we have are written in the Greek alphabet. Because

• 1:16:57Liv Albert?

  Really?

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  that seems to be where they got the concept of writing from. And that's not shocking, like Etruscan started writing the Greek alphabet too.

• 1:17:04Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  But you think, OK, well, we know Greeks had that colony in Massilia, which is basically Gaul.

• 1:17:10Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:17:10Speaker 04

  So there was a Greek Gaulish interface from fairly early on. And then after a while, they stop using the Gaulish alphabet to write, uh, or sorry, to stop using the Greek alphabet to write Gaulish, and they start using the Latin alphabet to write Gaulish. Again, presumably because that's just what they're in contact with. And they do customize it a little bit. There's a letter called the Tau Gallicum or the Gaulish T, uh, which is something like st or t or s or something like that. Um, and they they apparently they didn't feel like any of the Greek or Gaulish, or say, too many languages here, any of the Greek or Latin letters would actually do the job. So they just kind of do a D with a crossbar or something and say, you know what, close enough.

• 1:17:54Speaker 04

  Um, so i- it's not just a mindless borrowing, but deliberate borrowing and then a reborrowing. And they have the system and they use it. And then again, it just, when they stop having a language to write, they stop writing it. So, OK, fair enough. Um, but why would they switch from one to another? I mean, it's not like Romans wouldn't have recognized the Greek alphabet and gone, oh, OK, this is the thing. They would have known what to do with that. So there must have been some impetus for that change, and that change must involve a relationship with Rome. But it's earlier than the Caesar's conquest. So that doesn't seem to have been it. It just seems to be that these were two spheres.

• 1:18:35Speaker 04

  That were influencing each other because of proximity anyway. Which can also be a motive for Caesar to conquer, like, well, you know, the neighbors are people whose, you know, land I know, and I might as well just take this over because it's right here. It's much easier than going overseas. But it also presupposes a deeper historical relationship that we never really think much about. We sort of imagine it just uh uh on first approach to the material. It's like, oh, Caesar decided to conquer Gaul and then things happened. But what, no, actually, why was Caesar even aware of Gaul? How was he aware of it? What did he know about it?

• 1:19:15Speaker 04

  And these are questions that people just tend not to think much about because we're not interested until he starts moving.

• 1:19:24Liv Albert?

  That, yeah, yeah. Now I'm just, I'm sorry. Now you've led me to other nerdy questions. So have, I think I've just learned the answer to this then, but like so old Irish, as you're saying, and like middle Welsh or whatever, I mean, wha- whatever varied forms of Irish and Welsh, have they always give or take, you know, centuries, have they always used the Latin alphabet?

• 1:19:48Speaker 04

  No, uh, for Welsh, as far as we can tell, the answer is yes.

• 1:19:53Liv Albert?

  Really? Because that's the one I was most curious about.

• 1:19:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, well, Romans brought, seem to have brought writing to the island of Britain. Now, Irish is a little more complicated because one of the Irish, one of the reasons Irish is spelled as stupidly as it is, is that the Irish learned to write from the Welsh who learned to write from the Romans. But in between, there had been some sound changes. So the letter values had shifted quite a lot in Welsh. So what had happened was, uh, I, the example I was used, there's a Welsh word for all, which is pob, P O B. But in Brittonic, it would have been something like pulpos or whatever.

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  So that second P changed in sound, but they'd already been writing it by that point. So by the time you get early medieval Welsh, if you want to write pob, you write it P O P and the P just makes a different sound, whether it's at the beginning or the end. But if you have something starting with a B, like let's say bob, you would just start that with a B, why not? So there's two different ways to pronounce P and there's two different ways to write B, one of which is a P. So that mess is what the Irish came across and they're like, oh, cool. Okay. So this sound means one thing at the beginning and a quite different thing in the middle, which you could also do a different way if that were at the beginning.

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  And that's their default normal. So that's where they're starting from in Irish. And then more sound changes happen. So i- it's all quite sensible and organic if you don't think about it too hard. So, so they've always had that kind of writing system. And then after a while, when someone realizes, hey, you know what, this part is ridiculous. They invent things like, let's put a dot over B when it means V and not put a dot over it when it doesn't. And then at least that's a little clearer. But the Irish also had something called ogham writing, O G H A F or O G A M if you're going to use the old Irish spelling.

• 1:22:03Speaker 04

  And that appears to be specifically designed for carving on things because it's basically all straight lines. So if you want to carve things on rocks, curved letters are annoying. So they developed a kind of coded script where each letter is just a stick and a line through it. And they could carve that on kind of the edges of these stile and pillar stones and things. And you could have a message which makes sense if you read it in the correct direction and no sense if you read it in the other direction, uh, which is always great fun trying to interpret this. But the earliest writing we have is that for Irish because of these stone carvings.

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  But we don't know whether they got this idea from Norse runes, which of course are still an adaptation of the Roman alphabet for similar purposes, whether it's independent invention or whether it's some older system that they'd come up with on their own that separates, no idea.

• 1:23:03Liv Albert?

  Hmm. I'm learning a lot about the things connected to Rome in this conversation, far beyond the Gaul.

• 1:23:10Speaker 04

  Connected to Rome, sorry about that.

• 1:23:12Liv Albert?

  No, no, not at all. I'm just like, I'm sorry. Horse runes are connected to Latin?

• 1:23:19Liv Albert?

  Did not know that.

• 1:23:22Liv Albert?

  But I do like to stain.

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say like, the Rome, the Romans never got to Ireland. If I remember correctly, wasn't it something like they kind of like saw it from the distance and they were like, a bunch of cannibals who eat their fathers live there or something? Or where does that come from?

• 1:23:40Speaker 04

  So that sort of state of the art knowledge as of thirty years ago.

• 1:23:46Speaker 04

  Now, we've discovered enough Roman artifacts in Ireland. That it's pretty clear that they were either there or trading heavily with it.

• 1:23:57Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:23:58Speaker 04

  But didn't seem to settle it and certainly didn't conquer it. But then, like, when you think about Roman Britain, everyone just kind of paints the map Roman up to a certain point in southern Scotland where they say, okay, nowhere beyond this. But what I don't think is always queried is, when you say Rome conquered, what did you mean? Because does that mean that you actually had some sort of nominal notional control over every single remote village? Or does it mean that you controlled major trade networks through the place? Like, what, what does it actually mean to have Roman Britain or Roman Gaul?

• 1:24:40Speaker 04

  Because again, thinking about people and how people are. I, I just don't see the Romans as being able to control or wanting to control quite that much. That's not what they were interested in. They were interested in, shall we say, resource extraction. And so they're going to be able to establish their cities, their road networks, they're going to invest in an infrastructure. And that gives them. Um, a certain status that people are going to be inclined towards because who doesn't like roads and toilets and things? So I, you know, when people say they conquered, I think we're sort of thinking about it again on this colonial model.

• 1:25:23Speaker 04

  If you come in, you establish a government and then you're taking over. But I, I think it's sort of a combination of that, and if you build it, they will come. And then to me, that makes me think, well, this process can't have been as instantaneous as the maps make it seem. So what did it look like as people were learning to live with Romans on their island, learn to live with Romans in the neighborhood? And how does their own identity shift to meet that? Because, you know, I always go back to, you know, straight up modern identity. So I'm half Canadian, half American. My mother is Canadian, my father's American. And so I never know what I am. Am I Canadian? Am I American? Am I both? Am I neither?

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  What? So I didn't grow up in Canada, so I didn't watch the same television programs that Canadian kids grew up watching. So that's a big element of Canadian-ness that I'm missing. But on the other hand, um, growing up as the child of a Canadian in America, there were a lot of just cultural things where they, they didn't fit there, but they do here. So betwixt and between, and that, that's everybody to a degree. And you think, well, okay, that's the modern world. Why do we assume ancient people were any different? There's no such thing as a pure Gaul or a pure Roman. So when I'm thinking about Gauls, as soon as we see them,

• 1:26:47Speaker 04

  they're interacting with perhaps the Greeks in Messylia or someplace close by, perhaps the Romans somewhere in Italy. Certainly we can see evidence of far-flung trade networks. So to what degree is Gaulish culture?

• 1:27:03Speaker 04

  Roman influenced, Romanized, and how does that change over time? And again, there's no great answers to these questions, but it comes down to the same question we have about every culture. What does it mean to be Gaulish and what does it mean to be Roman? And again, bringing up the contemporary politics example, sorry to go there, but Canadian and American-ness.

• 1:27:26Speaker 04

  What it means to be American has dramatically changed since I lived there. And so the kind of American that I am half is a world that no longer exists. The past is a foreign country and all of that. And a lot of what American values seem to be at the moment are things that I don't recognize. Meanwhile, I have lived in Canada for quite a while, so things that have been happening here, these are changes that I'm familiar with and on board with. And that would have been the same in the ancient world, right? When Rome comes in, when Caesar invades Gaul and establishes something, from that point on, people are Roman to a degree, whether they're a Roman citizen or not, and they're

• 1:28:09Speaker 04

  Gaulish to a degree, and that's going to change and what they mean are going to change. And these are really complicated questions that I think people are now asking about the ancient world, but for a long time, they really just had quite a simple model and didn't ask the complexities, which are very hard to say. So like now, you go to France and one of the things you see that's different about French culture versus North America is the way they relate to food, the way they relate to work, the way they relate to leisure. And, you know, I feel like the way Romans relate to work is in large part through status

• 1:28:51Speaker 04

  and who are you able to control to actually get to do the work that is unpleasant, that you don't want to do?

• 1:28:59Speaker 04

  Did the Gauls have the same sort of thing? They probably had enslaved people, there's no reason to think that they didn't, but did they see them the same way? Was it a distinct legally separate category? Was it something, you know, where did these people come from? Were they conquered from neighboring tribes, in which case they would have been culturally similar? And these are just questions that I really want to know the answers to and can't get the answers to, but I want them anyway.

• 1:29:27Liv Albert?

  I find this very relatable, very relatable. Yeah, I think, I think that for the longest time, there has been this, this idea, I think, that the ancient, the people of the ancient world are like cardboard cutouts of people, you know, that they're not like, they weren't fully formed in the same way that we are. And I think like, those are the questions, right? Like, these questions are just regular things, like these very mundane questions. That's also, I would love to know the answers to all of it, because that's so much more interesting to me than, like, what did Caesar say he did or didn't do? Like, that's interesting, too. But like, you know, we, we had this idea for so long that the texts that survive are somehow like, the only way to see

• 1:30:09Liv Albert?

  the ancient world. And then you just finally step back and think like, oh, my God, but all of the stuff that didn't survive, like, we can think about that, too, or at least, like, conceptually imagine. And, you know, I, all to say, yes, I would also like to know everything about ancient peoples that we don't know.

• 1:30:27Speaker 04

  So, one of the things I've been trying to struggle with in my own work at the moment is this idea of cultural change versus cultural continuity and tradition, because all cultures change all the time. It's, it's a thing. But at the same time, my somewhat unscientific experience suggests that values are expressed very, very redundantly in a culture. There's a lot of different ways that what's important to you comes out. So, any single thing that goes, there's still a lot of redundancy in the system to keep that value moving forward. And even big things can change,

• 1:31:09Speaker 04

  but they, they change more slowly. And, you know, the larger and more well-established the culture is, the more likely you have these things to go forward. So, when I read about the ancient Romans, and I look at contemporary Italians, let's say, I feel like there's an awful lot of differences, but there are some things, notably, the way people relate to other humans in their community, that seem really, really similar. It seems like this idea of this constant awareness of

• 1:31:42Speaker 04

  Relationship status and the constant maintenance of that is recognizable in ancient Rome and modern Italy. I I feel I could be wrong there. And so I then wonder, what if we were to look at contemporary France, contemporary Switzerland, contemporary Belgium, and see what those cultures have in common? And see what those big values are and see if any of them are Gaulish, because we know there was a long period of Romanization. And we also know that the Germanic tribes, the Franks and others, came in and made their contributions. So again, there's there's no purity to be had or sought. And you know,

• 1:32:26Speaker 04

  why would there be? But there might nevertheless be something that we can still see that would point us towards what some of the ancient values might have been. If it's something that's enduring enough that we can see it in medieval France and we can see it in modern France, we might be able to say, hey, this probably didn't arise from nowhere. That might have been there in ancient Gaul as well, particularly if we can't assign another origin to it. And

• 1:32:54Speaker 04

  nobody is doing this work because it's so big and vague and annoying and require data sets that nobody has. But I still think it's an interesting concept.

• 1:33:07Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it well, it sounds like there's so much possibility there, like just on based on what little you've been able to tell me today. Like, I mean, I I said that I mean that in a way that whatever I've been able to get out of you. Um, because I don't feel like my brain is working correctly. I just realized I phrased that poorly. In any case, yeah, I I it's fascinating. I hope more people work on that because it's generally yeah, seems really, I'm just, I'm so excited to know of these groups that like existed beyond the Romans and learning more about them.

• 1:33:41Speaker 04

  I just feel like there's so many directions we could be inquiring, like, you know, cows. Cows are clearly important everywhere. In the modern world, we have lots of different breeds and rare breeds and traditional breeds. And some of those are purely geographical, you know, this works better where it's cold. This works better where it's not. But I also feel like a lot of the other choices we make, and I, I, I want a cow that will produce really creamy cheese or what have you. That, you know, that matters and that comes from someplace. And again, it's too agricultural and perhaps low status for your traditional academic to pay much attention to.

• 1:34:21Speaker 04

  But at the same time, the ancient world was not nearly as divorced from farm life as the 19th century academic world. And, and so like I say, like, all I can do when we're talking about the Gauls is come up with questions and try to think about something in a slightly different way because the texts we have have kind of been mined out.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, especially when it comes to sort of like, I guess, yeah, just bouncing off that like food culture or socializing culture and how that, that differs. Cause like sometimes when I'm in Greece, I'm like, yeah, yeah, some things don't change.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  But.

• 1:35:07Speaker 04

  But again, like the relationship of women's place in the culture, women seem to have had relatively more personhood in ancient Gaul and in the medieval Celtic countries than they did in ancient Rome. And.

• 1:35:24Speaker 03

  Good for Gaul.

• 1:35:24Speaker 04

  You know. Oh, well, until a few years ago, I think the modern world would have said, what? Women's rights can't be rolled back? That's not a thing. We always move forward. But I suspect that that is one of the things that happened in the Roman conquest of Gaul is that women's rights were rolled back. And again, what might that have looked like? What can we see in the texts and in descriptions? And, you know, what would we even look for? And it's really surprising, again, how little scholarship is really looking for that.

• 1:35:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:59Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:36:01Liv Albert?

  Well, I mean, there's, there's an awful lot about women's history that I think we're not looking at.

• 1:36:06Speaker 03

  Truly.

• 1:36:07Liv Albert?

  You know, we've got to start somewhere.

• 1:36:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think it also speaks to the sort of like the difficulty when it comes to studying uh these periphery cultures because of um what evidence is available to us and sort of

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  uh like one of the things we know I noticed was like the lack of funding for a lot of these things, especially at institutions that are not geographically in the region, right? Like, it was hard to find information on things in English, for example, um and

• 1:36:40Speaker 04

  Yes, well, let me tell you my sob story of being a Celticist is trying to find a job.

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:36:45Liv Albert?

  Fair.

• 1:36:45Speaker 04

  My, my fields of specialty Celtic Studies and Folklore, zero jobs in those fields in Western Canada. Maybe two or three jobs in Eastern Canada have come available over the last twenty years. And these are just not fields that people are willing to fund. When I talk to students, like, would you be interested in a course on Celtic mythology? Would you be interested in the course on folklore? Oh, my God, yes. They would be fascinated by this stuff, knowing that there is a scholarly approach to these fields, knowing that there's information out there to be had. People want that, but those people are students. Um administrators think,

• 1:37:30Speaker 04

  but how would we fund this? This is not going to make us money. We already have too many humanities departments. We don't need more. So, you know, like, what, what kind of world would we live in if people studied the humanities? So it's very, very difficult for people with this training and expertise to have fun. So the people who uh came up with me studying Celtic Studies, uh one of them is teaching in uh general education courses in the university and tutoring uh students uh in like elementary school years. One of them is teaching in a private high school in New York. One of them is teaching in a private high school in Hawaii.

• 1:38:14Speaker 04

  Um several of them have just fallen off the radar altogether. People get years and years of training and they don't go out and get jobs because those jobs don't exist and a lot of the ones that did exist have gone away since we decided to stop funding universities in the nineteen nineties.

• 1:38:38Speaker 04

  So, so like, like the job I have is because Latin was among the skills I have, the marketable one. But all the specific disciplinary expertise and training is, yeah, no.

• 1:38:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:53Speaker 04

  And a lot of people much smarter than me have been wasted.

• 1:38:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:00Liv Albert?

  Normally, I feel like I have some positivity to throw in at the end of things like that, but it's, if anyone's noticed, it's been a week. It's only Tuesday.

• 1:39:11Liv Albert?

  So I think, I mean, I think I'm really glad that you mentioned that at the end there because I think that's so important with the humanities. And I just.

• 1:39:20Speaker 04

  And, and, and not to be a janitor, but just to say like,

• 1:39:23Liv Albert?

  No.

• 1:39:23Speaker 04

  There, there is value to this stuff and I think there really is value in looking at these things where we barely know anything. But, you know, it can bring something slightly different to the table and, you know, there isn't room to do everything. There's never room to do everything, but I, I do think we could maybe be expanding things a little bit more. And, and, you know, having some venues to talk about this. We have podcasts, but what else?

• 1:39:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah, no, that's the thing. Like, yeah, and I mean, it is, it is, it is important and we, it is absolutely valuable to be studying this stuff and one day when the AI overlords realize that it's not making them money and nobody actually wants it, then maybe slowly the money will trickle back down to those of us studying humanity and hoping to keep it going, you know, hopefully that'll trickle back down to us. And that's my positive way of, of wrapping things up, but thank you so much. I've learned,

• 1:40:27Liv Albert?

  I've learned so much. I am really nerdy about word stuff and you've indulged me in a lot of it. So thank you. And also just like, oh my God, I'm a, obsessed with the idea that, that there was this much to the goals that I had no idea. So thank you.

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  Well, thank you for having me on for the conversation and, uh, yeah.

• 1:40:47Liv Albert?

  Thank you. It's been a delight, a delight, even if, oop, kicking my microphone out. Also, I don't know if it was clear at all throughout, so I apologize. But if I ever looked distracted, it was because I had two cats trying to fight slash play with each other on either side of a door. I was trying to navigate that for a couple of brief moments while we were chatting. They're delights. Thank you all, no, but thank you so much again for chatting with us. It's been incredibly fun and I promise my brain still works.

• 1:41:19Speaker 04

  Thank you. I make no similar promises.

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  Let's talk about Myths Baby is written and produced by Liv Albert. Michaela Pangarish is the Hermes to all you Olympians, the producer. Tired, it's the middle of the night, you know, we'll keep going. Select music by Luke Chaos. Thank you, Mr. Chaos. The podcast is part of the Memory Collective Podcast Network, a collection of creators that all strive to bring you accurate and reliable information on the ancient world. These include the wonderful friends at Movies We Dig, the partial historians Sweet Better, and so much more. Get ad-free episodes and others by subscription to the Oracle Edition on Patreon at patreon.com/MythsBaby or via the link in the episode's description. Are you a scholar or academic or an expert in something from antiquity, from Greece to Rome to Egypt or anywhere in the Near East?

• 1:42:19Speaker 03

  We would love to have you on the show as a conversation guest. Go to mythsbaby.com/contact and fill out our podcast guest form. We want to hear from you, so please reach out. See you all later. Bye.

• 1:43:23Speaker 05

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