The Modern Gaulish Language
The revival of the Gaulish language: Galáthach hAthevíu
Appendix III: Alternative Gaulish History
The following is a pastiche of what an alternative history of Western Europe might have looked like, creating an environment in which the Gaulish language might have survived and flourished.
52 BCE:
Uercingetorix (Gwerchingethrich) wins the battle of Alesia and the war. The Romans are decimated at the battle of Alesia, and Caesar is captured. The tribes of Gaul unite and set up a federation of nations, which also includes the people of Britain and Ireland, that brings into being and maintains a common armed force based on voluntary contributions alone and operates as a professional unit. The natural borders of Gaul are reinforced and provided with armed forces to keep safe; Gaul is defined as the area between the Rhine, the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees and the Atlantic.
The Federation of Gaulish, British and Irish Tribes (commonly referred to as FGBIT; in English that is) hold a tribunal which is attended by all people who wish to do so, and which is administrated by druids. Caesar is tried fairly under the native laws of the land, and is found to be a murdering sadist genocidal bastard. A Roman delegation is invited to witness the tribunal and the verdict. Caesar is executed in some satisfyingly horrific fashion. The Romans are told to piss off and don't come back. They bugger off and retreat behind the Alps, where they spend the next 400 years fighting, murdering, backstabbing and poisoning each other merrily with not a care in the world.
The Germanic people fidgeting behind the Rhine, being pushed in the back by the movements of miscellaneous horseriding invaders from the East, find they can not get across the Rhine and past the armed forces of FGBIT. Instead they turn south and follow the Rhine's east bank in through Eastern Switserland and down into Italy. They spend a certain amount of time happily murdering, poisoning, massacring and, at a stretch, back stabbing each other as well as various Romans. They catch a boat from Sicily and make it to Northern Africa; some poke up back across from Gibraltar and manage to stay in Andalusia long enough to give it its name. They rule Spain and Italy, but not Gaul or Britain. The Frisians, Angles and Jutes are shoved back into the North Sea and are told to stay away if they know what's good for them, and Vortigern was drowned at birth after a seeress looked into the innards of a freshly sacrificed chicken and saw, not surprisingly, a bloody mess. His parents weren't too fussed, because he used to wake up ten times a night and scream their ears off, so that was all right. And they had another 12 kids anyway, so it didn't really matter.
Gaul, Britain and Ireland were left alone to develop their own distinctive culture. Their languages continued to flourish and develop into the instruments of great learning and understanding they were in ancient times, continuing a tradition tentatively recorded in Gaul and featuring such things as the development of the investigative inclinations of the druidic mob of people, having yearly congregations in the area of Chartres to discuss science, philosophy and the conspicuous consumption of beer (back in the real world, prior to the 16th century the vernacular language in which the single biggest body of medical literature was written, outside of Latin and Greek, was Irish).
As an aside I think it would probably be useful to include that the library of Alexandria was never burned down, continues to flourish to this day as a centre of great learning, connected to the university of Alexandria, and that christianity as a religion never got any further than an insignificant mystical nonsense-sect shared by no more than a handful of stoned paranoid fanatics crawling around the Judean deserts, eating mushrooms and cockroaches, and spending altogether far too much time in the midday sun without a hat and sunscreen. Their incoherent ramblings and ravings were commonly tolerated and indulged by their country people, who, out of the kindness of their hearts, would give them food and water sometimes and bring their kids around to watch them scratch around in the dirt trying to find their own arse, just for a bit of mild entertainment.
Islam, on the other hand, never got off the ground at all. On the day Mohammed was supposed to flee to Medina, he slept in because he had a late night the night before, indulging himself in sex with underage camels and partaking a bit too heavily of date-wine. Therefore he forgot to set his alarm, and instead of fleeing to Medina he got arrested for his long term refusal to pay the outstanding parking fines for his camels. As a result he spent the rest of his days tied to a yoke and walking around in circles pulling buckets of water out of desert wells, with as his only company a donkey, a mule and a camel who, to Mohammed's deep and everlasting regret, steadfastly refused his sexual advances. As his was a mind naturally given to esoteric and mystical religious contemplation, spending every waking hour walking around in circles and dragging his feet through the dirt without ever getting anywhere suited him perfectly, and he lived out his days in ecstacy, dying peacefully at the ripe old age of 93 1/2, in his bed surrounded by all his favourite camels, and one goat, because his sexual appetites had become somewhat deviant in his old age.
As a result, untold millions of people missed out on being butchered, slaughtered, tortured, murdered, subjugated, indoctrinated, exploited, enslaved, castrated, burned and dehumanised. In spite of this obvious handicap, the whole of the middle east, northern Africa and Eastern Europe passed though a 2000 year period of prosperity, cooperation and tolerance, which, I am happy to say, continues unabatedly to this day.
All thanks to Vercingetorix. Good on him, I say.
