The Pre-Roman Substrate

The territory where Portuguese would later take shape was, before Rome, far from a linguistic blank. When the legions landed in the Iberian Peninsula in 218 BC, they found a mosaic of peoples and languages with centuries of history behind them. Of those pre-Roman tongues — Celtic, Lusitanian, the Iberian languages — little survived Latinisation; but the little that remained forms the language’s oldest substrate: a sediment of place names, river names and country words.

A mosaic of peoples

By around the 3rd century BC, the western Peninsula was shared among several groups. In the north-west — the future Gallaecia — lived peoples of the castro (hill-fort) culture who spoke Celtic, such as the Bracari, who gave their name to Braga, and the Gallaeci. In the centre-west were the Lusitanians, famed for their resistance to Rome under Viriathus. To the east and south lay Iberian peoples, speakers of a non-Indo-European language, and in the far south-west — the Algarve and the Lower Alentejo — the Conii or Cynetes. Beyond the Pyrenees, the Vasconic family, ancestor of Basque, would also leave its mark.

The Lusitanian language

Lusitanian is the best-documented pre-Roman language of the west, thanks to a handful of inscriptions in the Latin alphabet — among them those of Lamas de Moledo, Cabeço das Fráguas and Arronches. It is an Indo-European language, but its position within that branch remains debated: was it Celtic, para-Celtic, or an independent branch?

Much of the question rests on a single consonant. The Celtic languages lost the inherited initial Indo-European p; Lusitanian kept it.

The same inscriptions preserve the names of deities — Reve, Nabia, Trebaruna — that bind Lusitanian to the religion and the landscape of the territory.

The Celtic legacy

It was the Celtic tongues, however, that most marked the map. The element -briga (‘fortified settlement’, ‘height’) survives in dozens of ancient place names: Conimbriga, which gave Coimbra, Lacobriga, Talabriga, Mirobriga. Other names of places and rivers — Bracara, Tâmega, Douro — are likewise of pre-Roman root. It is in toponymy and hydronymy, more than in any other domain, that the substrate survived with real force.

Iberians and the Southwest script

Quite different were the Iberian languages, spoken in the east and south and with no known kinship to Indo-European. Their presence is attested by inscriptions in the so-called Palaeohispanic scripts — above all the Southwest script (or Tartessian), engraved on stelae of the Algarve and Lower Alentejo from the 7th century BC and still only partly deciphered. Their weight in Portuguese is minimal, but they make this territory one of the oldest cradles of writing in western Europe.

Words that survived

In the common vocabulary, the substrate bequeathed mainly rural, geographic and technical terms — many of them reaching Portuguese already filtered through Latin. They are few, but some belong to the most everyday usage.

Word	Likely origin	Meaning
carro	Celtic (Gaulish carros)	cart, wheeled vehicle
cerveja	Celtic (cervesia)	beer
lousa	Celtic / pre-Roman	slab, slate
seara	Celtic	sown land
veiga	pre-Roman	fertile riverside plain
barro	pre-Roman	clay, mud
barranco	pre-Roman	ravine, gully
bezerro	pre-Roman	calf
cama	pre-Roman Hispanic	bed
esquerdo	Vasconic (Basque ezker)	left (side)

Substrate and sound

Ascribing sound changes to the substrate is always risky, and scholars are divided. Some see in the lenition of intervocalic Latin consonants (-P-, -T-, -C- > -b-, -d-, -g-: Lat. LUPUM > lobo) an echo of Celtic phonology; others read it as an internal development of Hispanic Latin. Safer ground is what did not happen in the west.

The oldest sediment

In sheer number of words, the pre-Roman substrate is the most discreet of Portuguese’s layers. Yet it is the first of them all, and the one that clung best to the ground: in the names of the rivers we still follow, in cities whose origins fade before Rome, and in words as ordinary as cama or esquerdo, we speak — without knowing it — languages dead for two thousand years.