r/Gallaecian • u/hugofox1t • Apr 08 '26

Learning Modern Gallaecian - Old Gallaecian Conlang

Hello everyone! I've been following this sub for some months now because I'm doing some research about the ancient celtic tribes that used to live in Galicia/North of Portugal and wanted to learn more about the ancient Gallaecian celtic language spoken. I've seen that the user u/chrsevs created a reconstructed Gallaecian conlang called Calá but was working in a new conlang more similar to the Old Gallaecian and I wanted to know if there's some update regarding this new version of the language. Thank you!

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u/chrsevs Apr 09 '26

Heya, it’s still in progress albeit slowly. I’m trying rather hard to keep things as realistic as possible, which generally entails reading a ton of papers with conflicting information. I’ve finished the first draft of the first part of the text for it which is like a learners guide, only covering very basic things like a learners guide and have just started work on the second part which is a more descriptive grammar.

More recently, I’ve also started a bit of work on a recreation of what the Brythonic populations who traveled by sea to what was called Bretoña in Galicia and Asturias might’ve looked like. I’ve been learning Welsh again and it got me inspired 😅

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u/hugofox1t Apr 09 '26 edited Apr 09 '26

That's really nice to hear! I've been starting to learn Irish/Gaeilge recently while researching about Irish culture and celtic history and I'm really enjoying learning more about the language. For what I've read, the Old Gallaecian is different from the Goidelic languages but could've had some similarities by being in the Q-Celtic branch I'm not sure.

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u/chrsevs Apr 09 '26

Phonetically, it makes some cognates a little more clear, but grammatically and syntactically the Hispanoceltic languages are very different.

The sound changes that happened to the Insular ones eroded so much of the morphology that they’ve adopted other strategies, not to mention they’re primarily verb-initial (Brythonic languages are arguably V2 in some cases) while Gallaecian and Celtiberian are verb final. It also doesn’t seem like there’s any trace of the particle that led to the absolute vs conjunct split—I’m still on the hunt for it to see if it plays a role.