Celtic — The Celticist

The Celticist — from Lepontic stones to the Old Irish glossators.

Continental Celtic epigraphy (RIIG, Lexicon Leponticum and its word shelf), ogham Primitive Irish, CorPH’s Early Irish, the St Gall Priscian glosses in Latin and Old Irish, the UD Old Irish treebanks, the kaikki attested-Celtic extracts riding wiktionary-recon, and the GPC open subset as the Welsh dictionary shelf.

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The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these twelve answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): cy 89,386 · sga 6,838 · bre 5,491 · mga 796 · xlp 633 · pgl 547 · ett 502 · xtg-Grek 402 · cym 321 · cel 286 … and 20 more (nabu axis celtic lists all).

Carried in by multilingual packs (ud, wiktionary-recon — whole-source members whose other languages ride along, as of 7 November 2026): zho 327,296 · xcl 8,544 · gem-pro 5,749 · gmw-pro 5,578 · sla-pro 5,461 … and 36 more (nabu axis celtic lists all).

The desk’s instruments

• Gold-lemma language: sga (Early Irish — CorPH’s Annals of Ulster and the Milan / St Gall / Würzburg glosses, plus the Old Irish UD treebanks).
• Epigraphy: RIIG (Gaulish), ogham (Primitive Irish), Lexicon Leponticum and its word shelf (Lepontic).
• Etymology: the kaikki attested-Celtic extracts on wiktionary-recon carry the Proto-Celtic ancestry on the dictionary card — nabu define rí --lang sga names *rīxs and *h₃rḗǵs. (There is no Proto-Celtic reconstruction shelf yet, so nabu etym’s crosswalk ascent is thin from this desk — the cards are the richer walk.)

Working the celtic desk

The generic desk surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable celtic               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync celtic                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis celtic          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis celtic                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis celtic   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu show urn:nabu:ogham:e-dev-001 --parallel  # an ogham stone beside its transliteration sibling
nabu search túath --axis celtic       # a query scoped to just the Celticist's shelves — túath in the glosses
nabu search --lemma rí --lang sga --axis celtic  # CorPH's gold Early Irish by dictionary form — every king in the Annals
nabu define rí --lang sga             # the Old Irish card, with its Proto-Celtic *rīxs ancestry

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “Find macc in the Old Irish glosses.” → nabu_search macc (lang: sga) — Hits from the Milan and Bern Servius glosses (CorPH) with exact gloss-corpus citations — the diacritic fold means plain ASCII queries reach the edited text.

Terminal setup

• Ogham (pgl): nabu spaces the letters with U+1680 so the stemline reads continuously; install font-noto-sans-ogham.
• Old Irish / Gaulish / Lepontic: Latin-script (CorPH carries per-token Latin code-switch coloring in show); the terminal default font works.
• Note: RIIG and ogham are not in the --fuzzy index — use plain search --axis celtic for them.

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.