Pictish language
Pictish is an extinct Brittonic Celtic language spoken by the Picts, the people of eastern and northern Scotland from late antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.
Virtually no direct attestations of Pictish remain, short of a limited number of geographical and personal names found on monuments and early medieval records in the area controlled by the kingdoms of the Picts.
This is perhaps most obvious in the contribution of loan words, but, more importantly, Pictish is thought to have influenced the syntax of Scottish Gaelic, which is more similar to Brittonic languages than to Irish.
[5][9][10] Some commentators have noted that, in light of the disparate nature of the surviving evidence and large geographical area in which it was spoken, that Pictish may have represented not a single language, but rather a number of discrete Brittonic varieties.
[12] Celtic scholar Whitley Stokes, in a philological study of the Irish annals, concluded that Pictish was closely related to Welsh.
[23][24] Skene later revised his view of Pictish, noting that it appeared to share elements of both Goidelic and Brittonic: It has been too much narrowed by the assumption that, if it is shewn to be a Celtic dialect, it must of necessity be absolutely identic in all its features either with Welsh or with Gaelic.
[26] Scottish Gaelic, unlike Irish, maintains a substantial corpus of Brittonic loan-words and, moreover, uses a verbal system modelled on the same pattern as Welsh.
[30] A similar position was taken by Heinrich Zimmer, who argued that the Picts' supposedly exotic cultural practices (tattooing and matriliny) were equally non-Indo-European,[31] and a pre-Indo-European model was maintained by some well into the 20th century.
[33] Jackson's hypothesis was framed in the then-current model that a Brittonic elite, identified as the Broch-builders, had migrated from the south of Britain into Pictish territory, dominating a pre-Celtic majority.
[37] Traditional accounts (now rejected) claimed that the Picts had migrated to Scotland from Scythia, a region that encompassed Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
[38] Buchanan, looking for a Scythian P-Celtic candidate for the ancestral Pict, settled on the Gaulish-speaking Cotini (which he rendered as Gothuni), a tribe from the region that is now Slovakia.
[43] Guto Rhys (2015) notes that significant caution is required in the interpretation of such inscriptions because crucial information, such as the orthographic key, the linguistic context in which they were composed and the extent of literacy in Pictland, remains unknown.
[44][42][45] The Shetland inscriptions at Cunningsburgh and Lunnasting reading EHTECONMORS and [E]TTECUHETTS have been understood as Brittonic expressions meaning "this is as great" and "this is as far", respectively,[42] messages appropriate for boundary stones.
Pictish personal names, as acquired from documents such as the Poppleton manuscript, show significant diagnostically Brittonic features including the retention of final -st and initial w- (cf.
[12][52] The items most commonly cited as loanwords are bad ("clump"; Breton bod), bagaid ("cluster, troop"; Welsh bagad), dail ("meadow"; W dôl), dìleab ("legacy"), mormaer ("earl"; W mawr + maer), pailt ("plentiful"; Cornish pals), peasg ("gash"; W pisg), peit ("area of ground, part, share"; W peth), pòr (Middle Welsh paur; "grain, crops"), preas ("bush"; W prys).
[52] On the basis of a number of the loans attesting shorter vowels than other British cognates, linguist Guto Rhys proposed Pictish resisted some Latin-influenced sound changes of the 6th century.
[12] Several Gaelic nouns have meanings more closely matching their Brittonic cognates than those in Irish, indicating that Pictish may have influenced the sense and usage of these words as a substrate.
[47] Srath (> Strath-) is recorded to have meant "grassland" in Old Irish, whereas the modern Gaelic realization means "broad valley", exactly as in its Brittonic cognates (cf.
