The Scots Gaelic Myth

[PatrickHughes123]

Thank you for a very interesting thread.

May I ask what was the language of the Picts? I know I am going back hundreds of years further, but with the foundation of the Scotland, my understanding was the Irish Gaelic speaking Scotti and the Picts forged a Kingdom under Kenneth MacAlpin (much myth and legend about how fast and how violently this occurred).

My understanding of Scottish historic is very high level and may be very wrong, so be gentle.

Yes, that is the gist of it. The language is known today as Pictish. In 843 AD, Kenneth MacAlpin took control of Pictland and both the Gaelic kingdom and the Pict kingdom merged to form the Kingdom of Alba. Pictish lands were completely Gaelic-speaking by 900 AD, Pictish now was extinct. Alba would take part of the English kingdom in 1018, and Strathclyde in 1020. Cumbric-speaking people from Strathclyde were completely Gaelic speaking by the start of the 12th Century. This never happened in the English-speaking part as they were allowed to keep their own language, this Northern variety of English was soon to become the Scots language.

Scotland then gained more ground in 1234 when the Gaelic-speaking Galloway kingdom became part of Scotland in the extreme South-West.

Scotland then gained Orkney and Shetland in 1469. There is more to it than that but that is beyond the scope of the post.

[John_Carrick]

Thank you Patrick, I find all this fascinating and must read up further when time allows.

[OC Richard]

May I ask what was the language of the Picts?

It's pretty clear that it was a Brythonic or P-Celtic language, related to Welsh, Cornish, Breton, and Cumbric. (Cumbria/Cambria/Cymru are all versions of these people's name for themselves.)

In The Age Of The Picts by W A Cummins the author says:

"By careful linguistic, geographical, and historical analysis, a relative chronology of place-names can be built up...

Over much of eastern Scotland there is an important group of place-names which belongs to none of these historical incursions. Among these are some well-known names beginning with Aber... a British (Brythonic) word meaning the mouth of a river, or a confluence (which) is also a common element in Welsh place-names... and is quite distinct from its Gaelic equivalent inver-.

The most abundant and distinctive names of this group are those beginning with Pit- … originally pett, a Pictish word meaning a piece of land, related to the Welsh peth meaning a thing, and Breton pez, a piece.
The Gaelic equivalent cuid, meaning a portion, is quite distinct and does not appear as an element in place-names.

There are some three hundred Pit- names with a rather well-defined distribution (which) compares closely with that of the Pictish Class II symbol stones...

A further important fact about the Pit- names is that the second component is almost invariably of Gaelic origin.

The language of the Picts is still open to question, and no evidence has been presented that it did not contain a Gaelic component."

(The author doesn't present any evidence that it did.)

I suppose by "component" the author might mean something akin to the situation in English, a Germanic language with a strong French component.

Interesting, regarding the Gaelic/Pictish (Goidelic/Brythonic) question, is the fact that the earliest Irish lore shows hints of a Brythonic substratum, suggesting that Ireland was originally P-Celtic speaking.

[Allan Thomson]

I'd agree with the above comnents about Caledonia definitely being a P Celt kingdom & Gaelic is every bit as much an 'invading language' as English is percieved to be. There's plenty of evidence for P Celt such as the placenames mentioned above and the names found carved in Ogham. I'm definitely not antigaelic & agree it needs support & investment & the suppressionof the language was wrong. But the ridiculousness (& slight offensiveness) of the seperatist 'nationalist' agenda where one can cross the border & be confronted by gaelic signs in a place where it was not spoken covering over the brythonnic history predating the gaels is just nauseaing exploitation of a culture in a blinkered one sided agenda.

Incidentally the Gaelic spoken in Galloway was more than likelyfrom a different source than Highland Gaelic, as it came from the Norse Gaelic sea kingdom of Man & the Isles (the sudries) which was later fragmented by Somerled (who was of & married into the Crovan dynasty) & later endex by Alexander taking Skye.

Your map is definitely wrong as you show the Isles & Galloway as Irish speaking with only a small area of Norse Gaelic on the coastal area of the borders. As I pointed out Mann & the Isles & Galloway where definitely Norse Gaelic dynasties & not wholly 'Irish Gaelic'.

[Ivor]

Please correct me if I am wrong but is the Gaelic spoken in Scotland not different from that in Ireland? Many place names, even districts, seem to have more in common with Welsh than Gaelic. Carrick, for instance, and the likes of “Aber” as in Aberdeen, Abernethy, Aberlour etc. . William Wallace seems to have had some Welsh ancestry. Certainly names such as those beginning with “Dun” seem Gaelic and others beginning with “Pit” such as Pitenweem, Pitlochry, even Pittsburgh are seemingly derived from Pictish sources. And then we have place names such as Athelstaneford in Scotland which obviously derives from the English king, Athelstane so all we can deduce is that the Britain we know today is a melting pot of the original nationalities. The one external factor is, perhaps, the Norman invaders who, while they managed to rise to the top, have left little in the way of place names or language.

[PatrickHughes123]

Please correct me if I am wrong but is the Gaelic spoken in Scotland not different from that in Ireland? Many place names, even districts, seem to have more in common with Welsh than Gaelic. Carrick, for instance, and the likes of “Aber” as in Aberdeen, Abernethy, Aberlour etc. . William Wallace seems to have had some Welsh ancestry. Certainly names such as those beginning with “Dun” seem Gaelic and others beginning with “Pit” such as Pitenweem, Pitlochry, even Pittsburgh are seemingly derived from Pictish sources. And then we have place names such as Athelstaneford in Scotland which obviously derives from the English king, Athelstane so all we can deduce is that the Britain we know today is a melting pot of the original nationalities. The one external factor is, perhaps, the Norman invaders who, while they managed to rise to the top, have left little in the way of place names or language.

I've listed several Gaelic already

[PatrickHughes123]

Carrick, I believe, comes from the Gaelic Carraig

[Allan Thomson]

Please correct me if I am wrong but is the Gaelic spoken in Scotland not different from that in Ireland? Many place names, even districts, seem to have more in common with Welsh than Gaelic. Carrick, for instance, and the likes of “Aber” as in Aberdeen, Abernethy, Aberlour etc. . William Wallace seems to have had some Welsh ancestry. Certainly names such as those beginning with “Dun” seem Gaelic and others beginning with “Pit” such as Pitenweem, Pitlochry, even Pittsburgh are seemingly derived from Pictish sources. And then we have place names such as Athelstaneford in Scotland which obviously derives from the English king, Athelstane so all we can deduce is that the Britain we know today is a melting pot of the original nationalities. The one external factor is, perhaps, the Norman invaders who, while they managed to rise to the top, have left little in the way of place names or language.

Some of that comes from the earlier P Celt Pictish and Strathclyde British names and I recollect there was an example of a place with the Aber prefix changing to the Inver Prefix within documented History (I think was around the 1500's but I can't recall much other details as it was in a book I read a long time ago).

The 'original' identifiable language of Caledonia was definitely of a P Celt origin.

Re Scots Gaelic being different to Irish, the root is the same (as with Manx) but a number of other influences changed the language as the years went by. Definitely the P Celtic language of the Picts and the Strathclyde British and also the Norse influences had an influence in shaping the language.

What few realise is that even in Scotland Gaelic differs according to region. My Father had an Aunty who came from one of the Islands and could not speak a word of English until she went to School. They visited the McRae's Monument at Sherrifmuir and she was able to translate the monument for them, but she remarked that it differed some what from the Gaelic she had as a girl.

I also recall at an interceltic event there was a group of young people who came from the Scottish Islands. They said that they found Manx Gaelic much easier to understand than Irish Gaelic (even though Manx Gaelic was originally documented by a Welsh speaker which has impacted on some spellings). I guess this is due to the historic influence of the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles and the Norse Connection (as well as an older connection through Dalriada).

I totally agree about Britain being a melting pot, and I think there doesn't seem to be enough recognition of the fact that the concepts of "Scotland" and "England" are in the terms of the history of the British Isles a relatively new concept, and both nations have made themselves bigger and more powerful in their history through the subjugation and assimilation of other people's and power blocs. The Isles were very much relegated to a distant compromised outpost of Scotland in comparison to their earlier powerful sea 'kingdom' ('empire'?) role as part of the Norse Gaelic kingdom of the Isles....

This is why I have a problem with the separatist so called nationalist groups who rally on Gaelic as a means of creating an identity, and have a chip on their shoulder about equally as unpleasant on both sides for the inhabitants of the nearby vicinities wars fought between "England" and "Scotland"... as said those days are over and in the past they must remain.....

One thing to bear in mind is that whilst Britain is still ruled by a line of Queens and Kings who are of Stuart descent, that there hasn't been a truly "English" monarch since 1066...….

[davidlpope]

However, Gaelic was brought over to Nova Scotia, PEI, Newfoundland, and even in the U.S. in the Outer Banks were it flourished for years. Even slaves in the Outer Banks spoke Gaelic, learned by their Scottish Masters, and to this day, Gaelic in small pockets exist in the Outer Banks.

What's your source for this? The Outer Banks of NC, particularly Ocracoke, have a distinctive dialect, but it's not Scots Gaelic, most likely derived instead from the West Country of England.

Scots Gaelic was spoken by the Highlanders who settled in the Cape Fear region of NC (modern Fayetteville), but that's a long way from the Outer Banks and a different settlement pattern.

Scots Gaelic died out in the Cape Fear region after the American Civil War.

http://shimajournal.org/issues/v2n1/...Shima-v2n1.pdf

https://www.ncpedia.org/hoi-toiders

https://www.ncpedia.org/gaelic-language

[Tarheel]

David, I lived in Salter Path, NC. (on the outer banks) for three years in the mid 1980's. I was a land surveyor and met every sort of person up and down the outer banks. I found the folks on Harker's Island (for instance) spoke with a Gloucester brogue. The people of Oriental, and New Bern spoke with more of an old English slant. All the fishing villages blended to sound like northern American fishermen. There were voices from the Caribbean and cajun areas thrown in with the different fishing seasons.

To my ear, the NC mountain and foothill people sounded gaelic.

Collin, the Cape Fear river was the main trade route into the middle of NC. The Yadkin River was the next artery that my family used and lived along. Scots made encampments all along those routes to get to the mountains. Sorry for the history lesson but trade was the main objective in the New World and languages changed as fast the currencies flowed.