> I'm questioning, short of challenging :-): This seems to assign a
uniform
> definition to Pict, and a common language as "Pictish", from a view
that
> does not seem to be standard. I doubt they were one people, and
doubt one
> language can be so boldly applied with such certainty. I have read
> arguments spanning Non-IE to already Celtic for Pictish regions,
long
> before Dal Riada..and challenge a totally intrusive all
transforming Gaelic,
> so "purely Gaelic" to my mind has no real meaning.
See Katherine Forsyth, "Language in Pictland". It is currently
believed by many top Celticists that Pictish certainly was a northern
form of Brittonic, although with a slightly odd orthography, and that
there is no evidence of any substrate, Pre-Celtic language in
Scotland.
> And: "no other language
> was spoken in Ireland and Scotland in the middle ages"? Surely you
jest?
I just wasn't expressing myself clearly - I meant to say that in
Ireland and in the areas where Gaelic took hold in Scotland, no other
ancient language survived into the later Middle Ages when surnames
began to solidify. I did not mean to include later foreign languages
like Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Norman French because
Joseph seemed to be implying that his surname stemmed from an ancient
native language that had personal names which survived into the late
Middle Ages to produce surnames.
Not speaking of Germanic and Romance languages, Ireland and Scotland
in the 7th century AD had the following languages spoken: in Scotland
there was Pictish, Cumbric and Gaelic and in Ireland Gaelic (with
perhaps some Pictish, though this isn't confirmed by written or
onomastic evidence). Pictish seems to have differed little from
Cumbric, so we can say that the Scots spoke Brittonic and Goidelic.
In the 7th century AD, neither the Brittonic or the Gaelic branches
had -qu-'s (Brittonic long ago turned them to -p-'s and Goidelic made
them -c-'s).
-Chris Gwinn