Re: Elamo-Dravidian and Nilo-Saharan

On Mon, 21 Oct 2002 00:28:07 -0000, "ardfilidh" <ardfilidh@...> wrote:

>so do you have any opinion as to what language group pictish is?

Not really. Some inscriptions in the Pictish area are clearly written in a form
Brythonic Celtic, but it's not impossible that a pre-Celtic or pre-Indo-European
language had survived in the highlands. The inscriptions in question, however,
appear to be gibberish. This can be due to several things: (a) they are
gibberish, (b) "Pictish" was a bizarre language, or (c) the inscriptions have
been misread (most of them apparently are hardly readable).

>there were celtiberian scripts, but the few i've seen do not
>obviously resemble ogham.

The Celtiberian script has nothing to do with Ogham. It is an independent
derivation from the Punic and Greek scripts, and it's partially alphabetic,
partially syllabic.

>ogham appears to be based on the needs of
>gaelic, but i don't think it's latin based.

It's Latin inspired.

>this is probably why
>later gaelic writing in the latin alphabet gave different values to
>latin letters.

Such as?

> (i actually speak a bit of almost extinct nova scotian
>gaelic--lochaber and barra dialects--but it isn't much use in
>toronto, so i'm getting worse every year)
>
>the gaelic use of the alphabet gives letters different values
>depending on where they are found in the word or in relation to the
>heighnouring words. i have assumed that this is a remenant of ogham
>and of early irish, but it could just as easily be the creation of
>late medieval monks.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but if it's about the mutations and
lenitions, Ogham was devised before they actually happened, and there is little
trace of them in the Ogham inscriptions.

>so what about scythian. is there any surviving written scythian?

No.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...