tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post6742128164740848520..comments2023-11-29T07:39:34.401+00:00Comments on Carla Nayland Historical Fiction: The language of the PictsCarlahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11901028520813891575noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-48545526434976304592011-04-05T18:09:41.360+01:002011-04-05T18:09:41.360+01:00Not to mention modern English, in its many variati...Not to mention modern English, in its many variations :-)Carlahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11901028520813891575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-72934562375393304382011-04-05T05:04:01.951+01:002011-04-05T05:04:01.951+01:00Well, one good example is Old English, the quasi-f...Well, one good example is Old English, the quasi-foreignness of which is greatly amped up by the very different spelling rules.Rickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-3447686844770770672011-04-03T20:24:29.054+01:002011-04-03T20:24:29.054+01:00Spelling in many languages probably looks incompre...Spelling in many languages probably looks incomprehensible to people who aren't familiar with it, while those who are wonder what the problem is.Carlahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11901028520813891575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-80633909724382849112011-04-03T04:41:42.431+01:002011-04-03T04:41:42.431+01:00The Welsh should not be permitted to spell without...The Welsh should not be permitted to spell without a license! <br /><br />Yes, I am aware that this could also be said about speakers of another well known language. :-)Rickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-45204357428778785592011-03-30T23:12:32.393+01:002011-03-30T23:12:32.393+01:00Rick - A linguist would be able to give you a deta...Rick - A linguist would be able to give you a detailed answer to that. A few possibilities that occur to me: Modern Gaelic often has letters and letter combinations that are silent or that don't survive Anglicised pronunciation, e.g. Fhidhleir is pronounced Eelir, Fhamhair is pronounced Avir, so if 8th-century Pictish did the same the 'f' may have been silent in the first place and then been lost. It could have dropped out either over time or as part of the change of language - consonant clusters are sometimes difficult to transfer from one language to another - or both, in a similar process to the 'f' in Eoforwic disappearing when the name became York. Modern Welsh sometimes does consonant substitution e.g. 'f' for 'm', and if eighth-century Pictish did the same, the 'f' might have turned into something else and then been merged with the preceding 'n'.Carlahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11901028520813891575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-27360295432084746942011-03-30T21:57:28.383+01:002011-03-30T21:57:28.383+01:00Kinneil is Scots Gaelic and is recognisably a vari...<i>Kinneil is Scots Gaelic and is recognisably a variant of Peanfahel with the Q-Celtic ‘Kin’ substituted for the P-Celtic equivalent ‘Pen’.</i><br /><br />What would have become of the F in the second element?Rickhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16932015378213238346noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-9773144621651128202011-03-30T17:40:09.576+01:002011-03-30T17:40:09.576+01:00Gabriele - at the time of Agricola I'd use Cal...Gabriele - at the time of Agricola I'd use Caledonians too, following Tacitus; Picts first appears in Roman documentary sources much later, though it might have been in use earlier and not survived. There's the usual problem of having only Roman sources, which may or may not reflect whatever the tribes called themselves.Carlahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11901028520813891575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-73498187777032744502011-03-30T17:23:38.410+01:002011-03-30T17:23:38.410+01:00Well, if you can call them Picts at the time of Ag...Well, if you can call them Picts at the time of Agricola? I'm not sure about that and call them Caledonians (as the Romans did). <br /><br />There's one NiP that's resting in the drawer right now, taking place shortly after the Romans left, and that one has Picts and Dalriatans.Gabriele Campbellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17205770868139083575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-38357352183789931552011-03-30T16:29:23.246+01:002011-03-30T16:29:23.246+01:00Gabriele - do the Picts come into your Roman front...Gabriele - do the Picts come into your Roman frontier stories, or is that too early?<br /><br />Jonathan - True, the chief who arrived on Skye in Ch 27 just in time to die at St Columba's feet arrived by boat and could have come from anywhere. I tend to assume he was fairly local on the grounds that a dying man probably wouldn't undertake a long journey, but that can't be certain. Some people could travel long distances and the upper classes (chiefs, priests, warriors) would probably have been the most mobile because they had access to more resources.<br /><br />In Ch 33, Columba is said to be 'in the province of the Picts', and the converts are described as a 'peasant, who with his whole family, had listened to and learned through an interpreter...'. The peasant and his family are not explicitly said to be Picts, so they could be foreign travellers, though peasants tend to be closely connected to the land and thus less mobile than warriors/chiefs etc. They could have been foreign slaves, although Adomnan doesn't say that either. I tend to take this passage as describing local people living in the land of the Picts (who I would therefore call Picts, although if 'Picts' meant a particular social class or political affiliation that might not follow). Possibly if Pictish was an elite language the peasants spoke something else that was neither Irish nor Latin. It certainly seems possible to me that there could have been several languages in use.<br /><br />Good point about the Pit- name distribution. That was careless wording on my part, and thank you for pointing it out. The Pit- names cluster in rather the same way as brochs do, in a different area. That's consistent with several different cultural groups in different regions of north and east Scotland (who may all have been lumped together under the label 'Picts' by outsiders, but who may or may not have considered themselves to be grouped together and may or may not have accpeted the name 'Picts'). Such regional or cultural groups may well have differed in language as well as in their preferences for place names and architecture. Accents still vary considerably across Scotland today - Aberdonian is quite different from Highland - and presumably regional differences in speech would have been at least as pronounced in a period without fast land transport and national broadcast media. Interesting to speculate as to whether such distinct cultural/regional groups spoke different languages, or different dialects of the same language. Bede seems to have thought of 'Pictish' as one language, but that doesn't preclude regional variations, nor does it even preclude different regional languages; Bede may not have come across regional languages, especially if they were spoken in areas of Pictland a long way from Northumbria, or by people who didn't impinge on the ecclesiastical or political circles from which he presumably got most of his information, or by people who could also speak whatever language Bede recognised as 'Pictish' when occasion required. If there were different languages in use in different regions, presumably they were either sufficiently mutually intelligible at some level to allow for effective communication when co-operation was needed, or there were sufficient bilingual or multilingual individuals to act as interpreters, or there was some sort of additional lingua franca in use.<br />If 'Pictish', and indeed 'Picts' meant different things to different people, and/or at different times and places (or were only imprecise labels applied by outsiders to disparate peoples) all the theories could be right :-)Carlahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11901028520813891575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-70772878349665838942011-03-29T12:56:14.707+01:002011-03-29T12:56:14.707+01:00It's very rare that I have anything to say in ...It's very rare that I have anything to say in disagreement with one of your posts, Carla, but here I would want to add just a couple of wrinkles. Firstly, it may be important to note that the notable pagan brought to Columba in <i>VC</i> I.27 is not said to be a Pict. Okay, you may say, what else could he have been if Columba didn't speak his language? And one answer is, well, British maybe, who knows, a pre-Indo-European survivor, he has a Roman military title but Columba could presumably have managed Latin... All I'm saying is, Adomnán does not call this man a Pict. You know <a href="http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/pictland-should-be-plural/" rel="nofollow">what I think about Pictish identity, viz. that it's basically political</a>, so I'll go no further with that.<br /><br />The other thing is where you say:<br /><br /><i>The name element Pit-, derived from ‘pett’, meaning a parcel of land, appears all over the Pictish territories.</i><br /><br />Not true I'm afraid! There's a Pictish Arts Society map included in <a href="http://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/iron-age-picts-and-their-spoken-language/#more-4328" rel="nofollow">this post of mine</a>, which is relevant in its way, and it shows the Pit- names clustered mostly between the Firth of Forth and Inverness, and hardly any further north, or west of the Mounth either. They actually map quite well to the distribution of long-cist burials, for some reason, and both may be telling us something about land use rather than origins of population, but they certainly don't occur `all over the Pictish territories'. This is one of the reasons I think any solution to the question of what Pictish is needs to be very careful how widely it's selecting its evidence.<br /><br />(Blogger is eating OpenID comments again, so I'm here unauthenticated. Hopefully my ranting identifies me...)Jonathan Jarretthttp://tenthmedieval.wordpress.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-3406999129291451902011-03-26T20:51:04.863+00:002011-03-26T20:51:04.863+00:00Heh, memories of half forgotten stuff from univers...Heh, memories of half forgotten stuff from university. I should read my old notes again to help that grey matter in my head. ;)Gabriele Campbellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17205770868139083575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-1831735808583991182011-03-26T15:18:44.988+00:002011-03-26T15:18:44.988+00:00Meghan - Thanks - I'm glad you found it intere...Meghan - Thanks - I'm glad you found it interesting! Modern Irish and Scots Gaelic are both Q-Celtic languages, while Welsh and Breton are P-Celtic.Carlahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11901028520813891575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19922276.post-82754894802469764282011-03-25T23:07:11.097+00:002011-03-25T23:07:11.097+00:00That is so interesting! I believe my family is of ...That is so interesting! I believe my family is of the Q-Celtic variety. Thanks for the history lesson (and I love languages so this was especially fun to read about).Meghanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03375626649089998707noreply@blogger.com