Read Online The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain by Oppenheimer - Free Book Online Page A

than accuracy. Twice, Bede clearly indicates that there were four indigenous languages spoken in Britain: Gaelic, British (i.e. ‘Brythonic’), English and Pictish. He describes Picts as invaders who arrived windswept in Northern Ireland in longboats from Scythia. Not being allowed to settle there, they made their home in Scotland. 36 How they reached the British Isles from Scythia, east of the Mediterranean, Bede does not make clear, but elsewhere in Medieval literature the region of Scythia is sometimes alluded to as the ultimate Norse homeland in the Danish and Icelandic sagas. 37 The longboats might imply the Picts were from Scandinavia (see Chapter 10 ), but in any casethis story from Bede makes it clear that he did not think that they were either British or Irish. His linguistic skill should have been enough to work this one out for himself. 38
    Bede also refers to the Pictish name for modern Kinneil at one end of the Antonine Wall (a Roman fortified defence, stretching between Edinburgh and Glasgow, north of Hadrian’s Wall) as Peanfahel. While this appears to support the view that Pictish was not the same as Gaelic, it would leave a puzzle. In a Brythonic language (also known as
P-celtic
– see p. 88),
pean
or
penn
might mean ‘end’, but the second half of the name, -
fahel
, would appear to be Gaelic, meaning ‘[of] wall’. A name meaning ‘end of wall’ is appropriate for the location, but the word would be a compound mixture of Gaelic and some P-celtic language. Kenneth Jackson points out that such compounds are no rarity, and gives the etymology for some other words and place-names that support the presence of a P-celtic language north-east of Edinburgh. He argues that this was ‘a Gallo-Brittonic dialect not identical with the British spoken south of the Antonine Wall, different from the British-P-celtic used south of the Antonine Wall, although related to it’. According to the place-name evidence, this ‘P’-celtic language would have been distributed in Scotland north-east of Edinburgh and the Forth river. 39 This distribution coincides with the main Scottish concentration of celtic-inscribed stones on the east coast ( Figures 2.2 and 7.4 ).
    However, Jackson argued, from the evidence of Ogham inscriptions (Ogham being an alphabetic script used throughout insular-celtic-speaking areas often with celtic–Latin bilingual inscriptions in the fifth century and onwards), that there was a third language in northern Scotland apart from Scottish Gaelic and the P-celtic language: ‘The other was not Celtic at all,which would fit the relative absence of celtic place-names in northern Scotland, nor apparently even Indo-European, but was presumably the language of some very early set of inhabitants of Scotland’ ( Figure 2.1b ). 40 Jackson’s concept of a third language is now viewed by some as a minority view, but Colin Renfrew in his book
Archaeology and Language
chooses to take it seriously, referring to Jackson as having been ‘the leading living authority’. 41 German linguist Theo Vennemann has recently suggested on place-name and other evidence that this non-Indo-European Pictish language could have been derived from Semitic as a result of Neolithic intrusions of forebears of the Phoenicians (see p. 250).
    This would leave ancient northern Scotland with three distinct languages, one of which was spoken to the west and two to the east of the Grampians for a large part of the first millennium AD . However, the western language, Scottish Gaelic, which apparently displaced the other two, is regarded as an intruder during that period. What is odd about the disappearance of Pictish is that the Picts were in the ascendant during the Dark Ages, according to both Gildas and Bede. Their attacks on England were stated by Gildas as being part of the reason for inviting the Saxons, so why should both their putative languages have disappeared so comprehensively, when Gaelic was essentially the dominant