The mysterious language of the Picts

Damian   Sunday, June 05, 2005, 17:39 GMT
It's an absorbing topic VINCENT. As I've said before you do learn a lot from this Forum...the genuine stuff anyway.
towrie   Sunday, June 05, 2005, 18:44 GMT
i read that they left no records of their language like an alphabet
vincent to towrie   Monday, June 06, 2005, 08:08 GMT
No, no, they used to write using the old ogamic alphabet, that's why we still have some records of their language.
vincent   Tuesday, June 07, 2005, 10:10 GMT
I guess nobody cares about this topic, (sigh) if only I had born in times of Arne Saknussem, the great icelandic alchemist who reached the very centre of the Earth in 1534, I could speak with him the olde and vanished piktisc languaige
Damian from Edinburgh EH12   Tuesday, June 07, 2005, 10:18 GMT
VINCENT: There's little else I can add on this topic to what I've already said...maybe I could if I researched a wee bit more on the history of the Picts and the Pictish Language. It's inevitable over time that cultures and Languages come and go. Maybe in a thousand years from now English may well have gone the way of Pictish, who knows.
vincent to damian   Tuesday, June 07, 2005, 19:27 GMT
thanks damian, so i'm not alone.... ;)
vincent   Tuesday, June 07, 2005, 19:30 GMT
of course i'm joking
but i'm sure that if i had posted a topic like "why do the french smell bad?" i'd have had more success
Brennus   Tuesday, June 07, 2005, 22:12 GMT
The last I read, only 14 inscriptions in the Pictish language have been found. Some written in the Irish Ogam script; some in the Roman script. Their meanings are uncertain at best. While they don't tell us a whole lot about the Pictish language they tell us enough to discern that it was not Celtic or even Indo-European. The language appears to have survived until about 1000 A.D. and disappeared due to the twin threats of Celtic Christianity coming from the Irish and Scots and from the Viking invasions where the Norse temporarily occupied the last Pictish strongholds in the Orkneys and the adjacent areas on the Scottish mainland.

While the ethno-linguistic affinity of the Pictish language is not none for sure the most commonly suggested ones are Iberian and Basque. A few have suggested even Eskimo.
Brennus   Tuesday, June 07, 2005, 22:14 GMT
none > Should be "known."
Brennus   Tuesday, June 07, 2005, 22:18 GMT
Actually, "Twin pressures" would probably be a better choice of words than "twin threats."
vincent   Wednesday, June 08, 2005, 08:18 GMT
Eskimos in Scotland? That would have been terrific! Do they really think pictish looks like inuktitut? in the link i put above pictish rather looks like basque. But if we could prove that the picts were Inuits, it'd be a great dicovery
Damian in Edinburgh EH12   Wednesday, June 08, 2005, 10:10 GMT
Eskimos (Innuit) in Scotland? Check out this link under the heading "Innuits in Aberdeen":

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/diss/news/issues/issues7/iss7-his.htm

In the 15th-18th centuries the winter climate in Scotland was very much more severe than it is today and very often the whole country was snowbound and icebound for months on end. Polar ice floes reached the north of Scotland and there were records of polar bears getting that far south when much of the sea between Scotland and Iceland and the arctic regions was frozen over.

In 1720 an Eskimo (Innuit) kayak was discovered on the coast near Aberdeen and it's now in the museum there.

Not Language related I know, but there you go.
vincent   Wednesday, June 08, 2005, 15:50 GMT
Damian, you're marvellous! thanks a lot
Damian from Edinburgh   Wednesday, June 08, 2005, 20:53 GMT
Nae probs, Vincent.
Brennus   Wednesday, June 08, 2005, 22:00 GMT
Damian is right. During a mini ice-age in the 16th century, a group of Eskimos apparently did reach the northern coast of Scotland and their descendents still live there although they are considered Scottish today.

It is believed that a large part of Europe was occupied by peoples related to the Basques and the Lapps (Saami) before the Indo-European invasions from further east and north began c. 2000 B.C. A few ethnologists have suggested that some of the earliest modern inhabitants of the British islands were related to Arctic peoples like the Eskimo but certainly more research needs to be done. I read somewhere recently that the Ice Man (Ötzi) discovered on the Austrian-Italian border has proven DNA descendents living in England today. However, no one has yet come forth with any suggestions as to what ethnic or linguistic group Ötzi might have belonged to.