From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: Pagan Rock Artists...
Date: 12 Oct 92 20:31:49 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

[ this is getting a bit off paganism - if people want to redirect to
  soc.culture.celtic, go ahead ]
lilleyc@cs.man.ac.uk (Chris Lilley) wrote:
[ about the indigenous languages of Britain ]
> Pictish was probably spoken on the East Coast (Fife, Aberdeenshire).
> Scots Gaelic is the West Coast, Highlands (basically, the middle) and
> most Islands - Lewis&Harris, Skye, N&S Uist and all the little ones

The usual story is that Pictish covered most of Scotland at the time the
Romans arrived (the south-west corner spoke Galloway Brythonic) but this
was replaced from the west by Gaelic (spoken by the Scoti, an invading
Irish tribe) about the time they left.  It's a while since I read this
stuff, but I believe the idea that the Picts were a non-Indo-European
people, maybe the megalith-builders, has now been abandoned.  Certainly
they seemed to go in for the same paranoid culture of hillfort-building
that characterized the Celts elsewhere.  They now seem to have been an
early wave of Celtic settlement.

An exhibition a few years ago at a museum in Edinburgh, "Symbols of Power
at the Time of Stonehenge", made a pretty damn convincing case that the
megalith-builders, whoever they were, were no matriarchal egalitarians,
either.  Any ancient culture that puts several years' worth of human mine
labour in gold round somebody's neck must have a massively pyramidal
wealth/power hierarchy.


> The version of Scots Gaelic in the Orkneys is somewhat influenced by Norse.

Like influenced out of existence.  Orkney and Shetland were completely
absorbed into the Norse culture area and then absorbed into the mostly-
Scots-speaking kingdom of Scotland in the Middle Ages (long before
Scotland, with its political centre in Fife, managed to control the
Highland landmass in between).


> I have had the languages described to me in terms of concentric rings.
> Perhaps someone who knows more (Jack?) could comment? Is this accurate?
> The outer ring covers an arc, anticlockwise, through Shetland, Orkney,
> NW Scotland, the Hebrides, Eire and to the Pyrrenees. These people
> have a common, harder language.
> The middle ring, concentric with the outer, covers Wales, Cornwall,
> Brittany and I believe the Isle of Man as well. These all speak/spoke
> a similar, softer language.

The usual classification is into "P-Celtic" (Irish, Manx, Scots Gaelic) and
"Q-Celtic" (Brythonic, Gaulish, Welsh, Cornish, Breton).  They do have the
distribution you give here, except that the Celtic language in Spain was
Galician, spoken in the north-west corner, not in the Pyrenees; I'm not sure
which branch it belonged to.  The distinction is made by a particular
consonant shift; I don't hear one group as sounding "harder" than the other.


> The outer and middle ring are both Celtic languages.  The inner ring covers
> Lowland Scots, Northumbria, and Geordieland ;-) and is not Celtic.  When it
> was described to me, the implication was that the older languages were to
> the outside and has been pushed out to the 'edges' with each new culture.

This is more or less right.  There are only three common words surviving in
English from Old Brythonic: "down" (from "dun", meaning "hill"), "mummy" and
"daddy" ("mother" and "father", with no baby-talk associations, in Q-Celtic).
The last two speak volumes about what must have happened.

Another group of Celts (probably related to the Gauls) finished up in central
Anatolia around Ankara (a Celtic placename).


> Does anyone know the current status of the theory that the Basque language
> in the Pyrennees is a) a development of CroMagnon (!) and b) is the language
> of some Wiccan chants such as the 'Eko Eko Arazac' one?

For (a), its basic stratum certainly must have separated from anything else
spoken in Europe well over 10,000 years ago - the only candidate that ever
looked like a plausible relative is Georgian.  (b) sounds like something a
Gimbutas disciple might go for, since it attributes the ultimate origins of
Wicca to somebody other than the Indo-Europeans; is that in fact where it
comes from?

-- 
--  Jack Campin    room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
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