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[Steaphan]

If you want to get a feel for how Scots Gaelic sounds, then just listen to the radio on the BBC website. BBC - Scotland - Alba

There are various dialects of Scots Gaelic, but all are mutually comprehensible.

[Hugh2]

Originally Posted by ANDY-J3

It's an innovative idea and if there is really hard evidence to support it people would like to see it.

The written word can sometimes be unreliable. (Haven`t you heard of spin doctors?). Take for instance the following passage. It contains valuable new evidence based on archaeological research but it also contains -not an invention or a forgery in this instance- but a careless error. Can you spot it?

Myths of Irish origin - history, language and national identity

Traditional stories and genealogies tell how Dal Riata was founded around AD 500 by the Irish king Fergus Mor and his sons, who colonised Argyll from north Antrim, the area of Ireland closest to Scotland. An entry in the Irish Annals of Tigernach states under the year 500:

Fergus Mor, mac Erc, with the nation of Dal Riada, held part of Britain, and died there.

The idea that the Scots came from Ireland has been widely accepted since a different version of the story was reported by the English monk Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in the eighth century, and is repeated in every history book.

Britain received a third tribe,...namely the Irish (Scotti). These came from Ireland under their leader Reuda,
and won lands from the Picts...they are still called Dalreudini after this leader.

Neither of these sources is a contemporary record of events. The entry in the Annals of Tigernach belongs to a stratum of the tenth century in a manuscript of the fourteenth century. Bede`s account is closer to the events described, but still five hundred years after the supposed date of Reuda (third century). Scotti was the word used by Roman authors to describe the inhabitants of Ireland, and the term was later applied to all who spoke Gaelic. The use of the same Latin term for Irish and `Scots` has caused confusion to generations of schoolchildren, aptly satirised in the spoof history book 1066 and All That:

The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland;
while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brakets) and vice versa.

It seems likely that the word Scotti was applied to all people who spoke Gaelic, a branch of the Celtic family of languages which includes modern Irish and Scots Gaelic. This type of Celtic is technically known as Q-Celtic, or Brittonic, to distinguish it from the P-Celtic, or Goidelic, branch which includes Pictish, Welsh, Breton and Cornish. The common language shared by the Irish and Dalriadic Gaels was taken as strong support for the idea that the Gaels had come over from Ireland as recounted in the original tales.

The conventional historical account is that the Scots migrated from Antrim to Argyll either around 500, according to Tigernach, or in the third century AD, according to Bede. They came from a small kingdom called Dal Riata, and the same name was given to their Scottish colony. They ousted a native Pictish population, and settled much of Argyll. By the late sixth century, relations between Scottish and Irish Dal Riata were strained, and a convention was held at Drum Cett to settle the position of the Scottish `colony` in relation to the overlordship of the overking of Ulster. After this date, probably 574, Scottish Dal Riata was more or less independent.

This picture of Irish colonisation of western Scotland, and eventually most of Scotland, has recently been challenged. If the inhabitants of Dal Riata migrated from Ireland, there should be Irish types of object and forms of settlement in Argyll, but this does not appear to be the case. The commonest form of settlement in Ireland at this time were small circular enclosures with earth banks, known as ringforts, which were probably used for keeping cattle as well as for living accomodation. No ringforts are known in Argyll, although there are suitable locations for them. Some stone-walled ringforts are known in Ireland, but these are not the same as the Scottish duns, which are usually on hilltops. Scientific dating of Argyll duns has shown that the type was in use from the early Iron Age (at least 500 BC) through to the early medieval period, so they cannot have been introduced from Ireland by Fergus. Crannogs are common in Ireland and Scotland, but again recent scientific dating has shown that Scottish crannogs were built from the early Iron Age, while those in Ireland only appear in the sixth century AD. The method used to date the sites, dendrochronology, measures and compares the varying width of tree-rings on timbers from the crannogs, the patterns of wide and narrow rings being dependent on the weather. This evidence suggests that crannogs were invented in Scotland (there are almost none in England and Wales) and later spread to Ireland.

Personal ornaments such as brooches and dress pins were one of the main ways of telling who belonged to what group or tribe. Everyone needed to wear these to fasten their cloaks and tunics, and different designs became associated with different groups. These brooches also came to be badges of different social classes: the Irish documents tell us that a gold brooch was suitable for a king, and a silver one for a noble; most people`s brooches were of bronze. The commonest brooch in Dal Riata had rectangular terminals and bevelled edges, but in Ireland the terminals had animal heads. Pins with spiral rings, rather like key-rings, were very common in Ireland, but almost unknown in Scotland.

A type of monument which is distinctively Irish from this period is the ogham pillar. This was a memorial stone erected to commemorate someone. The person`s name was inscribed in an alphabet (ogham) invented in Ireland which consisted of stroke marks cut in the stone. Several hundred of these stones are found, in all parts of Ireland, dating from the fifth to seventh centuries, but only two occur in Argyll, not enough to suggest that any number of people crossed from Ireland.

In fact there is almost no archaeological evidence to support the traditional view of migration from Ireland, and some evidence to support the view that there was considerable influence in the opposite direction, from Scotland to Ireland. All the evidence points to a continuity of the population in Argyll from the early Iron Age through to the medieval period. How then can we explain the origin tales, and the undeniable fact that Gaelic came to be spoken in Scotland?

Language and identity were closely linked as there was no equivalent of the modern conception of nations and nationality at this time. People saw themselves as belonging to a group of kinfolk, or as descendants of a renowned ancestor, but only as `Irish` or `English` in the sense of people who shared a common language. When storytellers recounted tales of a people`s origin, it was assumed that all those who spoke a common language must have come from the same place. Other peoples had similar origin legends, some of them patently absurd to our modern ears. The Picts, for example, were said to have sailed from Scythia, and the Britons traced their ancestors back to the Roman Brutus. When the first histories and king-lists came to be written down, these stories were reinforced by the invention of suitable ancestors for kings, often stretching far back in to prehistory. Painstaking detective work by modern historians has revealed how these stories and genealogies were often adapted by later rulers to serve their own political purposes. For example, the genealogies in the seventh-century Senchus Fer nAlban (the history of the Men of Scotland) were rewritten in the tenth century to incorporate the Fergus story. This was done to try to bolster the claims of one branch of the claimants to the Scottish throne. The first kings of Dal Riata that we can be sure existed were Comgall and Gabran, who died around 550.

The Dalriadans thought they came from Ireland because they could speak to people there, but not to Picts or Britons on the other side of Druim Alban. They did not appreciate that language can change over long periods of time, and that the language of people who were in close contact with each other would continue to develop in the same direction, while the language of people in other areas would develop in different ways. As Goidelic Celtic is older than Brittonic, it seems that the peoples to the east of Druim Alban shared in the development of Brittonic which was taking place throughout the rest of Britain, while, to the west of Druim Alban, Goidelic remained in use because of the close links with the Gaels of Ireland. There were also political reasons for stressing the Irish origin, as, at least for a time, there was a joint rulership of Scottish and Irish Dal Riata. An origin legend which showed the kings of Dal Riata in Scotland coming from Ireland helped them to claim sovereignty over Irish Dal Riata.

This new version of history sees the `Scots`of Dal Riata not as immigrant Irish settlers, but as `Irish` speakers who had always lived in Scotland, and who shared a common language with their Gaelic neighbours. Although the seaways enabled them to have close links with Ireland, they developed their own distinctive culture within Scotland.

From: Saints and Sea-kings The First Kingdom of the Scots
by Ewan Campbell (Canongate Books with Historic Scotland, 1999)

[Croi Sasanach]

Call me ignorant but.. TLDR

I would like to ask though, Hugh, arn't the P-Celtic languages much older than the Q-Celtic ones? I'm sure I've read that a dialect of Brythonic was widespread in Ireland in the pre-gaelic times.

[Steaphan]

Yes, I thought the oldest languages in Europe were:

Hebrew
Latin
Welsh (from the Brythonic)
and possibly Basque, the Goidelic languages come after.

[Hugh2]

Croi Sasanach and Steaphan -

Do a Google-search for yourselves.

Did you spot the careless error?

Try this interesting post:

RootsWeb: GENEALOGY-DNA-L Re: [DNA] Galloway-NW Irish

[Duthill]

Originally Posted by Steaphan

Yes, I thought the oldest languages in Europe were:

Hebrew
Latin
Welsh (from the Brythonic)
and possibly Basque, the Goidelic languages come after.

I'm not quite sure how you figure a Hebrew to be a European language.
Do you know something about the origin place of the Jewish people that is not common knowledge ?

Basque is the oldest known on record is it not ? , as far as I ever knew.

[ANDY-J3]

I take it we're talking about the oldest language which is still spoken today. I would have said Greek was the obvious choice because there is textual evidence from the second Millenium BCE. Basque is considered by many historians to be older but that is conjecture rather than certainty because there isn't any written evidence to confirm it.