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Scotching the Scotch : from the east or from the west? (British History)
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EndlesslyRocking



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What did St.Columba speak? What did the Picts speak?

"We know on the contemporary authority of Bede that the Pictish and Scottish (Dalriadan) languages were quite distinct, and Bede's statement receives further support from Adomnan's Life of St Columba, where it is recorded that Columba had to speak to the Picts through an interpreter."

I understood the part in THOBR about the picts speaking Gaelic, but I thought this is what Columba spoke too. Upon reading this quote in another book, I'm now confused.
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Oliver Gillie



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Hatty says: "I was under the impression that surnames are a relatively recent introduction and that people were known by first names plus moniker referring to personal attributes."

According to THBOR surnames became fixed in the 14th century for taxation reasons. And according to Reaney patronymic surnames in England "originated later than generally thought", whatever that means. Reaney is quoted here by K. Schurer in "Surnames and the search for regions" which is on the web. I don't have Reaney's book (P.H.Reaney, The origin of English surnames, London 1967).

Much more interesting though Schurer says: "The high density areas of patronymic and metronymic surnames shown in figure 2 show a high degree of correspondence with the areas of pre-880 Danish settlement shown on the map given in G. Fellows-Jenson, "Variation in naming practice in areas of Viking settlement in the British Isles" in Postles, "Naming, Society and regional identity".

I don't think it matters much when surnames were fixed when we are discussing patronymics. The point about patronymics is surely that we are identifying survival of a custom, rather than a name, and I really don't know how helpful this is. But it may point to language because as we all know the Scots gaelic patronymic is Mac and the Welsh patronymnic is the genitive "s" as in Jones from John.
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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The point about patronymics is surely that we are identifying survival of a custom, rather than a name

Looking at medieval taxation lists and feudal rolls, surnames do indeed appear but they refer to professions mainly. Maybe only the aristos had a family name as such, pertaining to hereditary estates.
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DPCrisp


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Apparently surnames seem to stay in particular regions for yonks.

That means people stay in particular regions for yonks and reflects a central claim of Applied Epistemology: history is basically boring, things are very static... but not altogether inert.

"Distribution of patronymic and metronymic surnames by parish, 1881"... suggests that in Britain patronymics... and metronymics {The Notes say "patronymic and metronymic surnames ending in -son".}... follow a geographical distribution of what was, I imagine, the Danelaw.

Maps of the Danelaw vary, but this is typical:


Shame the -nymic map doesn't include Scotland.

Of course, the map shows -son to be concentrated in the north, but they do still exist all over the country. You'd think the cultural practice of calling yourself after your father {so cousins will have had different names} would stay within some cultural boundaries -- unless we think individual families maintain their own sense of heritage, regardless of their neighbours', which I think is generally not the case -- so this distribution must reflect something 'natural' about the people when their surnames were 'fixed' (whether that was a protracted or sudden process).

Here's what popped into my head:

The map for -s shows that Wales had an entirely different system from England -- which is fair enough, since there is a cultural divide there -- but being named after one of your parents was common to Wales and northern England. It seems to me that these both reflect a lack of imagination, as it were.

In southern England, the -son names are mixed with the great multitude of names denoting home towns, professions, epithets and whatever else. There was a lot to choose from when selecting a name in hustling, bustling England. If names were set arbitrarily, all sudden like, for tax purposes, then a diversity of names reflects a diversity of mental journeys people could take in settling on them. "I'm John's son" perhaps reflects the much more limited palette of the much more rural-and-nothing-else north.

"I'm a farm labourer."
"Tell me something I didn't know."
"I'm John's son."
"Johnson it is then."


---

Where did I read that Sweden recently (20th century? 19th?) had to dream up thousands of new surnames, because they had had so few, things were getting cumbersome? Did they in fact get the -son thing from us?
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DPCrisp


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I was under the impression that surnames are a relatively recent introduction and that people were known by first names plus moniker referring to personal attributes.

For patronymic names to be family names, they must have been frozen at some point, since by definition, they ought to change every generation. I suppose all surnames are snapshots... even your home town's name. There's no point naming people in Ashford 'Ashford': it only makes sense for people from Ashford living somewhere else.

The only reason for surnames not to be arbitrary, i.e. to be dictated by something, would be for, say, the family profession to be rather rigidly entrenched as the family profession. Is there any reason to think that was the case?

Seems funny to tar the children with the father's brush.
"I am John's son: why are you calling me Adamson? That was his father."
"Nope, you're all Adamsons as far as I'm concerned and you owe..."


Or is it about tarring the father with the children's brush?
"These are your kids and you owe..."
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DPCrisp


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I understood the part in THOBR about the picts speaking Gaelic, but I thought this is what Columba spoke too. Upon reading this quote in another book, I'm now confused.

It's no problem if the picts are in fact either English or Norse.
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Mick Harper
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If you thought the Swedes were boring, in France it is illegal to give your kid any name other than of the (very few) official ones. I suppose this is the origin of all those Jean-Claudes -- people'll do anything to be a little bit distinctive.
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Mick Harper
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What did St.Columba speak? What did the Picts speak?

"We know on the contemporary authority of Bede that the Pictish and Scottish (Dalriadan) languages were quite distinct, and Bede's statement receives further support from Adomnan's Life of St Columba, where it is recorded that Columba had to speak to the Picts through an interpreter."

I understood the part in THOBR about the picts speaking Gaelic, but I thought this is what Columba spoke too. Upon reading this quote in another book, I'm now confused.

You're right, this is bad news for me. However some points should be made:
1. The bit in Bede about the languages spoken in Britain comes right at the beginning and is supposed by some 'experts' (including me, though my interest here is clearly not expertise) to be a later interpolation.
2. Dalriada is in the southern ie 'English' (THOBR English, not Bediean English) bit of Scotland
3. Even if Adomnan is correct there is still the question of whether Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic are sufficiently dissimilar as to require translation. I am told they are 'the same language' but I am never quite sure what that means (cf Spanish and Portuguese, Hindi and Urdu) when it comes down to A talking to B.

Obviously this last point can be cleared up now -- does anybody know whether it is true today? And if so, is the difference sufficient to account for fifteen hundred years of further drift?
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Mick Harper
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Further to the above: if THOBR is correct there is just the small possibility that St Columba spoke English and therefore needed translators to speak to the Gaelic Picts. Though this would put too many fish into too many irons to ponder seriously.
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Oliver Gillie



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does anybody know whether it is true today?

I have been told by Gaelic speakers on the West coast of Scotland that it can be quite difficult for them to understand a Gaelic speaker from a different settlement/island/valley because of local differences in the language. The explanation that was given to me was that the amount of "Norse" in Gaelic varies with the location and is greater in the northern than in the more southerly parts of Scotland - although there is very little Gaelic spoken now in southern (meaning south-western) Scotland.

We think today of discrete languages but when there was much less mobility and most people spent their whole life in a small area languages probably varied a great deal more -- but also they often varied in a cline whereas now because of mass communications they vary with sudden shifts. We often go to a place in France in the Alpes Maritimes near the Italian border. You go across the border and suddenly everyone is speaking Italian whereas in the past they had a common version of Provencal that was spoken by both Italians and French.
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Oliver Gillie



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and I have several times been told that Scots and Welsh Gaelic speakers can't understand a thing the other says.
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Ray



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Moving away from the immediate subject matter - sorry but I've missed out on earlier opportunities - I've been looking at place-names in Ayrshire and ascertained that the Kil part of Kilwinning, Kilmarnock, Kilbride etc. = cil = cell = Culdee.

Culdees, I read, were the earliest Christians in Scotland. The term Culdee is associated with the the term cil.

Now, according to Chambers dictionary (Scottish, and essential for the Observer AZED puzzle) the word cell is ultimately derived from the Latin celare (to cover). It is, of course, also cognate with the Germanic Keller - as in Bierkeller - and a wide range of IE words. Which would suggest that Culdees were named after the cells they inhabited.

Yet according to the same dictionary Culdee derives from (I quote) Old Irish cele de, servant or companion of God, Latinised by Boece into Culdei(pl) as if cultores Dei.

Further, Culdee is uncannily similar, both in appearance and pronunciation, to Chaldee - an adherent of the early Syriac church. And it doesn't stop there.

Chambers defines the term Chaldee as: relating to Chaldaea, an ancient region of S Babylon ... a soothsayer (rare); a member of the Chaldaean church. It doesn't provide the ultimate derivation of the name, so I shall:

Chaldea comes from the Assyrian word Khaldu, which means Land of Tin. It referred to the southeastern section of the Caucasus mountains, which at one time was the main, if not the sole, source of the Ancient World's tin - not counting the Far East. Bear with me; this is relevant.

The Chaldeans were therefore instrumental in the evolution of the Bronze Age and as such came to be rich, influential and very numerous. They are generally better known as Hurrians, Uratians and Aramaeans - all being names which connected them with Ararat, the sacred mountain of their homeland.

Eventually the tin was worked out and most of the population was forced to migrate - hence the collapse of the civilisation. The population splintered as groups spread south and west across the Middle East.

One such group, known to us as the Hebrews finally settled in the land of Canaan (Land of the Khena-ani, or Purple People), whose language they adopted. They preferred to call themselves Israelites, ie Warriors of the Lord. Nearly there now.

Without mentioning Solomon, because the Harper-Ash double act is too AE to believe in him, the Israelite tribe of Judea split away from the main nation to become a nation of traders. In partnership with the Phoenicians - a sea-going nation who never existed - they eventually discovered an abundance of tin and other minerals in the British Isles.

Around Loch Lomond there is a legend that some of the earliest inhabitants of the region were Jews and Egyptians (aka Phoenicians? - shurrup Ash). They came here, it's said, to mine a rare blue clay that they had tracked down to one of the islands on the lake.

The question is: does any of this throw light on David 1's seat of power?
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Hatty
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Ray wrote:
Culdee is uncannily similar, both in appearance and pronunciation, to Chaldee - an adherent of the early Syriac church

Were the Culdees/Chaldeans the same people referred to as Caledonians by Tacitus et al?

They came here, it's said, to mine a rare blue clay that they had tracked down to one of the islands on the lake.

Would this be the source of woad as used by the Picts?
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Ray



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Were the Culdees/Chaldeans the same people referred to as Caledonians by Tacitus et al?

Well, now you mention it... unless there's a proven alternative, I'd say they could be.

Would this be the source of woad as used by the Picts?

I don't think the clay's that blue. Surely woad was extracted from the woad plant?
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DPCrisp


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Is there anything special about 1320, when the Declaration of Arbroath says the Scots came from Scythia?

That'll be the Scots in charge, of course.
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