Pictish inscriptions in the Gaelic Ogham alphabet
Ciaran
inscription in the Gaelic Ogham alphabet cited below. Note that
"mac"/"mic" means "son" in both Scottish Gaelic (Gaidhlig) and Irish
Gaelic (Gaeilge) - if you pronounce the Pictish incription "meqq" it
sounds much closer to the Gaelic version than to the P-Celtic Brythonic
version "mab"/"map" which means "son" in both Welsh (Cymraeg) and Breton
(Brezhoneg).
See the following web site and following extract:
http://www.edwinmorgan.com/cri_st_03_picts.html
St Ninians, besmeqqnanammovvez; and others. What these things mean
nobody knows; doubtless they contain both names and ordinary words. If
meqq at St Ninians really is "son" bes and nanammovvez may be names.(3)
Someone has gone to to the trouble of compiling the Pictish inscriptions
in the Gaelic Ogham alphabet - see the following web site and article -
note the "meqq" referred to above as the transcription of the Gaelic
"mac" seems to be repeated in the following:
maqqotalluorrh
meqqddrroann
maqqnuuvvhrre
maqqnahhto...
meqqnanammovvez
Gaelic "mic" transcribed as "miq" seems to be in the following:
miqavsallc
http://quadrireme.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_quadrireme_archive.html
Monday, November 28, 2005
Those Pictish Inscriptions In Full!
LC's earlier suggestion that I rig up a super-powered Linux cluster and
hire a black-market AI programmer to crack the Pictish code is a bit of
a sledgehammer/nut scenario, but it did give me a fantastic idea.
The idea being that I post all known Pictish inscriptions here, and you,
dear readers, notify me of any observations you may have - you know,
like any patterns, repeated phrases, frequency analysis (if you feel so
inclined), and the like.
Oo, it's a bit like an incredibly low-tech version of the Seti@Home
project! (That's enough now - Ed.)
So here you go, in no particular order:
qmi
nehhtvrobbaccennevv maqqotalluorrh
ammaqqtallv lv bahhrrassudds
vuunon itedovob b
(m)onnorranrr
bqi a b
irataddoarens
crroscc:nahhtvvddadds:dattr:ann bennises:meqqddrroann
von...ecco..
rginngchqodtosombs
eddarrnonn... tti... gng..
(e)tmiqavsallc
idbmirrhannurractkevvcerroccs
iru
..ehteconmors ...dov ...ddrs
etteca... ..v:dattua ...rtt..
hcsd.t..v.nh.t l....vqrrhmdnhq
allhhallorreddmaqqnuuvvhrre.rr
ineittemen mats
ttlietrenoiddors ..uhtuoaged...
inehhetestieq...inne
nehtetri
duv nodnnatmaqqnahhto...
caltchu
ettecuhetts:ahehhttannn:hccvvevv:nehhtons
iddarqnnnvorrenn iku(a) iosie
maqqnuuvvhrre..t
(...)besmeqqnanammovvez
eddarrnonn
ulucuvute
gedevem...dos
...vndar
Each line is a separate inscription, incidentally. Dots indicate where
there are letters missing. All of these inscriptions have been
transliterated into our alphabet from the Ogham alphabet they were
originally written in. Umm, I think that's it. Do your worst!*
* I do realise that some people may not be quite as excited about this
as I am. But that's OK.
posted by patroclus @ 19:54 38 comments
ANYBODY ELSE SEE OTHER GAELIC OR NORSE WORDS IN THE PRONUNCIATION OF
THESE PICTISH INSCRIPTIONS ? LETS HAVE A GO WITH OUR GAELIC AND
ICELANDIC DICTIONARIES:
e.g. "edda" - The Eddas are the primary texts for the study of Northern
mythology.
aes
have you read Robert Graves " The White Goddess" There is an awful lot
in there about Ogham Alphabets
Ciaran
Ciaran
Hmmm...could the "vuu" in "vuunon" be the lenited form of "mu" meaning
"about" in Gaelic - "mu" would become "mh" pronounced "v" and
transcribed in Ogham ?
Ciaran
Hmmm...could the "vuu" in "vuunon" be the lenited form of the Gaelic
"mu" meaning "about" - "mu" would become "mhu" pronounced "vu" and
transcribed in Gaelic Ogham alphabet ? This is just starting to sound
like stories about certain people.
allan connochie
"Ciaran" <cia...@ciaran.com> wrote in message
news:s9h6h.64485$rP1....@news-server.bigpond.net.au...
> Some form of Q-Celtic Gaelic may have been used by the Picts as on the
> inscription in the Gaelic Ogham alphabet cited below. Note that
> "mac"/"mic" means "son" in both Scottish Gaelic (Gaidhlig) and Irish
> Gaelic (Gaeilge) - if you pronounce the Pictish incription "meqq" it
> sounds much closer to the Gaelic version than to the P-Celtic Brythonic
> version "mab"/"map" which means "son" in both Welsh (Cymraeg) and Breton
> (Brezhoneg).
This is nothing new though. It is generally accepted that the 'meqq' could
mean son of. It could be Gaelic - which would be no surprise as the Picts
became Gaelicised, at first probably just influenced by, then probably
bi-lingual, then Gaelic speakers. However that is not the same as the
Pictish language itself being Gaelic. Likewise 'meqq' could simply be their
way of putting 'map' to print. It is also possible that 'meqq' has nothing
to do with son of - I'd doubt that myself by the fact is we don't know.
Likewise some have suggested that the inscriptions don't actually mean
anything - though again I'd doubt that.
What is true though is that the suggestion that 'meqq' could be the original
Pictish 'map' Gaelicised has been public knowledge ever since people started
looking at the inscriptions. Little things like that are what pushed some
scholars in the 19thC to suggest that Pictish may have been Q-Celtic.
However these views have ben roundly debunked for a century or so and
opinion amongst those who study the subject is just about unanimous. It is
generally accepted that the Pictish language was P-Celtic.
Allan
Ciaran
to the left of the line) which is transliterated as "q" represents a
hard "K" sound as in "Mack". There are other Ogham letters for "b/p"
which they would have used instead. "MAQ" is also used extensively on
definite Gaelic Ogham inscriptions everywhere Ogham is found.
allan connochie
What is very unlikely? The whole post? I've given several possible reasons
which have been put forward. It is all by the by anyway. Even if it is a
representation of Mac actually in Gaelic, which I said would be no surprise,
it makes no difference to the argument. No-one is denying that Gaelic didn't
spread into Pictland, influence Pictish and eventually replace it - what is
being said is that the Pictish language itself was P-Celtic.
I take it your point is about the 'meqq' possibly being the Pictish attempt
at puting 'map' to print? This is not my idea. I was simply giving one of
the possible reasons. Talking about the said subject Elizabeth Sutherland in
her book "In Search of the Picts" quotes Niall Robertson............."when
the Picts wrote their Ogam inscriptions in P-Celtic they might have used the
'fid' for 'q' to represent 'p', so that inscriptions using MEQQ or MAQQ
would have been read as MAP or MAPP"
She then goes on to explain "Ogam inscriptions in the other P-Celtic areas
such as Wales and the old district of Dumnonia used the 'cert' for 'q' if
they used it at all, but these inscriptions are written in Irish and don't
attempt to represent local language as the Pictish Ogams seem to do"
Again I have no wish to personally put forward this particular theory. It
was just one of the various theories around.
Sutherland by the way was responsible for establishing the museum at Groam
House in Rosemarkie as a Pictish centre. I think she knows a thing or two
about the Picts as she has dedicated a good part of her life to studying
them. She doesn't herself come to any conclusion about the MEQQ question,
which is possibly sensible, as it couldn't be proved one way or the other.
Whatever the answer is though it doesn't itself affect the overall
acceptance of Pictish being P-Celtic and she says "the opinion generally
held by Celtic scholars from the beginning of the 20thC is that Picts spoke
a P-Celtic language"
I could of course quote from stacks of volumes written by respected
historians but I thought this one would do to make a point. You suggested
that it wasn't you who has an agenda here, rather it is myself and the
entire Scottish community of historians who have the bias. These are two
quotes from William Ferguson's "The Identity of the Scottish Nation"
"Indeed about the one fact that modern scholarship has established with
certainty is that the Picts were P-Celts"
Now according to you scholars like Ferguson are pushing this idea to forward
their own agendas. The only problem is he makes repeated statements
throughout the book like this
"It was the Scots of Dalriada, an Irish tribe who settled in Argyll in the
sixth century AD and gradually extended their sway over most of Scotland
north of the Forth, who gave their name to the country; and more than their
name, for they contributed to and, to a large extent, shaped the subsequent
Kingdom of Scotland. For many centuries, and those the most formative, their
language, Gaelic, was the lingua scotica of the regnum scotica"
In other words your suggestion that people claim the Picts were P-Celts in
order to knock Gaelic is utter codswallop. The Gaelic language is important
enough that you don't need to reshape history in order to make it more so.
Allan
Ciaran
Excellent !!! Allan, thanks :-)
The Highlander
Please forgive me for nitpicking, but what you wrote directly above,
"Tha gu math" translates as "is well", a common response to "Ciamar a
tha thu? - How are you?"
You should say "sgoinneil", a word originally meaning careful,
needful, attentive, pleasing, but now commonly used to say "excellent"
.
You can even combine it with "gasta" (formerly spelled "gasda") as in
'How the Scots Invented the Modern World' - leabhar gasta sgoinneil! -
a splendid, excellent book!
Le deagh dhùrachd!
The Highlander
Faodaidh nach ionann na beachdan anns
an post seo agus beachdan a' Ghàidheil.
The views expressed in this post are
not necessarily those of The Highlander.
Ciaran
Moran taing.
Thanks very much.
Tha e gasta sgoinneil !!!
It is splendid, excellent !!!
Ciaran
Allan, the Wiki classifies Pictish as possibly Brythonic in the context
that all Insular Celtic languages are closely related anyway and it
presents evidence of this:
Insular Celtic languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Insular Celtic
Geographic
distribution: British Isles
Genetic
classification: Indo-European
Celtic
Insular Celtic
Subdivisions:
Brythonic
Goidelic
The Insular Celtic hypothesis concerns the origin of the Celtic
languages. The six Celtic languages of modern times can be divided into:
* the Goidelic languages (Irish, Manx, and Scottish); and
* the Brythonic languages (Breton, Cornish and Welsh).
The term "Insular" refers to the place of origin of these languages, the
British Isles, in contrast to the (now extinct) Continental Celtic
languages of mainland Europe and Anatolia. There is a theory that the
Brythonic and Goidelic languages evolved together in those islands,
having a common ancestor more recent than any shared with the
Continental Celtic languages such as Celtiberian, Gaulish, Galatian and
Lepontic, among others, all of which are long extinct.
The proponents of the Insular Celtic hypothesis point to shared
innovations among Insular Celtic languages, including inflected
prepositions, shared use of certain verbal particles and VSO word order.
They assert that a partition that lumps the Brythonic languages and
Gaulish (P-Celtic) on one side and the Goidelic languages with
Celtiberian (Q-Celtic) on the other may be a superficial one (i.e. owing
to a language contact phenomenon), as the identical sound shift (Q to P)
could have occurred independently in the predecessors of Gaulish and
Brythonic.
The family tree of the Insular Celtic languages is thus as follows:
* Insular Celtic
o Goidelic
+ Primitive Irish, ancestral to:
# Old Irish, ancestral to:
* Middle Irish, ancestral to:
o Irish
o Scottish Gaelic
o Manx
o Galwegian
o Brythonic
+ Cumbric
+ Pictish (possibly)
+ Old Welsh, ancestral to
# Middle Welsh, ancestral to:
* Welsh
+ Southwestern Brythonic, ancestral to:
# Breton
# Cornish
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_Celtic_languages
Now the above classification with the context that "Brythonic and
Goidelic languages evolved together in [the Celtic] islands, having a
common ancestor more recent than any shared with the Continental Celtic
languages" is more in line with my experience as a learner in all six of
these languages and finding heaps of commonality between them all.
allan connochie
> allan connochie wrote:
>> "Ciaran" <cia...@ciaran.com> wrote in message
>> news:455E9F8B...@ciaran.com...
> that all Insular Celtic languages are closely related anyway and it
> presents evidence of this:
> Now the above classification with the context that "Brythonic and Goidelic
> languages evolved together in [the Celtic] islands, having a common
> ancestor more recent than any shared with the Continental Celtic
> languages" is more in line with my experience as a learner in all six of
> these languages and finding heaps of commonality between them all.
And of course having never suggested that P-Celtic languages and Q-Celtic
languages aren't closely related I wouldn't disagree with anything written
there. All I pointed out was that the accepted view held by serious scholars
and historians who study the Picts and their language is that they spoke a
P-Celtic language.
cheers
Allan
The Highlander
'S e do bheatha!
You're welcome!
The Highlander
The following may be instructive: Notes I wrote some years ago.
The Children of the Celts
From the 5th century BC on, Celtic culture spread from an area beside
the Rhine and Danube to dominate central and western Europe and
Galatia in modern Turkey. It is probably true to say that whenever
place names contains phonemes like Gal, Gael, Gaidheil, Gall, Gaul,
Wal, Wall, Alp, Alba, Cymru, Cumber, Cambria, you may suspect a Celtic
origin, root or contact.
Discoveries of Chinese silk and goods of Greek and Italian workmanship
in Celtic burial sites indicate that the Celts traded widely. They
were warlike and boisterous, famed in ancient writings for their love
of drink, jewellery, bright colours and fighting. Often living in
hill-forts, they raided many Mediterranean lands, including attacking
Rome in 390 BC.
The Celtic Iron Age is generally divided into two periods; the
Hallstadt and La Tène (after 450 BC), named for archaeological sites
in Austria and Switzerland. Their characteristic style of decoration,
Celtic Art, spread throughout western and central Europe including the
British Isles, where it was still being used by scribes for the
illumination of the gospels in the early Middle Ages. The Celts also
made iron weapons and tools, which gave them an advantage over peoples
who had only bronze.
The rapid expansion of the Roman Empire resulted in many Celtic
settlements and countries becoming Roman, with Gaul (modern France),
becoming a Roman province by the end of the 2nd century BC. and
England and Wales by 59 BC. In most cases the Celtic language was
abandoned; although still seen today in place names; and were replaced
by Latin dialects which evolved into modern languages such as French,
Galician (the language of Spanish Galicia), Romanch (spoken in
southern Switzerland), Romanian and others.
The Celts now mostly inhabit the European western seaboard, from
northwestern Spain to northwestern Ireland. Celtic culture is still
found in Galicia, Spain, where the harp and bagpipes are still played
but the people now speak Galego, a dialect rather like Portuguese; in
Brittany, France, where Brezhoneg (Breton) is still widely spoken; in
Cornwell, England, where Kernewek (Cornish) is undergoing a revival;
in The Isle of Man where Gaelg (Manx) is used officially by government
and is being revived; in Wales, where Cymraeg (Welsh) is spoken by a
large percentage of people as their first language; in Ireland, where
Gaeilge (Irish) is an official language along with English; and in the
Highlands and Hebrides of northern Scotland, where Gàidhlig (Scots
Gaelic) is still spoken by many as their first language. For a sample
of each language, click the links directly above to see the same text
in the various languages. The Lord's Prayer has been chosen as the
example as it is fairly well known. In case you don't know this
prayer, the English version is provided beneath each language.
The Celts were a people of wealth, skills and culture but never wrote
down their laws, customs or beliefs. The oral transmission of
knowledge was a strong tradition and has survived to the present day
in Ireland and northern Scotland, neither of which were part of the
Roman Empire.
Compare these versions of the Lord's Prayer, (familiar to most
westerners) written in each of the still-spoken Celtic languages:
THE LORD'S PRAYER - English (Note: There are local differences)
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our
daily bread, and forgive us our sins as we forgive them who sin
against us.* And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from
evil. For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever.
Amen.
* (In Scotland, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.)
THE LORD'S PRAYER - Gàidhlig - Scots Gaelic
Ar n-Athair a tha air nèamh: gu naomhaichear d'ainm. Thigeadh do
rìoghachd. Deanar do thoil air an talamh, mar a nithear air nèamh.
Tabhair dhuinn an diugh ar n'aran laitheil, agus maith dhuinn ar
fiachan, amhuil mar a mhaitheas sinne d'ar luchd-fiach. Agus na leig
am buaireadh sinn, ach saor sinn o olc. Oir is leatsa an rìoghachd,
agus an cumhachd, agus a'ghlòir, gu sìorruidh. Amen.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE LORD'S PRAYER - Gaeilge - Irish
Ár n-athair, atá ar neamh: go naofar d'ainm. Go dtaga do riocht. Go
ndéantar do thoil ar an talamh, mar dhéantar ar neamh. Ár n-arán
laethiúl tabhair dúinn inniu, agus maith dúinn ár bhfiacha, mar
mhaithimid dár bhféichiúnaithe féin. Agus ná lig sinn i gcathú, ach
saor sinn ó olc. Óir is leatsa an Ríocht agus an Chumhacht agus an
Ghlóir, tré shaol na saol. Amen.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE LORD'S PRAYER - Gaelg - Manx
Ayr ain t'ayns niau, casherick dy row dt'ennym. Dy jig dty reeriaght.
Dt'algney dy row jeant er y thalloo myr t'eh ayns niau. Cur dooin nyn
arran jiu as gagh laa, as leih dooin nyn loghtyn, myr ta shin leih
dauesyn ta jannoo loghtyn nyn oi. As ny leeid shin ayns miolagh, agh
livrey shin veih olk. Amen.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE LORD'S PRAYER - Cymraeg - Welsh
Ein Tad, yr Hwn wyt yn y nefoedd, sancteiddier dy Enw. Deled dy
deyrnas. Gwneler dy ewyllys, megis yn y nef, felly ar y ddaear hefyd.
Dyro i ni heddyw ein bara beunyddiol, a maddau i ni ein dyledion, fel
y maddeuwn ninnau i'n dyledwyr. Ac nac arwain ni i brofedigaeth, eithr
gwared ni rhag drwg. Canys eiddot Ti yw y deyrnas, a'r nerth, a'r
gogoniant, yn oes oesoedd. Amen.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE LORD'S PRAYER - Brezhoneg - Breton
Hon Tad hag a zo en Neñv, hoc'h anv bezet santelaet. Ho rouantelezh
deuet deomp. Ho polontez bezet graet war an douar evel en Neñv. Roit
deomp hiziv hor bara pemdeziek. Pardonit deomp hor pec'hedoù evel ma
pardonomp d'ar re o deus manket ouzhimp. Ha n'hon lezit ket da
gouezhañ en temptadur met hon diwallit diouzh an droug. Amen.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE LORD'S PRAYER - Kernewek - Cornish
Agan tas ni eus y'n nev, bennigys re bo dha hanow. Re dheffo dha
wlaskor. Dha vodh re bo gwrys y'n nor kepar hag y'n nev. Ro dhyn ni
hedhyw agan bara pub dydh oll. Ha gav dhyn agan kammweyth kepar dell
aven nyni dhe'n re na eus ow kammwul er agan pynn. Ha na wra agan
gorra yn temptashyon mes delivr ni diworth drog. Rag dhiso jy yw an
wlaskor ha'n galloes ha'n gordhyans, bys vykken ha bynari. Amen
Feel free to use these in any way you want.