Modern Scottish Gaelic is a recent branch of a common language and culture, spoken in what is now Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Mann, that is considerably more than two thousand years old. The history and culture of Scotland, particularly of the Highlands, is part of this culture. Gaelic place names are scattered throughout the country. Scottish Gaelic hero stories, family histories, law, and poetry have common roots with those of Ireland. The cultures share some music and art forms. [Everyone has pipes, but the great highland bagpipe is distinctively Scottish.] The people on Scotland’s west coast were seafarers and their Gaelic language would have encompassed astronomy, maritime technology and trade. In recent centuries, Scotland has created a large body of lyric Gaelic poetry of extraordinary beauty. Truly great Gaelic poetry has, in fact, been composed to simulate piping.[1]
Descriptions of traditions and indeed of everyday life of early clan societies have been handed down over centuries through oral Gaelic transmissions that were fortunately written down now and again. The conflicting assertions of rights voiced during the Clearances reflect fundamental conflicts of views expressed in Gaelic Brehon law and that of Norman legal practice.[2] Although Gaelic traditions were, in the main, transmitted orally there is valuable surviving written material as well – for example 150 volumes of late medieval Gaelic manuscripts on many subjects in the National Library of Scotland. A great deal of earlier written material was lost in Viking raids. Among the manuscripts in the National Library is a large collection of Gaelic translations of Greek and Latin medical writings, by such traditional medical families as the Beatons and the Conachers.[3]
Gaelic is the language of Scotland’s founding fathers. It was the language of the people living on the west coast of Scotland in the early years of the first millennium CE. Although there were roughly six major languages spoken in Scotland during this period, Gaelic spread from its west coast base throughout Scotland, supplanting or diminishing the other tongues, while Gaelic speaking kings assembled Scotland, as we know it today, from the lands of its different linguistic groups – at first Gaels, Picts, and Bretons, and then Norse and Angles. At one time or another Gaelic was spoken in almost all parts of Scotland.[4]
The Goidelic languages, Scottish Gaelic, Gaeilge and Manx, are part of the Celtic family of languages, which were once spoken over a large part of Europe. In the last half of the first millennium BCE, these were spoken (and to a certain extent written) from what is now Ireland to Galatia in what is now Turkey. This language group, identified principally by Edward Lhuyd in 1707,[5] is one of the major language groups of Europe. The group includes the living languages of Scottish and Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, and Breton, as well as the more ancient languages of Brythonic (spoken throughout a very large part of Britain in the first half millennium CE, and surviving in the Welsh language), Gaulish, perhaps Pictish, Lepontic (evidence from inscriptions between 550 and 100 BCE in Northern Italy and Switzerland),[6] and others. This large group is often divided into q-Celtic languages such as Scottish and Irish Gaelic and Manx, and p-Celtic languages such as Welsh, Cornish and Breton. These labels are based on the occurrence of p-like sounds in many p-Celtic words that have k-like sounds in corresponding q-Celtic words. For example, “son” is “mac” in the q-Celtic languages and “mab” in Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. The differences between the two groups are wider than this, however.
The place and time when the Celtic languages first emerged is a subject of active current research. A traditional view, originating around the turn of the 18th and strengthening through the 19th century, was that a people, identified as the “Celts”, spread east and west from a homeland in central Europe carrying a Celtic language and distinctive, quite beautiful, art forms with them.[7] There are references to Celts as a people by Greek and Roman writers. These peoples are not well defined in these references but they are very real, with bloody clashes between these “Celts” on the one hand and Greeks, Romans and others on the other. A sequence of distinctive art forms, termed “Celtic”, began to appear around 600-800 BC. The earliest of these was labeled “Halstatt”, after finds in the cemeteries around the salt mines in Halstatt, Austria. Currently the oldest evidence of what we identify as Celtic languages is found on inscriptions from northern Italy and south-west Iberia in the 6th to the 8th centuries BC. There is active work to extend these dates to earlier periods. Recent scholarship uses different methodologies to study the history of languages and distinguishes between the spread of material culture, populations, and languages.[8] A hypothesis that has elicited a fair amount of discussion in the past couple of decades is based on writings of Barry Cunliffe[9] and asserts that Celtic languages emerged as a lingua franca of trade along the Atlantic Face of Europe [seen as the western edge of the Iberian peninsula, and what are now Brittany, Ireland, England, Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland] in the Bronze age and spread by trade along the rivers into mainland Europe. Interesting variations of this newer view have emerged from extensive discussions and research.
Tòmas MacCòmhghan
Betesda, Tìr-Mhàiri
[1] For example, “Moladh Beinn Dòbhrain” by Donnchadh Bàn// Duncan Ban Macintyre
[2] Derick Thomson (1983) reviews the cultural clash involved in the clearances.
[3] For example the volume catalogued as Adv. MS.73.1.22 in the National Library of Scotland.
[4] These points are covered in most histories of early Scotland. Derick Thomson (1983) gives an accessible overview.
[5] E. Lhuyd (1707)
[6] Among other studies see Aldo Luigi Prosdocimi (1991) or introductory articles in Cunliffe and Koch et al editors (2010, 2013, 2016).
[7] This is found in many works. An accessible overview can be found in Fraser Hunter, Matin Goldberg, Julie Farley, and Ian Leins (2015). A shorter version, but with maps, can be found in the chapter “Origins of the Celtic Languages” of John Haywood (2001).
[8] Colin Renfrew is a key scholar in this effort. See Colin Renfrew (1987)
[9] There is a great deal of published material touching this hypothesis. A collection of papers explaining, developing, modifying, and challenging this view can be found in the three volumes Barry Cunliffe and John T. Koch et al., editors (2010, 2013, 2016).