The Scots Gaelic Myth

[Allan Thomson]

Please correct me if I am wrong but is the Gaelic spoken in Scotland not different from that in Ireland? Many place names, even districts, seem to have more in common with Welsh than Gaelic. Carrick, for instance, and the likes of “Aber” as in Aberdeen, Abernethy, Aberlour etc. . William Wallace seems to have had some Welsh ancestry. Certainly names such as those beginning with “Dun” seem Gaelic and others beginning with “Pit” such as Pitenweem, Pitlochry, even Pittsburgh are seemingly derived from Pictish sources. And then we have place names such as Athelstaneford in Scotland which obviously derives from the English king, Athelstane so all we can deduce is that the Britain we know today is a melting pot of the original nationalities. The one external factor is, perhaps, the Norman invaders who, while they managed to rise to the top, have left little in the way of place names or language.

Some of that comes from the earlier P Celt Pictish and Strathclyde British names and I recollect there was an example of a place with the Aber prefix changing to the Inver Prefix within documented History (I think was around the 1500's but I can't recall much other details as it was in a book I read a long time ago).

The 'original' identifiable language of Caledonia was definitely of a P Celt origin.

Re Scots Gaelic being different to Irish, the root is the same (as with Manx) but a number of other influences changed the language as the years went by. Definitely the P Celtic language of the Picts and the Strathclyde British and also the Norse influences had an influence in shaping the language.

What few realise is that even in Scotland Gaelic differs according to region. My Father had an Aunty who came from one of the Islands and could not speak a word of English until she went to School. They visited the McRae's Monument at Sherrifmuir and she was able to translate the monument for them, but she remarked that it differed some what from the Gaelic she had as a girl.

I also recall at an interceltic event there was a group of young people who came from the Scottish Islands. They said that they found Manx Gaelic much easier to understand than Irish Gaelic (even though Manx Gaelic was originally documented by a Welsh speaker which has impacted on some spellings). I guess this is due to the historic influence of the Kingdom of Mann and the Isles and the Norse Connection (as well as an older connection through Dalriada).

I totally agree about Britain being a melting pot, and I think there doesn't seem to be enough recognition of the fact that the concepts of "Scotland" and "England" are in the terms of the history of the British Isles a relatively new concept, and both nations have made themselves bigger and more powerful in their history through the subjugation and assimilation of other people's and power blocs. The Isles were very much relegated to a distant compromised outpost of Scotland in comparison to their earlier powerful sea 'kingdom' ('empire'?) role as part of the Norse Gaelic kingdom of the Isles....

This is why I have a problem with the separatist so called nationalist groups who rally on Gaelic as a means of creating an identity, and have a chip on their shoulder about equally as unpleasant on both sides for the inhabitants of the nearby vicinities wars fought between "England" and "Scotland"... as said those days are over and in the past they must remain.....

One thing to bear in mind is that whilst Britain is still ruled by a line of Queens and Kings who are of Stuart descent, that there hasn't been a truly "English" monarch since 1066...….