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70-502: Sheep-counting systems ultimately derive from Brythonic Celtic languages , such as Cumbric ; Tim Gay writes: “[Sheep-counting systems from all over the British Isles] all compared very closely to 18th-century Cornish and modern Welsh ". It is impossible, given the corrupted form in which they have survived, to be sure of their exact origin. The counting systems have changed considerably over time. A particularly common tendency

140-599: A "plausible vector for the spread of early Celtic languages into Britain". There was much less inward migration during the Iron Age, so it is likely that Celtic reached Britain before then. Barry Cunliffe suggests that a Goidelic branch of Celtic may already have been spoken in Britain, but that this middle Bronze Age migration would have introduced the Brittonic branch. Brittonic languages were probably spoken before

210-473: A Celtic word that might mean 'painted ones' or 'tattooed folk', referring to body decoration. Knowledge of the Brittonic languages comes from a variety of sources. The early language's information is obtained from coins, inscriptions, and comments by classical writers as well as place names and personal names recorded by them. For later languages, there is information from medieval writers and modern native speakers, together with place names. The names recorded in

280-595: A common ancestral language termed Brittonic , British , Common Brittonic , Old Brittonic or Proto-Brittonic , which is thought to have developed from Proto-Celtic or early Insular Celtic by the 6th century BC. A major archaeogenetics study uncovered a migration into southern Britain in the middle to late Bronze Age , during the 500-year period 1,300–800 BC. The newcomers were genetically most similar to ancient individuals from Gaul . During 1,000–875 BC, their genetic markers swiftly spread through southern Britain, but not northern Britain. The authors describe this as

350-428: A discussion, see Celtic languages .) Other major characteristics include: Initial s- : Lenition: Voiceless spirants: Nasal assimilation: The family tree of the Brittonic languages is as follows: Brittonic languages in use today are Welsh , Cornish and Breton . Welsh and Breton have been spoken continuously since they formed. For all practical purposes Cornish died out during the 18th or 19th century, but

420-507: A great deal of literature survives in it, including the early Irish law texts. Classical Gaelic , otherwise known as Early Modern Irish , covers the period from the 13th to the 18th century, during which time it was used as a literary standard in Ireland and Scotland. This is often called Classical Irish , while Ethnologue gives the name " Hiberno-Scottish Gaelic " to this standardised written language. As long as this written language

490-578: A group rather than when grazing at large on open ground. Their use is also attested in a "knitting song" known to be sung around the middle of the nineteenth century in Wensleydale , Yorkshire , beginning "yahn, tayhn, tether, mether, mimph". The counting system has been used for products sold within Northern England , such as prints, beers, alcoholic sparkling water (hard seltzer in U.S.), and yarns, as well as in artistic works referencing

560-713: A pre-existing Gaelic culture on both sides of the North Channel . Dál Riata grew in size and influence, and Gaelic language and culture was eventually adopted by the neighbouring Picts (a group of peoples who may have spoken a Brittonic language ) who lived throughout Scotland . Manx, the language of the Isle of Man , is closely akin to the Gaelic spoken in the Hebrides , the Irish spoken in northeast and eastern Ireland, and

630-553: A progressive aspect form has evolved which is formally similar to those found in Celtic languages, and somewhat less similar to the Modern English form, e.g. 'I am working' is Ich bin am Arbeiten , literally: 'I am on the working'. The same structure is also found in modern Dutch ( Ik ben aan het werk ), alongside other structures (e.g. Ik zit te werken , lit. 'I sit to working'). These parallel developments suggest that

700-745: A regular development in Northern English in which the Old English long vowel /ɑː/ <ā> was broken into /ie/ , /ia/ and so on. This explains the shift to yan and ane from the Old English ān , which is itself derived from the Proto-Germanic * ainaz . Another example of this development is the Northern English word for 'home', hame , which has forms such as hyem, yem and yam all deriving from

770-738: A revival in Cornish has led to an increase in speakers of that language. Cumbric and Pictish are extinct, having been replaced by Goidelic and Anglic speech. The Isle of Man and Orkney may also have originally spoken a Brittonic language, but this was later supplanted by Goidelic on the Isle of Man and Norse on Orkney. There is also a community of Brittonic language speakers in Y Wladfa (the Welsh settlement in Patagonia ). The names "Brittonic" and "Brythonic" are scholarly conventions referring to

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840-571: A revival movement has more recently created small numbers of new speakers. Also notable are the extinct language Cumbric , and possibly the extinct Pictish . One view, advanced in the 1950s and based on apparently unintelligible ogham inscriptions, was that the Picts may have also used a non- Indo-European language. This view, while attracting broad popular appeal, has virtually no following in contemporary linguistic scholarship. The modern Brittonic languages are generally considered to all derive from

910-432: Is a far greater overlap in terms of Celtic vocabulary than with English, it is not always possible to disentangle P- and Q-Celtic words. However, some common words such as monadh = Welsh mynydd , Cumbric monidh are particularly evident. The Brittonic influence on Scots Gaelic is often indicated by considering Irish language usage, which is not likely to have been influenced so much by Brittonic. In particular,

980-628: Is derived from Old Welsh Guoidel meaning "wild men, savages". The medieval mythology of the Lebor Gabála Érenn places its origin in an eponymous ancestor of the Gaels and the inventor of the language, Goídel Glas . The family tree of the Goidelic languages, within the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, is as follows During the historical era, Goidelic

1050-463: Is for certain pairs of adjacent numbers to come to resemble each other by rhyme (notably the words for 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 6 and 7, or 8 and 9). Still, multiples of five tend to be fairly conservative; compare bumfit with Welsh pymtheg , in contrast with standard English fifteen . Like most Celtic numbering systems, they tend to be vigesimal ( based on the number twenty), but they usually lack words to describe quantities larger than twenty; this

1120-536: Is not a limitation of either modernised decimal Celtic counting systems or the older ones. To count a large number of sheep, a shepherd would repeatedly count to twenty, placing a mark on the ground, or move a hand to another mark on a shepherd's crook , or drop a pebble into a pocket to represent each score (e.g. 5 score sheep = 100 sheep). In order to keep accurate records (e.g. of birth and death) and to be alert to instances of straying, shepherds must perform frequent head-counts of their flocks. Dating back at least to

1190-613: Is probable that at the start of the Post-Roman period, Common Brittonic was differentiated into at least two major dialect groups – Southwestern and Western. (Additional dialects have also been posited, but have left little or no evidence, such as an Eastern Brittonic spoken in what is now the East of England .) Between the end of the Roman occupation and the mid-6th century, the two dialects began to diverge into recognizably separate varieties,

1260-516: Is proposed as the predecessor of Goidelic, which then began to separate into different dialects before splitting during the Middle Irish period into the separate languages of Irish , Manx , and Scottish Gaelic . Irish is one of the Republic of Ireland 's two official languages along with English . Historically the predominant language of the island, it is now mostly spoken in parts of

1330-497: Is sometimes used to refer to Scottish Gaelic, especially in Scotland, and therefore is ambiguous. Irish and Manx are sometimes referred to as Irish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic (as they are Goidelic or Gaelic languages), but the use of the word "Gaelic" is unnecessary because the terms Irish and Manx, when used to denote languages, always refer to those languages. This is in contrast to Scottish Gaelic , for which "Gaelic" distinguishes

1400-409: Is the origin of Derwent, Darent, and Darwen (attested in the Roman period as Deru̯entiō ). The final root to be examined is went/uent . In Roman Britain, there were three tribal capitals named U̯entā (modern Winchester, Caerwent, and Caistor St Edmunds), whose meaning was 'place, town'. Some, including J. R. R. Tolkien , have argued that Celtic has acted as a substrate to English for both

1470-457: Is traceable to Brittonic influence. Others, however, find this unlikely since many of these forms are only attested in the later Middle English period; these scholars claim a native English development rather than Celtic influence. Ian G. Roberts postulates Northern Germanic influence, despite such constructions not existing in Norse. Literary Welsh has the simple present Caraf = 'I love' and

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1540-774: The Gaeltachtaí are primarily found in Counties Cork , Donegal , Mayo , Galway , Kerry , and, to a lesser extent, in Waterford and Meath . In the Republic of Ireland 1,774,437 (41.4% of the population aged three years and over) regard themselves as able to speak Irish to some degree. Of these, 77,185 (1.8%) speak Irish on a daily basis outside school. Irish is also undergoing a revival in Northern Ireland and has been accorded some legal status there under

1610-695: The Canadian Gaelic dialect in Nova Scotia . Its historical range was much larger. For example, it was the everyday language of most of the rest of the Scottish Highlands until little more than a century ago. Galloway was once also a Gaelic-speaking region, but the Galwegian dialect has been extinct there for approximately three centuries. It is believed to have been home to dialects that were transitional between Scottish Gaelic and

1680-672: The Celtic languages of Britain and to the ancestral language they originated from, designated Common Brittonic , in contrast to the Goidelic languages originating in Ireland. Both were created in the 19th century to avoid the ambiguity of earlier terms such as "British" and "Cymric". "Brythonic" was coined in 1879 by the Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython . "Brittonic", derived from " Briton " and also earlier spelled "Britonic" and "Britonnic", emerged later in

1750-617: The European Union . Ireland's national language was the twenty-third to be given such recognition by the EU and previously had the status of a treaty language. Some people in the north and west of mainland Scotland and most people in the Hebrides still speak Scottish Gaelic, but the language has been in decline. There are now believed to be approximately 60,000 native speakers of Scottish Gaelic in Scotland , plus around 1,000 speakers of

1820-643: The Medieval Latin lingua Britannica and sermo Britannicus and the Welsh Brythoneg . Some writers use "British" for the language and its descendants, although, due to the risk of confusion, others avoid it or use it only in a restricted sense. Jackson, and later John T. Koch , use "British" only for the early phase of the Common Brittonic language. Before Jackson's work, "Brittonic" and "Brythonic" were often used for all

1890-738: The P-Celtic languages , including not just the varieties in Britain but those Continental Celtic languages that similarly experienced the evolution of the Proto-Celtic language element /kʷ/ to /p/ . However, subsequent writers have tended to follow Jackson's scheme, rendering this use obsolete. The name "Britain" itself comes from Latin : Britannia~Brittania , via Old French Bretaigne and Middle English Breteyne , possibly influenced by Old English Bryten[lond] , probably also from Latin Brittania , ultimately an adaptation of

1960-407: The medieval period, and continuing to the present in some areas like Slaidburn , farms were granted fell rights , allowing them access to common grazing land. To prevent overgrazing , it was vitally important for each farm to keep accurate, updated head-counts. Though fell rights are largely obsolete in modern agriculture except in upland areas, farms are often subsidised and taxed according to

2030-507: The 15th century, Scottis in Scottish English (or Scots Inglis ) was used to refer only to Gaelic, and the speakers of this language who were identified as Scots . As the ruling elite became Scots Inglis/English-speaking, Scottis was gradually associated with the land rather than the people, and the word Erse ('Irish') was gradually used more and more as an act of culturo-political disassociation, with an overt implication that

2100-621: The 1607 Flight of the Earls (and the disappearance of much of the Gaelic nobility), Irish was spoken by the majority of the population until the later 18th century, with a huge impact from the Great Famine of the 1840s. Disproportionately affecting the classes among whom Irish was the primary spoken language, famine and emigration precipitated a steep decline in native speakers, which only recently has begun to reverse. The Irish language has been recognised as an official and working language of

2170-499: The 1998 Good Friday Agreement but its official usage remains divisive to certain parts of the population. The 2001 census in Northern Ireland showed that 167,487 (10.4%) people "had some knowledge of Irish". Combined, this means that around one in three people ( c.  1.85 million ) on the island of Ireland can understand Irish at some level. Despite the ascent in Ireland of the English and Anglicised ruling classes following

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2240-480: The 19th and early 20th centuries. The Scottish Parliament has afforded the language a secure statutory status and "equal respect" (but not full equality in legal status under Scots law ) with English, sparking hopes that Scottish Gaelic can be saved from extinction and perhaps even revitalised. Long the everyday language of most of the Isle of Man , Manx began to decline sharply in the 19th century. The last monolingual Manx speakers are believed to have died around

2310-712: The 19th century. "Brittonic" became more prominent through the 20th century, and was used in Kenneth H. Jackson 's highly influential 1953 work on the topic, Language and History in Early Britain . Jackson noted by that time that "Brythonic" had become a dated term: "of late there has been an increasing tendency to use Brittonic instead." Today, "Brittonic" often replaces "Brythonic" in the literature. Rudolf Thurneysen used "Britannic" in his influential A Grammar of Old Irish , although this never became popular among subsequent scholars. Comparable historical terms include

2380-409: The 20th century, recording their speech and learning from them. In the 2011 United Kingdom census , there were 1,823 Manx speakers on the island, representing 2.27% of the population of 80,398, and a steady increase in the number of speakers. Today Manx is the sole medium for teaching at five of the island's pre-schools by a company named Mooinjer veggey ("little people"), which also operates

2450-441: The 5th century through the settlement of Irish-speaking Gaels and Germanic peoples . Henry of Huntingdon wrote c.  1129 that Pictish was "no longer spoken". The displacement of the languages of Brittonic descent was probably complete in all of Britain except Cornwall , Wales , and the English counties bordering these areas such as Devon , by the 11th century. Western Herefordshire continued to speak Welsh until

2520-454: The 7th century onward and are possibly due to inherent tendencies. Thus the concept of a Common Brittonic language ends by AD 600. Substantial numbers of Britons certainly remained in the expanding area controlled by Anglo-Saxons , but over the fifth and sixth centuries they mostly adopted the Old English language and culture. The Brittonic languages spoken in what are now Scotland , the Isle of Man , and England began to be displaced in

2590-871: The Brittonic languages were displaced is that of toponyms (place names) and hydronyms (names of rivers and other bodies of water). There are many Brittonic place names in lowland Scotland and in the parts of England where it is agreed that substantial Brittonic speakers remained (Brittonic names, apart from those of the former Romano-British towns, are scarce over most of England). Names derived (sometimes indirectly) from Brittonic include London , Penicuik , Perth , Aberdeen , York , Dorchester , Dover , and Colchester . Brittonic elements found in England include bre- and bal- for 'hill', while some such as co[o]mb[e] (from cwm ) for 'small deep valley' and tor for 'hill, rocky headland' are examples of Brittonic words that were borrowed into English. Others reflect

2660-496: The English progressive is not necessarily due to Celtic influence; moreover, the native English development of the structure can be traced over 1000 years and more of English literature. Some researchers (Filppula, et al., 2001) argue that other elements of English syntax reflect Brittonic influences. For instance, in English tag questions , the form of the tag depends on the verb form in the main statement ( aren't I? , isn't he? , won't we? , etc.). The German nicht wahr? and

2730-641: The French n'est-ce pas? , by contrast, are fixed forms which can be used with almost any main statement. It has been claimed that the English system has been borrowed from Brittonic, since Welsh tag questions vary in almost exactly the same way. Far more notable, but less well known, are Brittonic influences on Scottish Gaelic , though Scottish and Irish Gaelic, with their wider range of preposition-based periphrastic constructions, suggest that such constructions descend from their common Celtic heritage. Scottish Gaelic contains several P-Celtic loanwords, but, as there

2800-467: The Old English hām . Note: Scots here means " Scots " not " Gaelic " Brythonic languages The Brittonic languages (also Brythonic or British Celtic ; Welsh : ieithoedd Brythonaidd/Prydeinig ; Cornish : yethow brythonek/predennek ; and Breton : yezhoù predenek ) form one of the two branches of the Insular Celtic languages; the other is Goidelic . It comprises

2870-492: The Roman invasion throughout most of Great Britain , though the Isle of Man later had a Goidelic language, Manx . During the period of the Roman occupation of what is now England and Wales (AD 43 to c.  410 ), Common Brittonic borrowed a large stock of Latin words, both for concepts unfamiliar in the pre-urban society of Celtic Britain such as urbanization and new tactics of warfare, as well as for rather more mundane words which displaced native terms (most notably,

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2940-697: The Roman period are given in Rivet and Smith. The Brittonic branch is also referred to as P-Celtic because linguistic reconstruction of the Brittonic reflex of the Proto-Indo-European phoneme * kʷ is p as opposed to Goidelic k . Such nomenclature usually implies acceptance of the P-Celtic and Q-Celtic hypothesis rather than the Insular Celtic hypothesis because the term includes certain Continental Celtic languages as well. (For

3010-523: The Western into Cumbric and Welsh, and the Southwestern into Cornish and its closely related sister language Breton, which was carried to continental Armorica . Jackson showed that a few of the dialect distinctions between West and Southwest Brittonic go back a long way. New divergencies began around AD 500 but other changes that were shared occurred in the 6th century. Other common changes occurred in

3080-471: The continent, most significantly in Brittany and Britonia . During the next few centuries, in much of Britain the language was replaced by Old English and Scottish Gaelic , with the remaining Common Brittonic language splitting into regional dialects, eventually evolving into Welsh , Cornish , Breton , Cumbric , and probably Pictish . Welsh and Breton continue to be spoken as native languages, while

3150-511: The elements der-/dar-/dur- and -went e.g. Derwent, Darwen, Deer, Adur, Dour, Darent, and Went. These names exhibit multiple different Celtic roots. One is * dubri- 'water' (Breton dour , Cumbric dowr , Welsh dŵr ), also found in the place-name Dover (attested in the Roman period as Dubrīs ); this is the source of rivers named Dour. Another is deru̯o- 'oak' or 'true' (Bret. derv , Cumb. derow , W. derw ), coupled with two agent suffixes, -ent and -iū ; this

3220-621: The extant languages Breton , Cornish , and Welsh . The name Brythonic was derived by Welsh Celticist John Rhys from the Welsh word Brython , meaning Ancient Britons as opposed to an Anglo-Saxon or Gael . The Brittonic languages derive from the Common Brittonic language, spoken throughout Great Britain during the Iron Age and Roman period . In the 5th and 6th centuries emigrating Britons also took Brittonic speech to

3290-625: The language from the Germanic language known as Scots . In English, it is common to have distinct pronunciations of the word, with Scottish Gaelic pronounced / ˈ ɡ æ l ɪ k / compared to Irish and Manx Gaelic pronounced / ˈ ɡ eɪ l ɪ k / . The endonyms ( Gaeilge , Gaelic and Gaolainn in Irish, Gaelg in Manx and Gàidhlig in Scottish Gaelic) are derived from Old Irish Goídelc , which in turn

3360-518: The language was not really Scottish, and therefore foreign. This was something of a propaganda label, as Gaelic has been in Scotland for at least as long as English, if not longer. In the early 16th century the dialects of northern Middle English , also known as Early Scots , which had developed in Lothian and had come to be spoken elsewhere in the Kingdom of Scotland , themselves later appropriated

3430-507: The late nineteenth century, and isolated pockets of Shropshire speak Welsh today. The regular consonantal sound changes from Proto-Celtic to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton are summarised in the following table. Where the graphemes have a different value from the corresponding IPA symbols, the IPA equivalent is indicated between slashes. V represents a vowel; C represents a consonant. The principal legacy left behind in those territories from which

3500-561: The lexicon and syntax. It is generally accepted that Brittonic effects on English are lexically few, aside from toponyms, consisting of a small number of domestic and geographical words, which "may" include bin , brock , carr , comb , crag and tor . Another legacy may be the sheep-counting system yan tan tethera in the north, in the traditionally Celtic areas of England such as Cumbria . Several words of Cornish origin are still in use in English as mining-related terms, including costean , gunnies , and vug . Those who argue against

3570-495: The middle of the 19th century; in 1874 around 30% of the population were estimated to speak Manx, decreasing to 9.1% in 1901 and 1.1% in 1921. The last native speaker of Manx, Ned Maddrell , died in 1974. At the end of the 19th century a revival of Manx began, headed by the Manx Language Society ( Yn Çheshaght Ghailckagh ). Both linguists and language enthusiasts searched out the last native speakers during

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3640-616: The name Scots . By the 17th century Gaelic speakers were restricted largely to the Highlands and the Hebrides. Furthermore, the culturally repressive measures taken against the rebellious Highland communities by The Crown following the second Jacobite Rebellion of 1746 caused still further decline in the language's use – to a large extent by enforced emigration (e.g. the Highland Clearances ). Even more decline followed in

3710-399: The name of the river Trent simply comes from the Welsh word for a 'trespasser' (figuratively suggesting 'overflowing river'). Scholars supporting a Brittonic substrate in English argue that the use of periphrastic constructions (using auxiliary verbs such as do and be in the continuous/progressive) of the English verb , which is more widespread than in the other Germanic languages ,

3780-555: The native word for the island, * Pritanī . An early written reference to the British Isles may derive from the works of the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia ; later Greek writers such as Diodorus of Sicily and Strabo who quote Pytheas' use of variants such as πρεττανική ( Prettanikē ), "The Britannic [land, island]", and νησοι βρεττανιαι ( nēsoi brettaniai ), "Britannic islands", with Pretani being

3850-531: The now-extinct Galwegian Gaelic of Galloway (in southwest Scotland), with some influence from Old Norse through the Viking invasions and from the previous British inhabitants. The oldest written Goidelic language is Primitive Irish , which is attested in Ogham inscriptions from about the 4th century. The forms of this speech are very close, and often identical, to the forms of Gaulish recorded before and during

3920-687: The presence of Britons such as Dumbarton – from the Scottish Gaelic Dùn Breatainn meaning 'Fort of the Britons', and Walton meaning (in Anglo-Saxon) a tun 'settlement' where the Wealh 'Britons' still lived. The number of Celtic river names in England generally increases from east to west, a map showing these being given by Jackson. These include Avon, Chew, Frome, Axe, Brue and Exe, but also river names containing

3990-553: The present stative (al. continuous/progressive) Yr wyf yn caru = 'I am loving', where the Brittonic syntax is partly mirrored in English. (However, English I am loving comes from older I am a-loving , from still older ich am on luvende 'I am in the process of loving'). In the Germanic sister languages of English, there is only one form, for example Ich liebe in German, though in colloquial usage in some German dialects,

4060-464: The quantity of their sheep. For this reason, accurate counts are still necessary, and must be performed frequently. Generally, a count is the first action performed in the morning and the last action performed at night. A count is made after moving the sheep from one pasture to another, and after any operation involving the sheep, such as shearing , tagging , foot-trimming, mulesing , etc., although sheep are far less likely to stray while being moved in

4130-560: The region, such as Harrison Birtwistle 's 1986 opera Yan Tan Tethera . Jake Thackray 's song "Old Molly Metcalfe" from his 1972 album Bantam Cock uses the Swaledale "Yan Tan Tether Mether Pip" as a repeating lyrical theme. Garth Nix used the counting system to name the seven Grotesques in his novel Grim Tuesday . The word yan or yen for 'one' in Cumbrian , Northumbrian , and some Yorkshire dialects generally represents

4200-591: The sole Manx-medium primary school, the Bunscoill Ghaelgagh . Manx is taught as a second language at all of the island's primary and secondary schools and also at the University College Isle of Man and Centre for Manx Studies . Comparison of Goidelic numbers, including Old Irish. Welsh numbers have been included for a comparison between Goidelic and Brythonic branches. * un and daa are no longer used in counting. Instead

4270-495: The south, west, and northwest. The legally defined Irish-speaking areas are called the Gaeltacht ; all government institutions of the Republic, in particular the parliament ( Oireachtas ), its upper house ( Seanad ) and lower house ( Dáil ), and the prime minister ( Taoiseach ) have official names in this language, and some are only officially referred to by their Irish names even in English. At present,

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4340-440: The theory of a more significant Brittonic influence than is widely accepted point out that many toponyms have no semantic continuation from the Brittonic language. A notable example is Avon which comes from the Celtic term for river abona or the Welsh term for river, afon , but was used by the English as a personal name. Likewise the River Ouse, Yorkshire , contains the Celtic word usa which merely means 'water' and

4410-415: The time of the Roman Empire . The next stage, Old Irish , is found in glosses (i.e. annotations) to Latin manuscripts —mainly religious and grammatical—from the 6th to the 10th century, as well as in archaic texts copied or recorded in Middle Irish texts. Middle Irish, the immediate predecessor of the modern Goidelic languages, is the term for the language as recorded from the 10th to the 12th century;

4480-475: The two groups of Insular Celtic languages , the other being the Brittonic languages . Goidelic languages historically formed a dialect continuum stretching from Ireland through the Isle of Man to Scotland . There are three modern Goidelic languages: Irish ( Gaeilge ), Scottish Gaelic ( Gàidhlig ), and Manx ( Gaelg ). Manx died out as a first language in the 20th century but has since been revived to some degree. Gaelic , by itself,

4550-449: The two other Goidelic languages. While Gaelic was spoken across the Scottish Borders and Lothian during the early High Middle Ages it does not seem to have been spoken by the majority and was likely the language of the ruling elite, land-owners and religious clerics. Some other parts of the Scottish Lowlands spoke Cumbric , and others Scots Inglis , the only exceptions being the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland where Norse

4620-591: The word srath ( anglicised as "strath") is a native Goidelic word, but its usage appears to have been modified by the Welsh cognate ystrad whose meaning is slightly different. The effect on Irish has been the loan from British of many Latin-derived words. This has been associated with the Christianisation of Ireland from Britain. Goidelic languages The Goidelic ( / ɡ ɔɪ ˈ d ɛ l ɪ k / goy- DEL -ik ) or Gaelic languages ( Irish : teangacha Gaelacha ; Scottish Gaelic : cànanan Goidhealach ; Manx : çhengaghyn Gaelgagh ) form one of

4690-408: The word for 'fish' in all the Brittonic languages derives from the Latin piscis rather than the native * ēskos – which may survive, however, in the Welsh name of the River Usk , Wysg ). Approximately 800 of these Latin loan-words have survived in the three modern Brittonic languages. Pictish may have resisted Latin influence to a greater extent than the other Brittonic languages. It

4760-445: Was restricted to Ireland and, possibly, the west coast of Scotland . Medieval Gaelic literature tells us that the kingdom of Dál Riata emerged in western Scotland during the 6th century. The mainstream view is that Dál Riata was founded by Irish migrants, but this is not universally accepted. Archaeologist Ewan Campbell says there is no archaeological evidence for a migration or invasion, and suggests strong sea links helped maintain

4830-479: Was spoken. Scottish Gaelic was introduced across North America with Gaelic settlers. Their numbers necessitated North American Gaelic publications and print media from Cape Breton Island to California. Scotland takes its name from the Latin word for 'Gael', Scotus , plural Scoti (of uncertain etymology). Scotland originally meant Land of the Gaels in a cultural and social sense. (In early Old English texts, Scotland referred to Ireland.) Until late in

4900-456: Was the norm, Ireland was considered the Gaelic homeland to the Scottish literati . Later orthographic divergence has resulted in standardised pluricentristic orthographies. Manx orthography, which was introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, was based loosely on English and Welsh orthography, and so never formed part of this literary standard. Proto-Goidelic, or Proto-Gaelic, is the proposed proto-language for all branches of Goidelic. It

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