Re: Four sub-families of Proto-Celtic

In article <1249682258.166823@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
VtSkier <vtskier@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

<snip>

Further, and I know it's extinct, but I'd like to
know more about the language of the Picts/Albans
of Scotland. Was it IE? Was it related to Basque?
Was it related to Central Asian languages (i.e.
Finnish)? If anyone knows anything, I'd like to
hear it. Everything I've read says there is no
trace so we can't know anything about it.

Asking a similar question here or in shm some time ago, I was referred
to _The Language of Pictland_ by Katherine Forsyth (1997):

<http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/archive/00002081/01/languagepictland.pdf>
(Warning! Large file, non-searchable: images of a printed copy.)

which makes a pretty strong argument (albeit qualified at many points,
in recognition of the scarcity & weakness of evidence) for Pictish
having been a variety of P-Celtic, cousin to Old Welsh and Cumbric,
concluding that

"[...] from the time of our earliest historical sources, there was only
one language spoken in Pictland, the most northerly reflex of Brittonic.
[...] I do not rule out the possibility of pre-Celtic substratum
influence on Pictish, in fact I regard it as all but certain. This,
however, should be considered utterly unremarkable (and as I have
stressed is not at all the same thing as the survival of a
non-Indo-European speech-community)."

--
Odysseus
.

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