PICTS 



PIEDMONT 



109 



the Isles and west coast north of Argyll, nor indeed 

 of the counties north of Inverness, from the time 

 of Brude MacMailchon till the Norsemen came. 

 It is quite certain that the Scots colonised these 

 very early, and had, indeed, established themselves 

 in Perthshire. Aidan, the son of Gubhran, makes 

 expeditions to Orkney, and tights the Picts and 

 defeats them on the Forth, or even farther east- 

 ward, in Meanis. This aggressive energy, com- 

 Iiined with the other facts of the situation above 

 enumerated, would easily enable the Scots to 

 supersede the Picts iii power and language. 



The real ' Pictish question,' however, is what 

 the language was which they spoke. This question 

 must not be coufuse<l with another if allied one, 

 What race did the Picts l>elong to? The Picts 

 may have spoken a Celtic language though racially 

 possessed of little Celtic blood, and may have 

 retained non-Celtic customs as survivals of a lower 

 culture, as indeed they did in the case of female 

 -.iic-cession. Four hypotheses have been formed in 

 regard to the language and origin of the Picts. 

 The first, started bv Pinkerton and put by Sir 

 Walter Scott into tin- mouth of the 'Antiquary,' 

 is that they were Teutons, siieaking a Gothic 

 dialect; the second, maintained by l)r Skene, is 

 that they were Gaelir speaking Celts, and that 

 they ami not the Scots Dually eonqWTW in the 9th 

 century ; the third, due to Professor Rhys, is that 

 the Picts were non-Aryans, whose language was 

 overlaid by loans from Welsh anil Irish ; and the 

 fourth, held by two of the most eminent Celtic 

 scholars of the day, Professor Windisch and Dr 

 Whitley Stokes, is that they were Celts, but more 

 nearly allied to the Cymry than to the Gael. 



The materials for deciding the linguistic rela- 

 tions of the Picts, though fairly abundant, consist 

 almost entirely of names those in the classical 

 writers, in the king lists, and in the Book of Deer, 

 anil the still or lately existent place names of 

 ancient Pictavia. The main agreement between 

 the Gallo-Cymric and Gaelic languages is their 

 dropping of Aryan initial /> : their main difference 

 is their developing the labialised guttural y the 

 one like the Greeks into //, and the other, the 

 Gaelic, like the Latins into 7 or c. This fact led 

 Professor Khys to call them respectively P Celts 

 and i,' Celts. No native initial /< exists in old 

 Gaelic language. The name Picti, which was 

 usually regnnled as the Latin for 'painted men,' is 

 now considered inseparable from Pictones or Pictavi 

 of Gaul, now Poitou, and is therefore Celtic of the 

 P group. An old Gaelic equivalent is supposed to 

 exist in cichl ('engraver'), which leaves the old 

 idea of ' painted or pictured men ' intact. Further, 

 the Gaelic name rntthiti is derived from cruth 

 ( ' form, figure '), Welsh pr</d ; and the Welsh name 

 for Pict is actually Prydvn. The form Prettania, 

 undoubtedly used by the best Greek writers for the 

 Latin Britannia, makes it possible that the 

 Cruthnig gave their name to Britain. The mean- 

 ing of Bede's Pictish word finnifn/iel is practically 

 explained by himself as Wall's Head, where /H"H, 

 with its //, an-tters to Welsh /irnn ('head') and 

 not to Gaelir mm. Similarly Pern anil fiutit in 

 the king lists In-long to the P group ; but more 

 striking still is t\ie /iett of the Book of Deer, which 

 signifies 'a portion of land,' corresponding to 



Welsh pfth, and etymologically to Gaelic c 

 ('portion'). Pet or />if is a prefix in place-nan 

 in Pietland from Siitherlamlshire to the Forth 

 the present day, some two hundred being easily 

 counted, though the Gaelic Bal has considerably 

 extruded it in western Pietland. It is similar 

 to Aher an a place-name prefix, which is found 

 all over Pietland. This is the Abbor or Apor of 

 the Book of Deer and the Chronicles, and corre- 

 upond* only to Welsh Aber, older Aper, 'a con- 



fluence.' Minor points in the phonetics of the 

 Pictish names are the preservation of st and nt as 

 in Cymric ; ch, as in Ochil, Welsh Uchel, but Gaelic 

 Uasal ; it, in Naitoii, for Gaelic Nectan, being 

 Cymric; Elphiii for Alpin or Albin ; Bridei for 

 Brude, where , as in Welsh, changes to / .- the 

 Cymric forms of the prefix / or wr tor Gaelic for 

 or fer; and others. Names like Talorg and Mor- 

 cuiin remind us of Gaulish Argio-talus, 'silver- 

 brow,' and of Welsh Morgan. Modern place- 

 names like Dee ( ' goddess ' ), Don for Divona 

 ('goddess'), Tav, Eden, Nith or Nethy, and 

 Ythan can hardly be paralleled outside Gallo- 

 Cymric ground. The qu of Spey and Spean is 

 evidence of non-Gaelic origin. Dr Whitley Stokes, 

 who has brought together in a list all the extant 

 Pictish words from Tacitus down to the medieval 

 annalists in his work On the LiiKjiiistii: \'ultie of the 

 Irish Annuls, sums up the philologic arguments 

 with sufficient temperateness thus : ' The foregoing 

 list of names and other words contains much that 

 is still obscure; but on the whole it shows that 

 Pictish, so far as regards its vocabulary, is an 

 Indo-European and especially Celtic speech. Its 

 phonetics, so far as we can ascertain them, 

 resemble those of Welsh rather than of Irish.' 

 The conclusion to which we come is that the Picts, 

 whatever traces they show of a non-Aryan racial 

 element, with its consequent survival" of lower 

 ideas of marriage-laws, spoke a Celtic language 

 lielonging to a branch of Celtic allied to the 

 Cymric, but dialectically different from the Welsh 

 of Bede's time ; and that this dialect of the Gallo- 

 Cyniric stock was a wave of Celtic speech from the 

 Continent previous to the Gaulish which held 

 England when Ciesar entered Britain. 



S;i- ski-lie's I'luiinielet of the Picti and Scot* ( Kdin. 

 1SC7 1. where all the post-classical material is brought 

 together, and his Celtic Scotland, vol. i. ( Edin. ISSti); 

 Professor Kliyn's Critic liritain (Lond. 1K84), and his 

 Kliind Lectures for 1WJ in the Scottirli llcrinv ; Dr 

 Whitley Stokes' s work above mentioned ; Professor 

 AVindisch's article, ' Keltische Sprachen,' in Erach and 

 Gruber's Knciikloftddie ; Adamnan'g Coluntba (Kdin. 

 1874); Hem.esay'a Annals of Ulster (Dublin, 1887); 

 Kede's Ercltiiaitical Hixtvru and the other documents 

 in the Monumetita Historica JJritaniiictt ; Father Innes' 

 Critiral Etnay (1729; new ed. Edin. 1879); and Pinker- 

 ton's Inquiry into the History of Scotland. 



Picts' Houses, the name popularly given in 

 many parts of Scotland to the rude underground 

 buildings, more commonly and accurately called 

 Earth houses (q.v. ). The Brochs (q.v. ) are also 

 sometimes called Pictish Towers, tor the Picts' 

 Work, see CATRAIL. 



Picture-restoring. See RESTORATION. 



Picture-writing. See HIEROGLYPHICS. 



Pidgin-English. See CHINA, Vol. III. p. 195. 



Piece of Eight. See PIASTRE. 



Piedmont, or PIKMONT (Fr. jiied, ' foot,' mont, 

 ' mountain ')> a former Italian principality, which 

 now forms the north-west part of the kingdom of 

 Italy, is by the Alps separated from Switzerland 

 on the N. and from France on the W. ; on the E. 

 lies Lombardy, and on the S. Liguria and Genoa. 

 It included the duchy of Monferrat and part of the 

 old duchy of Milan, and now embraces the pro- 

 vinces of Alessandria, Cuneo, Novara, and Turin, 

 and covers 11,389 sq. in., with a pop. (1889) of 

 3,297,157. For an account of its geographical 

 features, see ITALY. From the end of the l'2th 

 century the name Piedmont was used as a collec- 

 tive title for the territories ruled over by the 

 House of Savoy on the east side of the Graian and 

 Cottian Alps ; the history of the region will be 

 found under ITALY, SARDINIA, SAVOY, and WAL- 

 JIKNSES. See, too, S. Butler's Al/utmn/ Xtmrtuarics 

 of Piedmont (new ed. 1890). 



