The Caledonians and the Picts
Where did Scotland and the Picts get their ancient names from?
In ancient accounts, Scotland was called Caledonia and the description survived into medieval use in the name of the Forest of Celidon, a site where the Historia Brittonum holds that Arthur fought one of his twelve battles. The town of Dunkeld in Perth and Kinross also seems to preserve the ancient name, but the origin of the term Caledonia has long perplexed linguists.
The name of the Caledones, an ancient people who lived in northern Scotland, is spelled by the Greek geographer Ptolemy as Kalēdonioi (Καληδόνιοι) with a heta or long ē in the second syllable. The Roman poet Lucan also treated the vowel as if it were long in his Pharsalia. His line unda Calēdonios fallit turbāta Britannos ‘the waves are not heard by the Caledonian Britons’ can only be taken to be metrical if the e is scanned long.
The name of the Caledones is not just important because it preserves Scotland’s ancient name, but also because the Caledones were considered one of the leading Pictish tribes in later Roman accounts. The Picts are mentioned in a work praising the accomplishments of the Emperor Constantine the Great as “Calidonians and other Picts”. The fourth-century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus similarly records that the Dicalydones were one of the two leading Pictish peoples: “the Picts are divided into two nations: Dicalydones and Verturiones”. Dicalydones has usually been assumed to mean ‘double Caledonians’, but what does Caledones mean?
The main problem with the name Caledones is that the long ē of its second syllable is not expected in an etymologically Celtic name. The Celtic languages shifted long ē to ī in words like rīx ‘king’ which is a cognate of Latin rēx ‘king’. They did develop a new long ē over time, but the later spellings such as Calidonia and Celidon can’t be reconciled with the new long ē of the Celtic languages.
The answer to the problem of the long ē of Caledones appears to be resolved by the Dutch linguist Guus Kroonen’s explanation of the origin of Old English hæleþ ‘man, hero’ and its cognates in the other Germanic languages. The Germanic languages record that their word for ‘hero’ exhibited what is known as suffix apophony – a variation in the vowel found in its suffix. Kroonen proposes that the original vowel was a long ē and the earlier form was *kalēt. This derivation suggests that the description Caledones meant ‘the heroes’.
This etymology of Caledones makes considerable sense from a comparative Indo-European perspective, but not a Celtic one. A Celtic people with a name similar to Old English hæleþ ‘man, hero’ should be expected to be preserved in ancient accounts as *Calītes. The Gaulish Caletes, who gave their name to Calais, have a similar name, but the e in the suffix of Caletes is short. The name of the Caletes derives from the adjective reflected in the Celtic languages by Middle Welsh caled ‘hard’. The Germanic word for ‘hero’ evidently indicated ‘(battle-)hardened’ originally and it seems to be reflected in the name of the Pictish Caledones.
The linguistic derivation of the name of the Caledones suggested by the Germanic word for ‘hero’ only makes sense if Pictish is an Indo-European language that developed differently than the Celtic dialects did. But this is exactly what analysis of the language of the Pictish inscriptions points to. The Pictish inscriptions show recurrent use of a grammatical ending equivalent to English ’s that is expected in an Indo-European language, but not an Insular Celtic dialect. Several of the river names of Scotland preserved in early works such as Ptolemy’s Geography also appear to have names with Indo-European, but not Celtic derivations. Everything seems to be consistent with the Picts being descended from the Old European peoples who migrated to Britain at the beginning of the Bronze Age and not being Celtic speakers.
The origin of the name of the Picts has been more controversial. St Isidore of Seville recorded that their name meant ‘painted people’ allegedly because the Picts used to tattoo their limbs. After all, in Latin pictus means ‘painted’. St Isidore’s connection of the name of the Picts with tattooing has inspired all sorts of artists to depict ancient Pictish warriors in quite fantastic manners. But most of the etymologies recorded by St Isidore are poppycock. He also recorded that the British received their name because they were brutes (Latin brutus), although that explanation hasn’t been quite as popular in the UK.
Instead, the Austrian linguist Julius Pokorny explained the name of the Picts as deriving from a cognate of Lithuanian pìktas ‘angry, evil’. Pokorny was one of the leading Celticists of his day and he was also an expert in Indo-European etymology. His comparative etymological dictionary of the Indo-European languages is his most famous achievement and it was long considered the Bible of Indo-European studies.
Pokorny recognised that Lithuanian pìktas is related to Old English fāh ‘hostile’, the root of Modern English foe, and an etymology of the name of the Picts that indicates they were a hostile people makes considerable sense. The Picts are not recorded by name in the earliest Roman accounts of Scotland, but they have been argued since the 1970s to be a tribal confederation that developed during the third century. The Picts were peoples from Caledonia who had come together to fight the southern foreigners – they were united by their hostility to the Romans. Pokorny’s explanation is only possible if Pictish is an Old European language, not Celtic, just as the name of the Caledones seems to only be explicable as a derivationally Old European formation.
My understanding is, or was, that Celtic is Indo-European derived, and is further segmented into Brythonic and Goidelic (which includes Scottish Gaelic).