A Very Short History of Scotland and the Scottish Language

Burns Night and the Coming Catastrophe

I feel like this won’t be short.

Oh no, it will be, I cut out most of the uninteresting bits.

Okay, but..

Don’t worry, it will still make sense.

Are you sure about that?

More or less. “Ahem.” What we know now as ‘Scotland’ was covered by glaciers until about 13,000 years ago. As they retreated, neolithic peoples gradually moved north from Eurasia. DNA tests on their remains tell us that these people had blue eyes and dark skin.

The first Scots were Black people?

Well it wasn’t called Scotland at that point, was it? But yes, like all early Eurasians they were Black people. Anyway, various waves of early people washed over the European continent, but the settling of the British Isles was cut off when a giant avalanche in Norway flooded what is now the English Channel.

Some of the first people to float across the channel after that, around 500 B.C. were tribes of folks we call the Celts, who were descended from a group in central Eurasia called the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Did they call themselves that?

No. That’s a terrible name for a tribe. We don’t know what they called themselves. But we know that Celtic is a family of languages descended from Proto-Indo-European, as are most of the European languages, as is Persian, and as the name implies, Sanskrit and Hindi.

Wait. The early Scots were related to Indians?

Yes. And Iranians and Germans and the French and the Romans and the people of the Iberian peninsula.

The Portuguese?

Yes.

The Basques?

Er, no. The Proto-Indo-Europeans—let’s call them PIE people—displaced another, older group of people who spoke a language similar to Basque. The Basques are the last holdouts of those people. Basque might be the last of the Neolithic languages.

Cool. What does this have to do with Scotland?

I’m getting to that. While the rest of the PIE people were basking in the sun…

I see what you did there.

…The Celts and the various Celtic tribes, including the Gaels and the Britons, were populating the British Isles. The Gaels in Ireland, the Welsh in Wales, the Britons in Britain, and of course in Scotland…

The Scots!

No, the Caledonians.

You said this would make sense.

It will. Suddenly, written history begins in 43 A.D., when another group of PIE people invade the British Isles: The Romans. The Romans established their main city at a ford on the River Thames and called in Londinium, and expanded their colonies from there, north to the Firth of Forth, where Edinburgh is today. Past that, they were never able to fully conquer. That remained the land of the Caledonians. The Romans remained in Britain for 400 years. During that time they established hundreds of bath houses (they were obsessed with taking baths) traded with the Celts, intermarried with the Celts, and also fought with the Celts. And they renamed tribes of Celts to suit their language. The called them “Scotti” and they called them, “Picts,” and of course, “Caledonii.” Roman Britains were perpetually harassed by these Scots and Picts and Caledonians. Hadrian built his famous wall at the outer edge of the Roman Empire to keep them where there were. But as we know, walls never work very well. By the end of the 4th century, the Roman Empire was revealed to have overreached. Germanic tribes were invading their borders from the East and Rome itself was sacked. Roman Britain was left on its own. When Scotti and Pictish tribes collaborated to invade south of the wall in 367, Roman Britons sent a letter to the Emperor pleading for help. The response, from Emperor Honorius, said simply,

“Look to your own defenses.”

Whoa.

Right! Britain might have become Celtic once more. But the Roman Britons did an odd thing. Looking to their own defenses, they started hiring Germanic mercenaries. These warriors were hired from the same Germanic tribes gradually eating away at the rest of the Roman Empire. Many Germanic tribes were either hired as mercenaries, or were already raiding the British Isles themselves. Amongst them, famously, were the Angles and the Saxons.

Uh-oh.

Uh-oh is right! The people we now think of as British, the name of one of the Celtic tribes, we also think of as Anglo-Saxon, because of the eventual outright invasion by these Germanic tribes. For the next 150 years or so, Germanic tribes took advantage of the soft, bath obsessed, Roman Britons and gradually took over. Mostly. They didn’t quite make it into Scotland where people spent more time sharpening their axes and less time relaxing in the bath.

I was wondering when we’d get back to them.

Well here we are. The land north of Hadrian’s wall was now free from Roman threat and was populated largely by four groups. In the east were the Picts, with kingdoms between the river Forth and Shetland. In the late 6th century the dominant force was the Kingdom of Fortriu, whose lands were centered on Strathearn and Menteith and who raided along the eastern coast into “England” (land of the Angles.) In the west were the Gaelic speaking people of Dál Riata with their royal fortress at Dunadd in Argyll, with close links with the island of Ireland, from whom comes the name “Scots.”

Did you just copy that all from Wikipedia?

Look. Don’t worry about that. The point is, modern Scotland is starting to take shape. Now also comes the rise of Gaelic culture, which seeps in from Ireland with the spread of Christianity. The Irish had famously preserved Christianity after the fall of the Roman Empire, protecting manuscripts and keeping faith during the ravages of the Dark Ages. Now they began proselytizing in Scotland, their cousins across the Irish Sea. The Gaels and the Picts eventually united to form the Kingdom of Alba. With this consolidation of power came a new name for the vast region North of the Firth of Forth: Scotland.

You’re not going to try to pronounce a thousand years of all the Scottish Kings and clans are you? Because that would be very dull.

No. But I will end with this. The borders between England and Scotland shifted significantly over the centuries. At one point the Kingdom of Alba almost took back the entirety of Britain, surrounding the Saxon kingdom of Wessex (Originally “West Saxony”) on three sides. Old English gradually evolved from the various German tongues of the Jutes, the Angles and the Saxons. And this new Germanic language pushed its way north into Scotland as the Vikings began raiding the English and Scottish coastline in 793. The Language of the Norse entered the chat, and mixed with the older German tongues to become Early Middle English. It became the tongue of trade, the Lingua Franca, in Britain and in Scotland. During the Reformation, in which Scotland broke from the Catholic Church, the two countries became further estranged, Scottish English retaining much of the ancient pronunciations and spellings. What we think go today as the Scots Language is based on Early Middle English, mixed with the accents and some vocabulary of Irish Gaelic. Linguists continue to argue about whether it is its own language or a dialect of English. When drinking in a Scottish pub, I recommend arguing the former. Pure Gaelic has almost vanished in central Scotland, though like in Ireland, it’s making a comeback.

The Scots Language began to go out of style as England exerted dominance over old Caledonia. By the 1800’s Scottish government and writers were turning their backs on Scots in favor of modern English. But not Robert Burns. Burns’ turn to the melodious Scots marks a revival. But the most famous poem in the Scots language, which is appropriate for this evening, “Auld Lang Syne” is not Pictish or Irish Gaelic, it’s more akin to the English of the 15th century, and means, literally, ‘Old Long Since.’ “Kirk” and “Loch” look familiar to English speakers because they mean Church and Lake. Kirk is old English, but Loch is Gaelic. So why then would it be so similar to the English word “Lake?”

Are you going to bring up the PIE people again?

I am.

Those who the Scottish called, “Sassonach,” which is the Gaelic pronunciation of, “Saxons,” were distant cousins of the Celtic people. As are the Portuguese and the Poles. The Romans and the Romanians. The Italians and the Indians. Which is why words like “lake” in so many of these languages are so similar. Lac in French, Lake in English, Lago in Spanish and Italian, and Loch in Scots.

What is the word for Lake in Hindi?

Look, um, that’s not important to the story of the Scots. A story that I will now cut short for time.

Fine. I’ll look it up myself.

***

I read this last night at our dear friends Doug and Robin’s ‘Burns Night’ celebration, their annual celebration of the birthday of famous Scottish poet Robert Burns. When we first starting going to these events I hadn’t yet been to Scotland and didn’t know much about Scotland, though I’ve been told by Scottish people that “Ian Webster” is an extremely Scottish name. Doug and Robin follow the Gaelic tradition of inviting people to read, or sing, or tell stories around the giant table they put up in their living room. They hire a bagpiper to play guests into the house. The bagpiper is usually the most colorful character of the lot, but always fun and always interesting. And of course they served haggis, “great chieftain o’ the pudding race” as Burns writes in his ode to haggis. There’s also a great deal of extremely good scotch.

Woven into this monologue is the theme of change, and catastrophe and the endless march of history. I thought about using this extremely simplified version of an extremely complex place to remind us, in light of the upcoming administration, that as awful and catastrophic as it seems, human history is marked by calamitous change. The gradual and then rapid fall of Roman Britain must have felt apocalyptic, but Britain remains, though the Roman’s 400 years there has been reduced to scant ruins. The U.S. is approaching its 250th birthday. The Native people of the Americas continue to live within the new countries set up by the PIE colonists (English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese) and to put pressure on the Southern border of the United States, though, notably, without the same violence offered by the Celts.

Like the Celts, the Native people of the Americas also come from Africa, originally, and we are all cousins—quite closely related in fact, in the long view of genetic history. The Native people of the Americas also populated these continents in waves, different language families overtaking others, forcing migrations of competing bands, in the same way the neolithic and then the PIE people have repeatedly washed over the British Isles.

It’s difficult to see history from ground level. One has to get some distance. When you have enough altitude, you realize you need to go higher still. To see the entire span of world history is to see what tiny specs we are, relatively insignificant in fact. Mere microbes crawling across a great sphere, pushing each other this way that. This gives me solace, though I know it does nothing for the people on earth under threat from totalitarianism and climate catastrophe. I guess my final thoughts before tomorrow are, for the meantime, ‘look to your own defenses.’ Do what you can for you and yours and the people you can help. Believe in Democracy. Believe in the Great Experiment of the United States, with its baked-in flaws and built-in levers for change. We’ve left those levers largely unattended. We’ve tarried in the warmth of the bath. Dry off and look to your defenses, and defend those who can’t defend themselves.

fig.1: A great chieftain o’ the pudding race