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Such, then, was the racial distribution of Scotland. Picts, Goidelic Celts, Brythonic Celts, Scots, and Anglo-Saxons were in possession of the country. In the year 844, Kenneth MacAlpine, King of the Scots of Dalriada, united under his rule the ancient kingdoms of the Picts and Scots, including the whole of Scotland from the Pentland Firth to the Forth.
Besides the Goidels, or so-called Celts, and the Brythonic Celts or Britons, we find traces in Scotland of an earlier race who are known as "Picts", a few fragments of whose language survive. About the identity of these Picts another controversy has been waged. Some look upon the Pictish tongue as closely allied to Scottish Gaelic; others regard it as Brythonic rather than Goidelic; and Dr.
Its most marked characteristic is its preservation of the pronunciation of U as 'oo' and of QU, while the 'Brythonic' or Welsh variety changed U to a sound pronounced like the French 'u' or the German 'u' and also QU to P. There is a similar line of cleavage in the Italic languages, where Latin corresponds to Goidelic, and Oscan and Umbrian to Brythonic.
Such must have been Niall of the Nine Hostages, who was killed according to the traditional chronology about A.D. 405 on the British coast and perhaps in the Channel itself. Assoc. The decision of the question seems to depend upon whether we should regard the Goidelic elements visible in western Britain as due in part to an original Goidelic population or ascribe them wholly to Irish immigrants.
In the south of Scotland, Goidels and Brythons must at one period have met; but the result of the meeting was to drive the Goidels into the Highlands, where the Goidelic or Gaelic form of speech still remains different from the Welsh of the descendants of the Britons.
Rhys surmises that it is really an older form of speech, neither Goidelic nor Brythonic, and probably not allied to either, although, in the form in which its fragments have come down to us, it has been deeply affected by Brythonic forms.
As the type of Celtic speech that has penetrated farthest to the west is that known as the Goidelic or Irish, it has not unreasonably been thought that this must have been the type that arrived in Britain first. There are indications, too, that it was this type that penetrated furthest into the west of Gaul.
Its inscription is Goidelic: that is, it does not belong to the ordinary Callevan population, which was presumably Brythonic. It may be best explained as the work of some western Celt who reached Silchester before its British citizens abandoned it in despair. We do not know the date of that event, though we may conjecturally put it before, and perhaps a good many years before, A.D. 500.
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