Modern Pictish conlang

[Quintessence]

Hello, dear conlangers.

Maybe you know something about Pictish language - the mysterious and unknown language of Scotland, which is supposedly impossible to revive. Some claim that it is related to Basque or Etruscan...

Sound like a scary Halloween story? Yes, but no less interesting is that I decided to try to restore this language based on known records, place names and word formation rules.

I have already collected 120 Pictish words, 13 almost completely translated Pictish sentences and about 30 female and male Pictish names. The document with all this will be updated as soon as I find something new, the sources are at the end.

Document - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1isb ... ue&sd=true

Why did I decide to create Modern Pictish? Well, I think this is very interesting. Besides, I will be the first, no one has done this before me)

What are my goals? Create a community of people interested in the language (you can join it in Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/1158514018445249) and create a fully working language based on ogammic and Latin records, as well as word formation rules. Such a language would be as close to the original Pictish as possible.

Well, I have a couple of questions for you:

What do you think about this project? Is it even possible?

Would you like to work on modern Pictish? Which hypothesis of the origin of the Picts do you support?

Do you know any Pictish words, names or have you noticed anything unusual? Please let me know.

I will be happy to answer any questions or comments.Criticism needed.

[Arayaz]

First of all, welcome to the board!

Second of all, wow! That is an impressively bold project. If I knew anything about Pictish, I would love to contribute. Unfortunately, I lack both that knowledge and a Facebook account. :D

As for the origin of Pictish, I believe it's usually classified as a Celtic language, and that's certainly the most likely option. (I mean, look at your pronouns: mi, tti, ni ─ super Indo-European.)

[WeepingElf]

That's an interesting idea to pursue. I am also into re-creating lost languages of Europe; my main conlang project, Old Albic, is a re-creation of a prehistoric language of Britain, for instance. As Arayaz has already pointed out, most scholars today opine that Pictish was a Celtic language, probably of the Brythonic branch, but it may have contained many loanwords from earlier, possibly non-IE language strata. Apparently (I am no expert on this), the old place names of Scotland are to a large part analyzable as Brythonic, but there are quite a few which resist such analysis. Bede the Venerable at least considered Pictish to be a different language than "British" (i.e., Welsh/Cornish/Breton considered a single language), but "different" of course doesn't mean "unrelated". The notion that the pre-Celtic languages of the British Isles were Semitic or related to it has quite some tradition, but most Celticists reject it now as Celtic and Semitic have almost nothing in common except VSO word order and some typological correlates thereof, and who proposes a Semitic substratum in places like Mesoamerica or the Philippines?

And welcome to the CBB, Quintessence!

[Ælfwine]

There's very little known about Pictish, so I believe it might be difficult to scrape enough material for a full functioning conlang. Although this hasn't stopped people before from creating conlangs from scarcely known material! So good luck to you.

[Porphyrogenitos]

These days I think it is pretty well-accepted that Pictish was a Celtic language closely related to Brittonic, if not a variety of Brittonic itself. This paper provides an extensive discussion of the evidence for Brittonic Pictish.

Also, this is a bit of a spoilsport comment of me to make, but I would advise against advertising your project as a "reconstruction" or "restoration" of Pictish. To create a complete and usable language based on surviving evidence of Pictish is not reconstruction, but full-fledged speculative conlanging. Reconstruction would be going exactly as far as the evidence takes us, which would not be very far at all. I say this so that future prospective participants in your project will not be mislead about the nature of what you're undertaking.

[Quintessence]

Thank you everyone for your support and congratulations)
I received a lot of feedback from all of you, and I want to answer some questions:
1. Modern Pictish is not a revival or reconstruction of the Pictish language.
Absolutely yes. But I'm just trying to create a language that will be MAXIMUM similar to Pictish. That is, if someone else wants to do this, then it will be a little pointless in view of the fact that the most “Pictish” language already exists. That is, yes, Modern Pictish is in no way a Modern version of the Pictish language, it is simply a language that squeezes out from all sources of information about the Pictish language.
Plus, based on already known words, you can make word formation rules, and they will really be very similar to the original Pictish ones.
2. Conlang information will eventually run out. Of course yes, everything has an end. But after all the oghams are deciphered, all the names of places are found and all the known words are already in the language, you just need to use the rules of word formation. We take a word from Welsh, convert it to Pictish and that’s it, the word is as similar as possible to its Pictish original.
So, yes, thank you for support, maybe I'll update something soon.

[WeepingElf]

There's very little known about Pictish, so I believe it might be difficult to scrape enough material for a full functioning conlang. Although this hasn't stopped people before from creating conlangs from scarcely known material! So good luck to you.

You can fill the gaps with material from Brythonic. I use a similar approach for my Hesperic family (to which Old Albic belongs), which is a branch of IE so I can use whatever PIE words I need to fill up the vocabulary where no substratum loanwords are known.