Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 784

Academy of Saint Gabriel Report 784

This report is available at http://www.s-gabriel.org/784

Some of the Academy's early reports contain errors that we haven't yet corrected. Please use it with caution.

Greetings,

Here's the information we found on "Broichan MacBrude," which you wanted to use as a Pictish name.

We have very little information on Pictish names, since the Picts didn't have a written language. What we have is based on fragmentary evidence from Gaelic and Latin records. We aren't even sure what kind of language Pictish was, although it appears to be distantly related to Gaelic. However, based on the limited information we have, it appears that your name needs only a minor spelling change to be an accurate 8th-century Pictish name.

We found the name <Broichan> in a Gaelic-language source from the 7th century. (1) Because Pictish and Gaelic are very different languages, we can't be sure if this is an accurate record--names of one language often get mangled when they're written by people who speak a different language.

<Brude> appears to originally be a title roughly equivalent to "king." However, <Brude> and <Bruide> are both found as names in the 7th century. (1)

The toughest part of your name to document is actually <mac>. <mac> is the Gaelic word for "son," and wasn't originally used by Picts. However, by the 8th century we have Irish inscriptions of Pictish names using <maqq> to mean "son." (2) We don't know if the Picts used <maqq> themselves, but since we have no Pictish records this is as close as we can get to a recorded historical form.

Given all this, <Broichan maqq Brude> is a plausible Irish form of a Pictish name. Since there are no Pictish records, this is as close as we will be able to get.

Arval Benicoeur, Margaret MacDuibsidhe, Talan Gwynek, and Tangwystl verch Morgant Glasvryn contributed to this letter.

We hope this has been helpful, and that we can continue to assist you.

In service,
Alan Fairfax
Academy of S. Gabriel

(1) Wainwright, F. T. (ed.) _The Problem of the Picts_ (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1955).

(2) Jones, H. R. "A Consideration of Pictish Names."

http://www.itd.umich.edu/~ximenez/s.gabriel/pictnames.html