Elt For
Cus.
It is a good specimen of the mixture of forms we find in this part of the Pictish territory. Drosten is not a Welsh form but Gaelic; Ipe Uoret, Cornish; and Forcus unmistakably Irish. See Adamnan, ed. 1874, p. 120, for Forcus. An Ogham inscription on a stone at Aboyne has been thus read:—
Neahhtla robbait ceanneff
Maqqoi Talluorrh.
‘Neachtla or Neachtan immolated Kinneff to the sons of Talore.’ The word ‘robbait’ is the Irish word ‘robaith,’ used in the Book of Deer for a donation to the church.
[260]. The Manumissions in the Bodmin Gospels, from which the Cornish forms are taken, have Wurgustel and Ungust among the names.
[261]. Chron. Picts and Scots, pp. 45, 319, 329.
[262]. ‘Clerici illi, qui in ecclesia illa commorantur, qui Pictorum lingua Scollofthes cognominantur’ (cap. lxxxv.). Reginald of Durham was a Norman, and it probably merely represents his attempt to pronounce a word ending with a guttural. He would soften Sgolog to Sgolofth, just as the Normans softened Bannockburn to Banoffburn.
[263]. This is the process which George Chalmers has gone through in endeavouring to show that the Cymric language originally pervaded the whole of Scotland. He has, in vol. i. p. 33, an elaborate comparison between the names in north and south Britain, which in reality proves nothing; and in applying his Welsh etymologies to the names of places, he proceeds entirely upon the mere resemblance of sounds in the modern form of the word. This mode, which the author has elsewhere termed phonetic etymology, taints almost all the attempts which have been made to attach the local names in Scotland to one or other of the Celtic dialects.