by Paul Kavanagh
Myth, misunderstanding and legend mix with fact in popular understanding of the Picts. Many years ago I met a guy who insisted that the Picts were in fact pygmies from Africa. He was deadly serious, though how a population of Central African people made it to Iron Age Scotland was never explained, CalMac ferries still don’t go to the Congo. Others have maintained that the Picts spoke a language related to Finnish or Basque, or even that they spoke a Germanic language ancestral to modern Scots. None of these theories is supported by the linguistic evidence.