Another Frivolous Hobby

Another frivolous hobby of mine is the manufacturing of theories. I don't mean scientific theories. I mean theories in the lay sense. The idea is to come up with plausible but unproven explanations for things that sound like they might have been proven if they had been adequately bolstered with all the studies and footnotes and expert opinions that one usually expects theories to be bolstered by. I like to make these up. Today I will share my all time favorite of these, which I call, "How Scotland Got Its Name."

Somewhere to the Northeast of the Balkan Peninsula in the neighborhood of what is now the Ukraine, there lived in the time of the ancient Greeks a people we in retrospect call The Scythians. We pronounce that as if it were spelled Sithians. But that was not how their name was pronounced in their time. We in fact derive the spelling of their name from the Romans, who wrote it SCYTHIA, who transcribed from the Greeks, who in turn spelled it ΣΚΥΘΙΑ.

Now, it so happens that we know how to pronounce ancient Greek, because they told us. They actually left behind manuscripts that describe in detail, with cut-away diagrams even, how to pronounce the letters of their phonetic alphabet. Put your lips so, put your tongue so, blah, blah, blah. The ancient Greeks gave us the first books on linguistics.

We also know, by the way, that the Romans, who studied extensively under Greek teachers, and didn't dare antagonize them, transcribed Greek into Latin extremely consistently. This is in fact the primary evidence we have for how ancient Latin sounded. Since C transcribed Greek K in SCYTHIA, therefore it sounded there as K not as S. And so forth.

Therefore the name SCYTHIA was in those ancient times pronounced roughly as we would pronounce scütia. The u with the two dots being like German u-umlaut. The h is gone because it turns out the Greeks pronounced Θ closer to T than to English TH, so much closer it's not worth trying to represent the difference, you wouldn't be able to hear it anyway.

So we should call the Scythians the Scütians. Let's do that.

Getting on with our theory, it's time for me to mention that eventually the Romans made military incursions into Scütian territories, and captured many, many, Scütians including Scütian soldiers. It was a common practice of the Romans to allow captured soldiers to live relatively free lives if they would fight for the Roman army. In effect the captured soldiers would have a choice, enslavement, or conscription. Basically the same choice we gave Americans of Japanese ancestry during WWII. We lock you up, or you go to war.

Just like what we did with Japanese-Americans, the Romans thought they'd better not use Scütians on the Scütian front. Better instead use them in wars on the opposite end of the Empire.

So a Scütian Division, or Batallion, or whatnot, I don't know the difference, was sent to Britain after the Romans conquered the Britonic Celts in the South of that island. And they helped build Hadrian's wall, which I'm sure you've heard of, meant to protect the part that had been conquered from the part to the North that had not yet been conquered.

To conclude this theory, all I have to tell you is that to further motivate the Scütian conscripts to do the boring job of manning Hadrian's wall year after year, and fighting the crazed barbarians that would occasionally try to over-run it from the North, the Romans said to the Scütians, "Look, if you can just hold out a while longer, and help out when we're ready to invade the North, we will name it after you, and to prove we mean it, we are calling it Scütland on all our maps, even now."