David John Osgarby

3005032O@student.gla.ac.uk

Room 103
3 University Gardens
Glasgow G12 8QQ

ORCID iDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-5250-2438

Research title: What do the Symbols Say? A Linguistic and Statistical Decipherment of Pictish Symbols

Research Summary

My research aims to compile and compare datasets of Pictish Symbols and Pictish language forms to empirically test the validity of hypotheses about the form and function of Pictish Symbols. This research will build towards a linguistically grounded decipherment of the Pictish Symbol system.

My research questions are:

  • How do we determine whether Pictish Symbols represent language, and if so whether they represent words, morphemes, sounds or a combination thereof?
  • How do Symbols and Symbol texts vary over time and space?
  • What is the purpose of the Symbol Texts, e.g. identifying a person, group or location?
  • How do we use historical sources documenting Pictish individuals, groups and locations to decipher Symbol texts?
  • What do individual Symbols and Symbol texts encode?

My approach is interdisciplinary. I will apply methods from linguistics, grapholinguistics, and cryptanalysis to provide writing system models that best account for parallel corpora of Pictish Symbols and Pictish language forms. The emerging field of grapholinguistics will provide the formal framework of my research, and the application of digital humanities approaches, such as the creation of interlinked open datasets and the use of standard encoding schemas, will allow me to rapidly and automatedly test complex hypotheses across datasets.

Below are some photos (taken by myself) showing Pictish Symbols carved on objects on permanent public display at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.

WoodraeHilton of CadboleScoonie
Brough of Birsay Ackergill Aberlemno 2 (Copy)

Publications

Osgarby, D., & Bowern C. (2023) ‘Complex predicates and serialization’. In C. Bowern (Ed.), The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages. pp. 291-308. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198824978.003.0026.

Meakins, F., Ennever, T., Osgarby, D., Browne, M., & Hamilton-Hollaway, A. (2023) ‘Ngumpin-Yapa languages’. In C. Bowern (Ed.), The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages. pp. 918-932. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198824978.003.0076.

Osgarby, D. (2021) ‘Associated motion in Mudburra and northern central Australian languages’. In A. Guillaume & H. Koch (Eds.), Associated Motion. Empirical Studies in Language Typology. pp. 325-356. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110692099-008.

Green, J., Green, R., Hamilton-Hollaway, A., McConvell, P., Meakins, F., Nash, D., Osgarby, D., & Pensalfini, R. (2019) Mudburra to English dictionary. AIATSIS Foundation Series. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. https://shop.aiatsis.gov.au/products/mudburra-to-english-dictionary.

Osgarby, D. (2018). ‘Reconstructing Proto-Mirndi verbal morphology: From particles and clitics to prefixes’. Australian Journal of Linguistics 38(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2018.1400504.

Osgarby, D. (2017) ‘Jean-Christophe Verstraete and Diane Hafner (eds), Land and Language in Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016, ISBN 9 7890 2726 7603, 492 pp., €110’. Queensland Review 24(2). https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2017.18.

Áístainskiaakii, Issapóíkoan, Áínnootaa, & Osgarby, D. (2013). ‘Aakíípisskani “the women’s buffalo jump”’. In J. Dunham, P. Littell, & J. Lyon (Eds.), University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics: Papers for ICSNL XLVIII (Vol. 35, pp. 1–21). Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia. https://lingpapers.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2018/01/2013_Aistainskiaakii.pdf.

 

Supervisors