Gaelicnames

I quite agree with Colin Mcallister about Gaelic place names existing in the southeast of Scotland (Letters, 17 April) and why not? There are French place names in Scotland too, like Beauly and Chatelherault. Does that make Scotland a French-speaking country?

People name their houses and land-holdings after familiar places to them, or to mark their ownership, or to describe the place, thus, Peebles means “shieling” in Old Cumbric and Penicuik, “Hill of the Cuckoo”. However, the texts from the past tell us who the people of south-eastern Scotland were and the records of the time say, quite explicitly, that the people south of the Forth were called “English”, because they spoke English. Scots were those who spoke Gaelic and French spoke French.

Mr Mcallister should devote some time to reading the charters of King David I, the king who moved English speakers up to the Buchan area from “Lothian” to learn about what language the people (not the aristocrats) here spoke a thousand years ago!

ANDREW HN GRAY Craiglea Drive, Edinburgh