David Osgarby

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.