Editing Pictish language (section)

===Other discredited theories===
Traditional accounts (now rejected) claimed that the Picts had migrated to Scotland from [[Scythia]], a region that encompassed Eastern Europe and Central Asia.<ref>See for example {{harvnb|Bede|1910|loc=HE I.1}}; {{harvnb|Forsyth|2006}} suggests this tradition originated from a misreading of {{harvnb|Servius}}' fifth-century AD commentary on {{harvnb|Virgil}}'s Aeneid:<br />Aeneid 4:146 reads: ''Cretesque Dryopesque fremunt pictique Agathyrsi''.<br />Servius' commentary states: ''Pictique Agathyrsi populi sunt Scythiae, colentes Apollinem hyperboreum, cuius logia, id est responsa, feruntur. 'Picti' autem, non stigmata habentes, sicut gens in Britannia, sed pulchri, hoc est cyanea coma placentes.'' Which actually states that the Scythian [[Agathyrsi]] did ''not'' "bear marks" like the British, but had blue hair.</ref> Buchanan, looking for a Scythian P-Celtic candidate for the ancestral Pict, settled on the Gaulish-speaking [[Cotini]] (which he rendered as ''Gothuni''), a tribe from the region that is now [[Slovakia]]. This was later misunderstood by [[Robert Sibbald]] in 1710, who equated ''Gothuni'' with the Germanic-speaking ''[[Goths]]''.{{sfn|Sibbald|1710}} [[John Pinkerton]] expanded on this in 1789, claiming that Pictish was the predecessor to [[Scots language|modern Scots]].{{sfn|Pinkerton|1789}} Pinkerton's arguments were often rambling, bizarre and clearly motivated by his belief that Celts were an inferior people. The theory of a Germanic Pictish language is no longer considered credible.<ref>For a discussion of Sibbald's misunderstanding and of Pinkerton's thesis, see {{harvnb|Ferguson|1991}}.</ref>