Reconstituting an Ancient Celtic Tribe
“We're not reconstructing the past; we're reconstucting the future.”
(Volkhvy)
The original Celtic Tribe of Witches, a people known as the Dobunni, spoke a language known to linguists as Common Brittonic: a language which, in time, morphed (inter alia) into Welsh.
(The Dobunni themselves eventually morphed into an Anglo-Saxon-speaking people named, eponymously, the Hwicce. Peoples morph, languages morph: history is the story of change.)
So how do you say Dobunni in Welsh?
Some of my own family once hailed from the old Dobunni hunting-runs, but though Welsh is one of my ancestral languages, I'm not a Welsh-speaker, and I do not know whether or not memory of the tribe survived long enough to have undergone the sound changes that would have made a Brittonic word into a Welsh one.
(My guess would be, probably not. Being a people of the Cotswolds and the Severn valley—i.e. Southern Britain—the Dobunni were Romanized early, though their tribal self-awareness survived at least to the time of Boudicca's 62 CE “rebellion”, during which they sided with the Romans because their hereditary enemies, the Catuvellauni [“War-Cats”] fought with Boudicca's coalition.)
Nonetheless, we know enough about the processes by which the old language changed into the new that we can make an educated guess.
(As an amateur linguist myself, I find the process of updating old, disused words to what their contemporary forms would have become if they'd actually survived, to be a fascinating exercise in reconstitutive culture. If you think that there's an analogy here with the Pagan Revival, I think you're probably right.)
Boudicca's name, for example (if this actually was her name, rather than just an epithet meaning “victorious”) became Buddug (that's BIH-thig, with the TH of with), as the northern Celtic tribe known as the Votadini (who would have pronounced that V as W) became the Gododdin (gaw-DOE-th'n, with the TH of that).
So, mutatis mutandis, what name would the People Formerly Known As the Dobunni go by now?