Actually, Guest Briton, that's not quite right.

"Britain" seems to have been an ethnicity before it was a Geographical description, though it originally seems to have referred to Picts, not the people later called Britons. Early indications are that they were called cruithini in old Irish and Pretani in old Brythonic, suggesting their name existed prior to the differentiation of the Celtic languages, and originally included the PRTN cluster found in the word Britain. The B, of course, is the voiced form of P, and the C replaced the P in the Gaelic languages, so they were BRTNs or PRTNs in P-Celtic and CRTNs in q-Celtic (Goidelic/Gaelic). It seems the name [Pretan=Breton or Briton] transferred from the Picts to the island where they lived, then from the island to the Britons who lived there later.

The "Great" in Great Britain is not to distinguish it from the smaller islands of the archipelago, but to distinguish the island of Britain from Brittany, which was originally a colony of British Celts. In French, the politically dominant language of both England and France after the Norman Conquest, "Bretagne" referred to both the island and the colony, hence "Grande Bretagne" for the island to avoid confusion.

I know, thread creep! Sorry!

Back to bagpipes. I think what sorefingers means (if I may) is that the earlier pipe on which a bagpipe is based is a reed-pipe similar to the ones played by snake charmers, and in that he is quite right, as Q notes.