Re: Celtica (was: Maggel)

Barbara Barrett scripsit:

> What baffles me is how come when one uses the word "Gaelic" ouside of
> Ireland folk assume you mean the Scots dialect rather than the parent
> language, even if you use the Irish rather than the Scots pronounciation of
> "Gaelic"? It seems that in English; Irish=Gaelic but Gaelic=Scots Gaelic:
> Wierd.
This certainly is greatly influenced by the decision of the Irish over
the past 80 years to use "Irish" as the English name of the Goidelic
language spoken in Ireland, and to deprecate the use of "Gaelic"
as either noun or adjective except in the names of some institutions.
(There is, to be sure, the engaging testimony of an Irish stonemason in
the matter of a Celtic cross which had collapsed in a churchyard, thus:
"The Gaels put it up, and the gales blew it down."  The jury found for
his employers, the defendants.)

As for "parent language" and "Scots dialect", it's true that the presence
of Gaelic (by whatever name) in Scotland is the consequence of a physical
migration from Ireland to Scotland, but in a linguistic sense Irish
and Scots Gaelic are now separate languages with a common descent from
Old Irish.

We do not describe English as the "British dialect of Frisian", though
that would be equally true to the historical facts:

	Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis:
	Wa't dat net sizze kin
	is gjin oprjochte Fries.

(or "good English and good Fries", as we make it.)

--
"But the next day there came no dawn,           John Cowan
and the Grey Company passed on into the         jcowan@reutershealth.com
darkness of the Storm of Mordor and were        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
lost to mortal sight; but the Dead              http://reutershealth.com
followed them.          --"The Passing of the Grey Company"

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