Re: Irish Gaelic is evil!

Cad é mar atá tú? :-)

> We seem to have been writing essentially the same
> response to Carsten's mail at the same time.
I noticed! And, as always, the other person's (in this case your) message, which
was being typed at the same time as mine, went through first! :-) I must be a
slow typer. That, and I spout off too much! ;-)

> In the 40's, I think. An example is the word for "beach": <trágh> became
> <trá>. <gh> at the end of a word after a broad vowel is rather hard to
> hear.
Still spelt <tràigh> (genitive: tràghad) in Scottish Gaelic! :-)

>> (Also, Scottish Gaelic is phonologically more conservative than Irish).
>
> Interesting you should say that. I would have described S. Gaelic
> as being less conservative, at least when it comes to what are surely
> phonological innovations like the lack of voiced stops, and the
> pre-aspiration feature. Then again, Irish has the úrú
> (nasal mutation) where I don't think SG does.
You know, you are right -- those are some definite innovations on the part of SG.
But then again, there's the retention of final velar fricatives in SG that are
usually lost in IG (at least in pronunciation if not always in spelling), the
retention of <ao> as a distinct vowel /M:/, much less diphthongization of
medial vowel + fricative clusters than in Irish, etc.

> But certainly the spelling of SG is more conservative-looking.
I often tend to find older Irish orthography more "sensible", no doubt due to my
familiarity with Scottish Gaelic! :-)

> And as I've tried to establish a number of times on this list,
> Irish & Gaelic orthography is *not*  Maggelanious (?sp), rather
> Etabnanious (?sp). That is, relatively consistant, but complex,
> rather than perversely unpredictable :).
Exactly!

> Old Irish (is Old Gaelic then a slightly later version of OI
> used in Alba?)[*]
No, the terms are synonymous, but Old Gaelic (and Middle Gaelic, Classical Gaelic,
etc.) seemed to be the preferred term in Scottish academia -- at least at my
university -- since of course at the time there was only one Gaelic language
(the conventional dating puts the East-West or Scottish-Irish split in the
Early Modern Irish/Gaelic period) in the whole of the Gaelic world.

I found a tendency among Scottish academics to be a bit annoyed by the fact that
Irish scholars "appropriated" everything Gaelic as Irish -- so the earlier
forms of the language were Old and Middle Irish (not Gaelic), Cù Chulainn is a
figure of Irish (not Gaelic) mythology, etc., despite the linguistic and
cultural unity which existed for so many centuries.

Although having said that, I must admit that much of the "bitterness" (if you want to
call it that) seems to exist in the Anglophone world -- Gaels from both sides
that I met seemed rather more aware of the shared past, if you will; for
example, I know Scottish Gaels who visted Ireland, were overheard speaking
Gaelic, and were asked what dialect of Irish they were speaking. But then
again, I've also heard tales of people from Northern Ireland who visited the
Hebrides and were overcome with emotion upon discovering that it *is* possible
to be both a Gaelic speaker and a Protestant!

> [*] Old Irish is a pretty unsatisfactory name for the
> ancestor of Gae[dh]ilge, Gàidhlig and Gaelg. It's
> very hard to get away from the implication that the
> other two are somehow an offshoot of Irish. Which
> they are, in the sense that the ancestor-language
> originated on the island of Ireland, but isn't very
> linguistically satisfying...
I've noticed a marked tendency in Irish scholarship especially to draw a straight,
unbroken line from Old Irish to Modern Irish, with SG and Manx dismissed as
rather unimportant offshoots -- you'll find this picture in most histories of
the Irish language written by Irish authors, including even the otherwise
magnificent, huge "Stáir na Gaeilge" (sp?) and even the old "Teach Yourself
Irish" by Dillon.

This has (rather unfortunately, IMO) let some of the more, shall we say,
politically volatile members of the Scottish Gaelic academic establishment to
look for any evidence, however slight, to support the notion of Scottish Gaelic
as an independent language from Irish as early as possible ("see, this spelling
in this one manuscript surely indicates that Gaelic was independent from Irish
by the sicth century", blah blah blah).

> Indeed, in the SG-like Ulster dialects (basically Donegal),
> we have affricates, e.g. [tS] for soft <s>.
You mean soft <t>, right? :-)

I love Ulster Irish. I desperately want to learn it, but virtually all
paedagogical material for Irish seems to be based on Connemara or Munster
Irish, or on Standard Irish, which is essentially a mix of Munster and
Connemara Irish. :-(

> An excellent description of something that I omitted to mention!
> Meaning, that broad consonants before broad vowels sound plain,
> and slender consonants before slender vowels sound plain, because the
> palatalisation (or lack of it) occurs naturally by accomodation in
> those situations...
Exactly.

>> Also, take a look at Polish orthography -- there are some
>> parallels
>
> Yes, it's quite like that! Except Polish uses only <i> before
> another vowel as a "consonant modifier", while our languages
> use a number of different vowel symbols before and after
> consonant groups.
Indeed. But it was the closest thing I could think of! I think Lithuanian orthography
follows similar principles to the Polish as well in using <i> to represent
palatalized consonants, but I forgot to mention it.

Thomas