Academic literature on the topic 'Goidelic languages'

The main goal of the paper is to study Celtic (especially Goidelic) words denoting ‘road’, to collect ranked synonyms, to give motivated etymologies, to exercise a diachronic and comparative study of the use of the names of the ‘road’ in Old, Middle and Modern Irish and in Scottish Gaelic (including comparative data from Continental Celtic and Insular Brittonic languages) and to reveal and describe supposed Goidelic innovations (slige, belach, bóthar). The final aim is to introduce Goidelic data into the described scheme of semantic shift.

This is a small case study of Goidelic adjectives denoting the physical qualities of heaviness and lightness, namely trom and éadrom in Irish and trom and aotrom (eutrom) in Scottish Gaelic. Both go back to Old Irish. I will refer to them by their Old Irish forms tromm and étromm in generalisations. Étromm is derived from tromm with a negative prefix é, suggesting a high level of structural symmetry. However, this proves not to be the case, and étromm appears to be a lot more than just “not tromm” even at the earliest stage. Moreover, distribution of both trom and étromm differs substiantially in Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic although these languages are closely related. What makes this kind of adjective especially interesting is A. Wierzbicka and C. Goddard’s assumption that “physical quality concepts refer to embodied human experiences and embodied human sensations” (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2007: 765). In other words, we call something ‘heavy’ not because it has some specific weight, but rather because we feel this weight. The analysed Goidelic data fully support this statement.

Present-day historians of English are widely agreed that, throughout its recorded history, the English language has absorbed linguistic influences from other languages, most notably Latin, Scandinavian, and French. What may give rise to differing views is the nature and extent of these influences, not the existence of them. Against the backdrop of this unanimity, it seems remarkable that there is one group of languages for which no such consensus exists, despite a close coexistence between English and these languages in the British Isles spanning more than one and a half millennia. This group is, of course, the Insular Celtic languages, comprising the Brittonic subgroup of Welsh and Cornish and the Goidelic one comprising Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic. The standard wisdom, repeated in textbooks on the history of English such as Baugh and Cable (1993), Pyles & Algeo (1993), and Strang (1970), holds that contact influences from Celtic have always been minimal and are mainly limited to Celtic-origin place names and river names and a mere handful of other words. Thus, Baugh & Cable (1993: 85) state that ‘outside of place-names the influence of Celtic upon the English language is almost negligible’; in a similar vein, Strang (1970) writes that ‘the extensive influence of Celtic can only be traced in place-names’ (1970: 391).

Many minority languages across Europe and elsewhere, including in the Celtic-speaking world, underwent linguistic obsolescence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In some cases, this ultimately progressed to language death. Manx, the autochthonous Goidelic Celtic language of the Isle of Man, was one such case. In more recent times, the Manx language has seen a revival, which has increased speaker numbers. Manx represents an atypical situation among minority languages, as the present-day speaker community is, with few exceptions, made up of speakers who have had no direct contact with traditional native speakers. Therefore, the present-day Manx speaker community bears closer resemblance to that of Cornish, as well as those of urban varieties of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, than to speaker communities in traditional Celtic language heartlands. This article discusses the language use of speakers of Revitalized Manx. It investigates some aspects of linguistic structure in the language use of three groups of speakers who have acquired the language in different contexts: teachers of Manx, speakers who received Manx instruction through the medium of English, and speakers who have received Manx-immersion education. An analysis of a number of verbal forms reveals differences in these three groups of Manx speakers, which may be correlated with the amount and type of input in Manx these speakers have received. The article discusses these findings in the wider context of processes influencing the linguistic production of speakers of revitalized minority languages.

The old Indo-European word for ‘daughter’ (*dhugH [Szemerenyi 1977: 21] or *dhuĝ(h₂)-tḗr [Mallory, Adams 2006: 472]) survives in all major branches of daughter-languages except Albanian, Italian (but cf. Osc. futír?) and Insular Celtic. OI der ‘daughter, girl’ and der- in compound names represents a reduced form of old I.-E. word [O’Brien 1956: 178], “an allegro-form” [Matasović 2009: 110]. Continental Celtic has a well-known Gaulish duxtir (Larzac tablet) and Celtiberian TuaTe[r]es/TuaTeros (Bottorita inscription II) supposed to have the same old I.-E. meaning ‘daughter’ (?, cf. ‘jeune fille initiée’ [Lejeune 1985: 133], cf. also [Sims-Williams 2007: 3]). At the same time, another I.-E. term for ‘girl, woman’ is also attested and even widely used in Gaulish: *ġenh₁ ‘bear, generate’ [IEW: 373 ff.] > Gaul. geneta, genata, gneta, nata [Delamarre 2003: 177, 181] with supposed meaning ‘young girl, young woman, servant (?)’. Cf. also Osc. genetaí ‘daughter’. Insular Celtic conserved this I.-E. root in W. geneth ‘girl’ (with merch ‘daughter’), OI gen ‘woman, girl’ (a rare word of glossaries, see DIL: gen-2) and OI ingen ‘1.girl; 2.daughter’ (ousted in MI by cailín in this first meaning). The loss of I.-E. word of ‘daughter’ both in British and Goidelic could be explained by the special institute of fosterage existing in Early Ireland and Wales (cf. OI aite and muimme ‘foster-father’ and ‘foster-mother’, “intimate forms have been transferred to the fosterparents” [Kelly 1988: 86] and the use of dalta ‘foster-child’ with the meaning ‘daughter’ in Modern Irish dialects). But we suppose, this loss of I.-E. kinship term represents a part of so called “linguistic revolution” of Insular Celtic languages in early centuries AD, a “revolution” provoked by some social changes. The semantic shift ‘girl’ — ‘daughter’ — ‘servant’ (as well as ‘boy’ — ‘son’ — ‘servant’) represents a universalia (or frequentalia), attested in many languages (cf. [Zalizniak 2008]). Cf. Czech dĕvice, Paul. dziewa ‘girl’, but Luj. dźowka ‘daughter’ and Czech naše holka ‘our girl = daughter’; Russ. devochka ‘girl’ used in the meaning ‘daughter’ and, at the same time, dochka ‘daughter’ used in the meaning ‘girl’ in popular speech. The semantic development in this case is not ‘evolutional’ but of two-way one, or bilateral, that is: ‘girl’ ↔ ‘daughter’ (and ↔ ‘servant’). Cf. the etymology of I.-E. *dhuĝ(h₂)-tḗr proposed (with some doubt) by J.Mallory: from *dhug- ‘meal’, ‘the person who prepares the meals’ [Mallory and Adams 1997: 148]. Servant again! Cf. also Russ. rab ‘slave’ and rebenok ‘child’.

This article examines the placement of weak pronominal objects in Goidelic Celtic. These elements appear in a far-right position in the clause, in spite of their prosodic lightness. Previous analyses have put this phenomenon down to either a language and construction specific rule, or to a side effect of clausal organisation. The article examines the most articulated current version of the latter option, shows how it suffers from serious empirical and conceptual problems and develops in its place an approach in which the pronouns remain internal to the verb phrase with their precise position determined by prosodic factors. This collapses the surprising behaviour of weak pronouns in Goidelic with that of weak pronouns in Germanic. The apparent differences in the positioning of pronouns between the two language families derive from independent aspects of clausal architecture. The new approach uses a much less articulated clausal structure but an enriched view of the syntax-prosody interface.

A new method of “dating” language changes was proposed in the 1950s by Morris Swadesh (1952, 1955), who examined changes in the basic vocabulary of a language and postulated that the 1000-year retention rate represents 86% of the vocabulary; in other words, 14 words from a 100-word list must be replaced. An attempt to calculate the split between Goidelic and Brittonic based on this approach was made in Greene (1964) and later in a fundamental study by Elsie (1979) containing, unfortunately, some inaccuracies. In Blažek and Novotná (2006) this split between Goidelic and Brittonic is dated to ca. 1200 BC. The authors used a new calibration, with a change in the constant of disintegration λ from 0.14 to 0.05 per millennium, the elimination of borrowings and the inclusion of synonyms in the wordlist. The use of synonyms compromises the original Swadesh idea of the basic vocabulary of a language, and automatically leads to its artificial archaisation. This article tries to demonstrate the possibility of an analysis of semantic changes in basic Irish vocabulary using the non-modified version of the Swadesh method and to define a possible date for the growth of the Middle Irish language stratum.

After providing an analysis of Celtic phonology as per the approach to phonology known as Laryngeal Realism, this paper addresses the differing realizations of the two mutations common to Goidelic and Brittonic, the first lenition and nasalization. It is proposed that differences in interarticulatory timing between consecutive segments led to the attested differing realizations of these mutations. Some attention is also paid to the differing realizations of nasalization between Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

The undoubtedly Gaulish personal name Loucita, attested in the Norico-Pannonian onomastic area, is particularly interesting from the point of view of its word formation. Unambiguous parallels for such a derivative are difficult to find in Celtic onomastic material, the only possible but very uncertain candidate being a Goidelic river name Ἀργίτα, recorded by Ptolemy. Outside of Celtic, the name of a Germanic seeress Vel(a)eda, if it goes back to *u̯elētā- (which is a probable but not the only possibility), is a potential case in point, which would then unavoidably imply that Loucita < *leu̯k-ēt-ā- must somehow be based on the oblique stem with a generalised length of the suffixal vowel (*leu̯k-ēt-) taken over from the nominative singular, where it was inherited. Since the category of lexicalised, synchronically unproductive dethematic *-et-stems in Celtic typically displays exactly that phenomenon, this etymological interpretation cannot be dismissed as ultimately improbable. Another reasonable possibility, however, would be to start from a feminine abstract *lou̯k-i-/*leu̯k-i- ‘brightness, lustre’ (itself based on the thematic possessive adjective *leu̯k-ó- by external derivation), to which Loucita could then represent a barbātus-type adjectival derivative *leu̯k-i-to- ‘having lustre,’ exactly parallel to the type seen in Indo-Iranian colour adjectives. It is argued that the latter type probably does not represent thematic possessives of t-abstracts to i-stem adjectives but, contrary to the communis opinion, rather goes back to to-possessives of i-stem abstracts. Under both analyses, however, the name is an important addition to the Proto-Indo-European type of derivative in *-ito-, so far unambiguously identified only within Indo-Iranian.

This study has collected and analysed a database of place-names containing potential ethnonymic elements. Competing models of ethnicity are investigated and applied to names about which there is reasonable confidence. A number of motivations for employment of ethnonyms in place-names emerge. Ongoing interaction between ethnicities is marked by reference to domain or borderland, and occasional interaction by reference to resource or transit. More superficial interaction is expressed in names of commemorative, antiquarian or figurative motivation. The implications of the names for our understanding of the history of individual ethnicities are considered. Distribution of Walh-names has been extended north into Scotland; but reference may be to Romance-speaking feudal incomers, not the British. Briton-names are confirmed in Cumberland and are found on and beyond the fringes of the polity of Strathclyde. Dumbarton, however, is an antiquarian coining. Distribution of Cumbrian-names suggests that the south side of the Solway Firth was not securely under Cumbrian influence; but also that the ethnicity, expanding in the tenth century, was found from the Ayrshire coast to East Lothian, with the Saxon culture under pressure in the Southern Uplands. An ethnonym borrowed from British in the name Cumberland and the Lothian outlier of Cummercolstoun had either entered northern English dialect or was being employed by the Cumbrians themselves to coin these names in Old English. If the latter, such self-referential pronouncement in a language contact situation was from a position of status, in contrast to the ethnicism of the Gaels. Growing Gaelic self-awareness is manifested in early-modern domain demarcation and self-referential naming of routes across the cultural boundary. But by the nineteenth century cultural change came from within, with the impact felt most acutely in west-mainland and Hebridean Argyll, according to the toponymic evidence. Earlier interfaces between Gaelic and Scots are indicated on the east of the Firth of Clyde by the early fourteenth century, under the Sidlaws and in Buchan by the fifteenth, in Caithness and in Perthshire by the sixteenth. Earlier, Norse-speakers may have referred to Gaels in the hills of Kintyre. The border between Scotland and England was toponymically marked, but not until the modern era. In Carrick, Argyll and north and west of the Great Glen, Albanians were to be contrasted, not necessarily linguistically, from neighbouring Gaelic-speakers; Alba is probably to be equated with the ancient territory of Scotia. Early Scot-names, recorded from the twelfth century, similarly reflect expanding Scotian influence in Cumberland and Lothian. However, late instances refer to Gaelic-speakers. Most Eireannach-names refer to wedder goats rather than the ethnonym, but residual Gaelic-speakers in east Dumfriesshire are indicated by Erisch­-names at the end of the fifteenth century or later. Others west into Galloway suggest an earlier Irish immigration, probably as a consequence of normanisation and of engagement in Irish Sea politics. Other immigrants include French estate administrators, Flemish wool producers and English feudal subjects. The latter have long been discussed, but the relationship of the north-eastern Ingliston-names to mottes is rejected, and that of the south-western Ingleston-names is rather to former motte-hills with degraded fortifications. Most Dane-names are also antiquarian, attracted less by folk memory than by modern folklore. The Goill could also be summoned out of the past to explain defensive remains in particular. Antiquarianism in the eighteenth century onwards similarly ascribed many remains to the Picts and the Cruithnians, though in Shetland a long-standing supernatural association with the Picts may have been maintained. Ethnicities were invoked to personify past cultures, but ethnonyms also commemorate actual events, typified by Sasannach-names. These tend to recall dramatic, generally fatal, incidents, usually involving soldiers or sailors. Any figures of secular authority or hostile activity from outwith the community came to be considered Goill, but also agents of ecclesiastical authority or economic activity and passing travellers by land or sea. The label Goill, ostensibly providing 178 of the 652 probable ethnonymic database entries, is in most names no indication of ethnicity, culture or language. It had a medieval geographical reference, however, to Hebrideans, and did develop renewed, early-modern specificity in response to a vague concept of Scottish society outwith the Gaelic cultural domain. The study concludes by considering the forms of interaction between ethnicities and looking at the names as a set. It proposes classification of those recalled in the names as overlord, interloper or native.