TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tristram, Hildegard L. C.
T1  - Attrition of Inflections in English and Welsh
N2  - A close comparative analysis of the attrition of inflections in historical English and Welsh reveals that Welsh had already lost its entire NP inflection when it surfaces in writing in the 7c AD, while English was still fully inflected both in the NP and VP. The comparison of the modern English and Welsh morphological categories shows that English overtook Welsh in its rate of analyticising drift. This shows first in writing during the Middle English period. Thus in English, the attrition bothfully affected the NP and the VP, while in modern Welsh the attrition of the verbal inflection in the VP is much less advanced than in English. Both languages, however, share the shift in the VP from the synthetism of verbal tense, mood (and voice) marking towards analytic aspect marking, which continues to gain in importance in both languages today. The question is raised, whether this joint development may have been due to the influence of the 'Late British' speaking shifters to Old English, to prolongued areal contactin the island of Britain ("Sprachbund") and/or to a more general drift from syntheticity to analycity in (Western) IE languages in Europe, which affects some languages more than others. The Appendix prints the earliest Old English and Old Welsh texts (dated by absolute chronology) and marks their loss of inflections, in order to highlight the advanced analycity in the Old Welsh NP as opposed to the Old English NP.
Y1  - 2002
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tristram, Hildegard L. C.
T1  - The Politics of Language : Links between Modern Welsh and English
N2  - The continued linguistic contact in the islands of Britain and Ireland over the past two millenia has led to linguistic convergence processes between the Insular Celtic and West Germanic languages involved. While the Latin, Old Norse and Norman French contact scenarios were recognised and have been well studied since the 19c, the Celtic component received much less scholarly attention until the 1990s because of the continued linguistic bias, once fostered by 19c Anglo-Saxonisms and the idea of racial purity of the Egnlish population. It is only in the very recent past that the many different contact areas between English and the Insular Celtic languages have received recognition after New Labour's post-1997 introduction of "devolution" politics. The closest and longest interaction took of course place between English and Welsh. The present article looks at three major types of interaction which led to convergence in a number of important linguistic features: (1) mutual retention of shared archaic features, (2) mutual shared innovations, and (3) transfer from one language to another, either by unilateral or by bilateral transfer. The exemplary contact features discussed in this article relate to the retention of interdental fricatives, the shared innovation of analycity and multi-word verb formation, and clefting as feature transfer. Transfer is likely to have taken place under the following conditions: (a) earlier written documentation in the donor language, (b) higher frequency of occurrence in the donor language, (c) conformity with other structures in the donor language, and (d) grammaticalisation in the donor language. The conclusion endorses Salikoko Mufwene's claim that the making of English in the island of Britain was subject to the same contact processes which created the English based creoles from indigenised Englishes during the colonial period.
Y1  - 2002
SN  - 3-8253-1322-0
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tristram, Hildegard L. C.
T1  - DO-Periphrasis in Irish
N2  - Periphrastic DO constructions are very common both in English and in the Neo-Brittonic languages and are used for various functional purposes. These form part of a larger linguistic area in western and northern Europe. The literature does not mention comparable constructions for Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Irish informants, however, confirm orally that they are in common use among present day Gaeltacht speakers. They appear also to have been common in late spoken Manx. This study is based on the "Caint Chonamara" electronic corpus, the field work for which was first untertaken by Hans Hartmann (Hamburg) and Tomás de Bhaldraithe (Dublin) in the early 1960s und brought to a close by Arndt Wigger (Wuppertal) in the 1990s. The file for the Ros Muc dialogues yielded a very low return of potential DO constructions, i.e. 14 tokens of DÉAN + VN out of 494 DÉAN tokens altogether in the file. This shows that the DÉAN + VN construction was grammatically correct and acceptable to the native speakers, but was not grammaticalised and had a very low frequency. This result is interesting, but not surprising, since the informants chosen for this file conformed to the NORMS category (non-mobile old rural males. They were born around the turn of the 19c/20c and acquired their language now more than 100 years ago. This was well before the independence of the Republic. They would have acquired their Irish orally from native speakers and underwent very little formal training in Irish, or none. This small sample confirms that Irish did not belong to the broad linguistic area in Western Europe which makes use of periphrastic DO constructions, at least not until very recently.
Y1  - 2002
SN  - 90-429-1026-7
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tristram, Hildegard L. C.
T1  - European Versification : the Effect of Literacy
N2  - A report of Mikhail Gasparov's 1989 book on the 'History of European Versification' is the starting point of the discussion in this article of the types of versification found in the Insular Celtic literatures from their first documenation in the early middle ages to the present day, as Gasparov's survey does not cover these poetries. It is claimed here that their metrical constraints were pre-literate and first and foremost geared at aural reception. The introduction of writing led to an increase in metrical sophistication which, while still basically oral, because of the process of "prelecting" (i.e. reading out aloud to illiterate or semi-literate audiences), required a very careful appreciation of their metrical skills. Contact with English and French syllabic poetry in the later middle ages and particularly in the modern period produced so-called "free verse" poetry. The word "free" in this particular context meant that the rather loose metrical constraints of these majority literatures in no way compared with the extraordinarily high metrical sophistication of the native oral derived or "bardic" poetry.
Y1  - 2002
SN  - 3-631-35697-8
ER  -