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This article provides a survey of the research carried out by Celtic scholars in Germany during the 15 years between 1980 and 1995. It is based on the respective bibliography published in 'Studia Celtica Japonica' 9 (1997). The major research fields covered are IE Studies, Celtic philology, linguistics, literature, archaeology and cultural studies.
At the suggestion of the then editor of 'Studia Celtica Japonica,' Professor Toshio Doi, this bibliography lists the returns of a questionnaire sent to all scholars in Germany who were actively involved in Celtic Studies between 1980 and 1995. They were asked to list all their publications in the field of Celtic Studies, so as to allow to carry out a survey of their research activities during this period. While most scholars kindly obliged by returning their lists, there were notable exceptions who never answered the query. Regretably, the present bibliography therefore contains important gaps, which, however, may be quite telling as far as the research situation in Germany was concerned during that period.
In the earliest recorded poetry of the Insular Celtic literature, the occurrence intra-linear phoneme recurrences in addition to the rather common feature of alliteration suggest that they served an indexical motivation of the metrical constraints. This is in particular suggested by the indexical use of personal names. This practice may perhaps even reach back to Continental Celtic metrical practices which already seem to bear witness of the use of such language skills. It is particularly interesting to note that the initial mutations of the lexemes do not obstruct indexicality. It is suggested that the orally trained poets may perhaps have received specific grammatical instructions as part of their prolongued poetic education.
The five Potsdam "Studientage zum Englischen Mittelalter (SEM)" (1999-2003) served a number of purposes. These are fully discussed in this article. The first and foremost idea was to provide a yearly forum for young scholars in English medieval studies to present their research to other scholars in the field and to test their market value ("Nachwuchsfoerderung"). After Potsdam, the SEM meetings are circulating between those universities in the German speaking countries, which feature a Medieval Studies Programme in their departments of English and American Studies. This programme serves to boost their academic profile and etablish centres of excellency for English medieval Studies on the Continent. Networking is another prime objective of the SEMs. See http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/sem/sem.htm etc.
This article discusses the problem why the English language used in Ireland ("Irish English") as the second national language, has to date enjoyed so little prestige among everyday users of it, whereas it found enthusiastic recognition among Anglo-Irish writers since the beginning of the 19c. While no educated speaker of Irish English would target an RP pronunciation any more, the use of Irish English grammar and lexis is still stigmatised as smacking of the "brogue." The hypothesis is advanced that, in spite of its independence since 1921 and its "Celtic Tiger" economy since entry into the EU in the 70s, the Republic of Ireland has still not fully entered the post-colonial stage in matters of language and education, where pride in Identity and Otherness is reflected in the conscious use and engineering of a nationally distinctive variety of English, such as in Australia, New Zealand or Canada.There is still no national dictionary of Irish English, no national grammar, no national broadcasting and TV handbook, no national dictionary of Irish English. The title of the article quotes from a publication which attests to the strong linguistic minority complex which many Irish people still seem to suffer from.
Aspect in Contact
(1995)
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.
A close comparison of selected parts of the translation of the Venerable Bede's 'Historia Ecclesiastica gentis anglorum' into Old English and Old Irish reveals how selective the translators proceeded in their translation work and how they adapted the Latin original to the genre traditions of their vernacular styles of writing. By their omissions, their choices of lexis and syntax they clearly expressed their translation interests. Part of the differences also seems to have been motivated by the targeted written and the oral mode of communication. While the Irish translation is entirely written in character and hardly lends itself to reading out aloud ('prelecting'), the style and rhythm of the Old English translation suggests that it was to serve public reading purposes in front of illiterate or semi-literate listening audiences.
Paul Mankin was one of three literature professors who taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the 1980s and who had attended Dylan Thomas' lecture tours at American universities thirty years earlier as students. They were particularly impressed by the power of Thomas' language and his forceful style of presentation. In this "Causerie" or interview recorded in 1985, Mankin speaks about the effect Thomas' performance at UCLA had on his own work. He also discusses the lasting value of Thomas' poetry and its impact on other poets.
This paper argues that the texts surviving from the Old English period do not reflect the spoken language of the bulk of the population under Anglo-Saxon elite domination. While the Old English written documents suggest that the language was kept remarkably unchanged, i.e. was strongly monitored during the long OE period (some 500 years!), the spoken and "real Old English" is likely to have been very different and much more of the type of Middle English than the written texts. "Real Old Engish", i.e. of course only appeared in writing after the Norman Conquest. Middle English is therefore claimed to have begun with the 'late British' speaking shifters to Old English. The shift patterns must have differed in the various part of the island of Britain, as the shifters became exposed to further language contact with the Old Norse adstrate in the Danelaw areas and the Norman superstrate particularly in the South East, the South West having been least exposed to language contact after the original shift from 'Late British' to Old English. This explains why the North was historically the most innovative zone. This also explains the conservatism of the present day dialects in the South West. It is high time that historical linguists acknowledge the arcane character of the Old English written texts.
This paper argues that the texts surviving from the Old English period do not reflect the spoken language of the bulk of the population under Anglo-Saxon elite domination. While the Old English written documents suggest that the language was kept remarkably unchanged, i.e. was strongly monitored during the long OE period (some 500 years!), the spoken and "real Old English" is likely to have been very different and much more of the type of Middle English than the written texts. "Real Old Engish", i.e. of course only appeared in writing after the Norman Conquest. Middle English is therefore claimed to have begun with the 'late British' speaking shifters to Old English. The shift patterns must have differed in the various part of the island of Britain, as the shifters became exposed to further language contact with the Old Norse adstrate in the Danelaw areas and the Norman superstrate particularly in the South East, the South West having been least exposed to language contact after the original shift from 'Late British' to Old English. This explains why the North was historically the most innovative zone. This also explains the conservatism of the present day dialects in the South West. It is high time that historical linguists acknowledge the arcane character of the Old English written texts.
DO in Contact?
(1997)
Periphrastic English constructions involving the verbs BE/HAVE + a nominalised verb form expressing [+imperfectivity] and [+perfectivity] have close analogues in the Insular Celtic languages, where Celtic analogues of the English verb BE + a prepositional construction marker + Verbal Noun are used. The two constructions in English and teh Celtic languages are not identical and cannot be so, because the Celtic languages do not feature present and past participles and English has no verbal nouns. But the two types of the periphrastic mode of expressing aspect are close enough to suggest either a shift scenario, a borrowing scenario and/or an areal spread by diffusion over a long period of time. Since Old English did not mark aspect, neither morphologically nor syntactically, but Old Welsh and Old Irish already did so syntactically, it is suggested here that a unilateral transfer process was involved here, which proceeded from the Celtic languages to the English language. Aspectual transfer is even more pronounced in the so-called 'Celtic Englishes,' where in addition to the periphrastic marking of [+ imperfectivity] and [+perfectivity] the marking of [+habituality] is a grammaticalised feature and is periphrastically expressed.
DO-Periphrasis in Irish
(2002)
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.