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Extract: [...]In Celtic languages (both Continental and Insular) we can find words with uncertain etymology which presumably represent loanwords from other language-families. One can see the traces of the pre-Indo-European substratum of Central and Western Europe, “an original non-Celtic/non-Germanic North West block” according to Kuhn (1961). But we may suppose that this conclusion is not sufficiently justified. This problem can have many different solutions, and we may never be in a position to resolve it definitively.[...]
Celtic and Afro-Asiatic
(2007)
Extract: [...]It is not remarkable that structural similarities between the Insular Celtic and some Afro-Asiatic1 languages continue to exert a fascination on many people. Research into any language may be enlightening with regard to the understanding of all languages, and languages that show similar features are particularly likely to provide useful information. It is remarkable that the structural similarities between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic languages continue to be interpreted as diagnostic of some sort of special relationship between them; some sort of affinity or mutual affiliation that goes beyond the fact that they are two groups of human languages. This paper investigates again the fallacious nature of the arguments for the Afro-Asiatic/Insular Celtic contact theory (henceforth AA/IC contact theory). It takes its point of departure from Gensler (1993). That work is as yet unpublished, but has had considerable resonance. Such statements as the following indicate the importance that has been attached to the work: “After the studies of Morris-Jones, Pokorny, Wagner2 and Gensler it seems impossible to deny the special links between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic” (Jongeling 2000:64). And the ideas in question have been propagated in the popular scientific press,3 with the usual corollary that it is these ideas that are perceived by the interested but non-specialist public as being at the cutting edge of sound new research, when in fact they may simply be recycled ideas of a discredited theory. For these reasons it is appropriate to subject Gensler’s unpublished work to detailed critique.4 In particular, with regard to the twenty features of affinity between Insular Celtic and Afro-Asiatic which Gensler investigated, it will be shown (yet again, in some cases): [...]
Extract: [...]The Roman conquest of what was to become the province of Gallia Narbonensis in the second and then of the whole of Transalpine Gaul in the first century B.C. led to the incorporation into the Roman empire of a large part of the territory in which Gaulish was then spoken.1 In consequence, the vernacular rapidly lost its footing at least in public life and was soon replaced by Latin, the language of the new masters, which enjoyed higher prestige (cf. e.g. Meid 1980: 7-8). On the other hand, Gaulish continued to be written for some three centuries and was probably used in speech even longer, especially in rural areas. We must therefore posit a prolonged period of bilingualism. The effects of this situation on the Latin spoken in the provinces of Gaul seem to have been rather limited. A number of lexical items, mostly from the field of everyday life, and some phonetic characteristics are the sole testimonies of a Gaulish substratum in the variety of Latin that was later to develop into the Romance dialects of France (cf. Meid 1980: 38, fn. 77). [...]
Conventional wisdom since the earliest studies of Irish English has attributed much of what is distinctive about this variety to the influence of the Irish language. From the early philologists (Joyce 1910, van Hamel 1912) through the classic works of Henry (1957, 1958) and Bliss (1979) down to present-day linguistic orientations (e.g. Corrigan 2000 a, Filppula 1999, Fiess 2000, Hickey 2000, Todd 1999, and others), the question of Irish-language influence may be disputed on points of detail, but remains a central focus for most studies in the field. It is not our intention to argue with this consensus, nor to examine specific points of grammar in detail, but, rather, to suggest an approach to this question which (a) takes for its empirical base a sample of the standard language, rather than dialectal material or the sample sentences so beloved of many papers on the subject, and (b) understands Celticity not just in terms of the formal transfer of grammatical features, but as an indexical feature of language use, i.e. one in which English in Ireland is used in such a way as to point to the Irish language as a linguistic and cultural reference point. In this sense, our understanding of Celticity is not entirely grammatical, but relies as well on Pierce’s notion of indexicality (see Greenlee 1973), by which semiotic signs ‘point to’ other signs. Our focus in assessing Celticity, then, derives in the first instance from an examination of the International Corpus of English (ICE). We have recently completed the publication of the Irish component of ICE (ICE-Ireland), a machinereadable corpus of over 1 million words of speech and writing gathered from a range of contexts determined by the protocols of the global International Corpus of English project. The international nature of this corpus project makes for ready comparisons with other varieties of English, and in this paper we will focus on comparisons with the British corpus, ICE-GB. For references on ICE generally, see Greenbaum 1996; for ICE-GB, see especially Nelson, Wallis and Aarts 2002; and for ICE-Ireland, see papers such as Kirk, Kallen, Lowry & Rooney (2003), Kirk & Kallen (2005), and Kallen & Kirk (2007). Our first approach will be to look for signs of overt Celticity in those grammatical features of Irish English which have been put forward as evidence of Celtic transfer (or of the reinforcement between Celtic and non-Celtic historical sources); our second approach will be to look at non-grammatical ways in which texts in ICEIreland become indexical of Celticity by less structural means such as loanwords, code-switching, and covert reference using ‘standard’ English in ways that are specific to Irish usage. We argue that, at least within the standard language as we have observed it, Celticity is at once less obvious than a reading of the dialectal literature might suggest and, at the same time, more pervasive than a purely grammatical approach would imply.
Extract: [...] One of the often noted characteristic features of the Celtic languages is the absence of a singular verbal form with the meaning ‘to have’.1 The principal way of expressing possession is through periphrastic constructions with prepositions (such as Irish ag, Scottish Gaelic aig ‘at’; Welsh gan, Breton gant ‘at, with’) and appropriate forms of the substantive verb. Pronominal prepositions, another distinctive feature of the Celtic languages, consist of a preposition and a suffixed pronoun, or rather a pronominal personal ending. This construction may be analyzed as an instance of category fusion. Thus, the Irish and Welsh equivalents of English ‘I have money’ are Tá airgead agam or Mae arian gen i, respectively, both literally meaning ‘is money at-me/with-me’. This note discusses pronominal possessive constructions in Celtic languages (and some comparable examples from Celtic Englishes) and provides some background information on pronominal prepositions and comments on historical developments of these forms. It also discusses some terminological issues involved in labelling the construction in question. [...]
Contents: The Sociolinguistic Conditions favourable to spread of Structural Features Contact-induced Changes in Insular Celtic Phonological Changes The Lenition of Voiceless Stops Raising / i-Affection Lowering / a-Affection Apocope Syncope Morphological The Loss of Case Inflection of Personal Pronouns The Creation of the Equative Degree The Creation of the Imperfect Tense The Creation of the Conditional Mood Morphosyntactic and Syntactic The Creation of Preposed Definite Articles
Extract: [...]The New English Dictionary, later to become the Oxford English Dictionary, was first published between 1884 and 1928. To add new material, two supplements were issued after this, the first in 1933, and another, more extensive one between 1972 and 1986. In 1989, the Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (OED2) was published, which integrated the material from the original dictionary and the supplements into a single alphabetical sequence. However, virtually all material contained in this edition still remained in the form in which it was originally published. This is the edition most commonly used today, as it forms the basis of the Oxford English Dictionary Online and is also still being sold in print and on CD-ROM. In 1991, a new project started to revise the entire dictionary and bring its entries up to date, both in terms of English usage and in terms of associated scholarship, such as encyclopaedic information and etymologies. The scope was also widened, placing a greater emphasis on English spoken outside Britain. The revision of the dictionary began with the letter M, and the first updated entries were published online in March 2000 (OED3). Quarterly publication of further material has extended the range of revised entries as far as PROTEOSE n. (June 2007). New words from all parts of the alphabet have been published alongside the regular revision.[...]
Extract: That the Celtic languages were of the Indo-European family was first recognised by Rasmus Christian Rask (*1787), a young Danish linguist, in 1818. However, the fact that he wrote in Danish meant that his discovery was not noted by the linguistic establishment until long after his untimely death in 1832. The same conclusion was arrived at independently of Rask and, apparently, of each other, by Adolphe Pictet (1836) and Franz Bopp (1837). This agreement between the foremost scholars made possible the completion of the picture of the spread of the Indo-European languages in the extreme west of the European continent. However, in the Middle Ages the speakers of Irish had no awareness of any special relationship between Irish and the other Celtic languages, and a scholar as linguistically competent as Cormac mac Cuillennáin (†908), or whoever compiled Sanas Chormaic, treated Welsh on the same basis as Greek, Latin, and the lingua northmannorum in the elucidation of the meaning and history of Irish words. [...]
Extract: [...]It is true that scholars concentrate on a certain linguistic level in order to reach the greatest depth in their research. But this general stance should not lead to a complete neglect of other levels. When considering a multi-level phenomenon such as language contact and shift, concentration on a single linguistic level can have the unintended and unfortunate consequence of missing linguistically significant generalisations. This is especially true of the main division of linguistic research into a phonological and a grammatical camp, where syntacticians miss phonological generalisations and phonologists syntactic ones. In the present paper the interrelationship of syntax and prosody is investigated with a view to explaining how and why certain transfer structures from Irish became established in Irish English. In this context, the consideration of prosody can be helpful in explaining the precise form of transfer structures in the target variety, here vernacular Irish English. The data for the investigation will consider well-known features of this variety, such as unbound reflexives, non-standard comparatives and tag questions. Furthermore, the paper points out that, taking prosodic patterns into account, can help in extrapolating from individual transfer to the community- wide establishment of transfer structures. In sum, prosody is an essential element in any holistic account of language contact and shift.[...]
Extract: [...]In the first part of this paper I trace the language shift from Breton to French within the historical, social and ideological framework in which it occurred. I then argue that 19th and 20th-century attempts by scholars and militants to rehabilitate the Breton language led to the creation of a unified standard (peurunvan).2 The consequence has been the rise of a three-way diglossic rapport between the speakers of French, the new Breton standard3 and those of the traditional Breton vernaculars. Taking the varieties of southern Cornouaille (Finistère) between Quimper and Quimperlé as a point of comparison,4 I focus on a number of phonological, morphological, syntactical and lexical features which, though far from exhausttive, are not generally taken into account in the new standard language. These details provide a general idea of how varieties of Breton function at the micro-dialectological level, as well as ways in which they can differ from the standard and other spoken varieties. The paper concludes with observations regarding the necessity to consider languages, language varieties and their speakers within relevant social contexts.[...]
Extract: [...]Intriguing as they undoubtedly are, the early sixteenth-century lists of books in the Earl of Kildare’s library may well have inadvertently helped to lull scholars into visualising a rather idealised picture of language balance in multilingual late medieval Ireland. The lists reflect a society in which the four languages, Irish, English, Latin and French, vied as scholarly media and where the outcome in the Earl’s library was a four-way photo-finish. The number of volumes in each of the languages was recorded as follows: Latin, 34; French, 35; English, 22; Irish, 20 (Mac Niocaill 1992: 312-314). But of course the multilingual contact situation in Ireland had always been quite dynamic, both at vernacular and at scholarly levels, following the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169. Although French continued to be employed in official documents into the second half of the 15th century, it had already ceded its vernacular role to English in the towns of the colonists prior to the drawing up of the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366. These Statutes, composed in Norman-French, the primary language of English law at the time, provide an earlier snapshot of the language situation within the areas under English jurisdiction, as they sought to compel the colonists to desist from adopting Irish as a community vernacular. Ironically, no mention is made of Norman-French in the Statutes themselves. It is clear that what was at issue was a contest for supremacy between Irish and English as the principal vernacular among the colonists.[...]
Extract: [...]Of all the print-media newspapers are the most commonly used. They are not literature in the sense of belles letters, but they should not be underestimated in their political, social and personal importance. No other printed product is as closely linked with everyday life as the newspapers. The day begins under their influence, and their contents mirror the events of the day with varying accuracy. Newspapers are strongly reader-oriented. They want to inform, but they also want to instil opinions. Specific choices of information shape the content level. Specific choices of language are resorted to in order to spread opinions and viewpoints. Language creates solidarity between the producers and the consumers of newspapers and thereby supports ideologies by specifically targeted linguistic means. Other strategies are employed for the same purpose, too. Visual aspects are of great importance, such as the typographical layout, the use of pictures, drawings, colours, fonts, etc.[...]
Language and Content
(2014)