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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.
Breton and Irish, two Celtic and strongly endangered European minority languages, enjoy (or suffer) different fates of official recognition. While France does not officially recognise Breton as an independent language and has no even signed the European Charter of Minority Languages as most other EU countries did, Irish is by its constitution the first national language of the Republic of Ireland and therefore enjoys a very high official prestige. It is an obligatory subject in the schools and all EU documents need to be translated both into Irish and English. In spite of this difference of status and prestige, both languages have suffered, during the past 50 years, from a dramatic loss of speakers, as the young generation sees no need to preserve a regionalised minority heritage in a world of globalised communication and exchange. While both inherited languages were, traditionally and sociologically speaking, the medium of communication of the rural population, albeit with a long and venerable written tradition reaching back to the middle ages, the language of the future is that of the urban middle classes learnt as a second language (L2) und for all intents and purposes not used as a community language in the home. Middle class Breton and Irish are token languages, serving its users as identity markers in order to set themselves off from the English and French, most of whom only speak English and French and have no additional regional language. The linguistic gap between the inherited rural and the new urban varieties is great, so that older native rural speakers do not understand school Breton and school Irish. It is predictable that only the urban varieties will survive for still quite a while, whereas the rural varietes are unlikely to escape language death due to the ongoing change of living conditions in the rural areas and the absence of localised language engineering.
In this brochure, Tristram argues that Standard English may be more indebted to the influence of 'Late British' than hitherto acknowledged by mainstream historical scholarship. By 'Late British' the native (or source) language of the about 2m language shifters in the wake of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest is meant who constituted the bulk of the native population of the island of Britain in the early middle ages. Although predictably, the influence of 'Late British' on Old English neither shows in the lexis of written Old English nor in its core grammar, it does show in the phonology (Peter Schrijver) and the inflectional syncretism of the Northern dialect texts. The influence of the interlanguage of the shifters only really surfaces in Middle English texts, after the diglossia between the language of the HIGH variety of Old English of the ruling elite and the LOW variety of the working population was discontinued under Norman rule. A number of grammatical features are listed in this brochure, which show that Present Day Standard English typologically sides with the Celtic languages, and with the Neo-Brittonic languages in particular, rather than with the other Continental Germanic languages. The brochure also calls for more research into this matter and in particular detailed investigations into the individual features mentioned.