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(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.
The great Old English epic 'Beowulf' has been dated to practically every century between the 6th and the 11th century, depending on the criteria of dating adopted and the approaches advocated by the respective scholars. As the text successfully avoids to provide definite cues or evidence for a definitive date, these scholarly attempts reveal more about the respective scholars' research interests than offering uncontroversial dates. The point of dating 'Beowulf' then seems to provide scholars with the opportunity to anchor their own personal understanding of the poem within the century of their own personal predilection.
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.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. (Hrsg.), Two Hundred Years of Lindley Murray; Münster, Nodus, 1996
(1998)
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.
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.