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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.
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): [...]
Das Eigene und das Fremde
(2013)
Die ukrainische Minderheit in der polnischen Wojewodschaft Westpommern 60 Jahre nach der Akcja Wisła
(2008)
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). [...]