Celtic and Scottish Studies

'Superb in how it anticipates and supplies what readers may need to know at any given moment, this insightful study of discourse and register is of particular interest to SG and other Celtic language scholars. Additionally, this book serves as a methodological demonstration of corpus linguistic work in dialogue with register theory.' Thomas Stewart, University of Louisville

The strength of the Gaelic dialects is an index - to a great extent - of how strong the language is in its native communities. In the 1950s, the Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland (SGDS) recorded language data from 207 points, extending from from Caithness in the north, to St Kilda in the west, to Brig O Turk - not far from Glasgow - in the south. These were all traditional Gaelic speaking communities at one time. Today, if we look at these communities, we find that the language is no longer spoken on a day to day basis in most of them, and not at all in many of them. Some of the last speakers of some of these dialects died over 40 years ago. If we look at where our Gaelic medium teachers are from, over half are from only 20 of these points: i.e. 10% of them. Without a change in what is happening in the communities where Gaelic is still spoken as a living language, most of the surviving dialects will be gone in a couple of generations.

Reviews:

‘outstanding […] of the first importance in the study of Scottish music and social history’ (Scottish Gaelic Studies), ‘a major contribution’ (Cothrom), ‘enormous added value’ (The Scotsman), ‘imaginative and thorough’ (Scottish Studies)

'This newest edition of Puirt-à-Beul renews our insight into the musical form and expressive voice of Gaelic Scotland' (Julie Fowlis)

'One wonders what Dr Keith Norman MacDonald would make of this elegant edition of the book that he produced around 1901? Its subject-matter was rare in his own time, and we must not expect so much of someone who did not have the resources and knowledge that we now have. Will Lamb begins with an excellent definition of the genre, giving Puirt their proper place as art at long last. The book contains not only every word and note that was in the original, in a pleasanter format, but the texts are translated into English, and the names of the tunes are given as titles known to instrumentalists. That is only a hint of the treasures that Dr Lamb has culled from books and manuscripts from many centuries and places. MacDonald’s book is long out of print in any case, and the new Puirt-à-Beul should be a matter of great satisfaction to singers and instrumentalists alike.' Morag MacLeod

This article concerns the well-known case of storytelling brothers Neil and Duncan MacDonald from South Uist, Scotland. The impressive verbal consistency of their hero tales has been taken to indicate that some Gaelic storytellers could acquire, recite, and transmit their repertoire in a near verbatim fashion. However, by deploying plagiarism detection techniques across an electronic corpus of texts, the author reveals that previous observations about the brothers’ verbal conservativeness have been skewed by corrupt evidence.

"Linguistically-orientated register research has tended to concentrate either upon core morpho-syntactic features – such as verb types, syntactic complexity and reduced forms – or so-called ‘register markers’ (Biber and Finegan 1994).  The latter are lexemes and phrasal formulae that, in and of themselves, are sufficient to bring to mind a particular language variety.  For example, in English, the phrase, ‘once upon a time’ – conventionalised to the point of cliché – immediately activates the expectation for a narrative event. 

In Scottish Gaelic traditional storytelling, verbal formulae are the most palpable register markers to be seen.  They are found across a wide range of tales and tellers (O Nolan 1971), and some originate in early modern and medieval forms of the language (Bruford 1966).  My working assumption in this research was that conventionalised language of any kind co-varies with important communicative and thematic functions.  In other words, the very existence of a fossilised or semi-fossilised form suggests that there was an opportunity for it to become so; it fulfils some non-arbitrary purpose in the register and does so in a well-packaged, economical way.  In this paper, I attempted to locate the various communicative functions underlying a range of verbal formulae, and organise them within a taxonomy.  By doing so, I hoped to be able to say something about the structures of Gaelic folktale morphology – that is, what semiotic features have the most currency in the register – and to tie observations into a greater dialogue about the process of language conventionalisation.

The data for the study came from the first two volumes of Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands.  The tales within this collection were gathered verbatim from a range of narrators across the Scottish Highlands and islands in the mid-nineteenth century.  My sample contained 17 narrators over 33 tales, with a total of approximately 90,000 words.

An analysis of the data indicated that it is possible to link formulae in Gaelic traditional narrative to recurring discourse functions.  These fell into three broad categories: 

1. Character relations
2. Epithets and names
3. Inertia (i.e. things that negotiate the progression of the story)

Within character relations, for example, were the functions dialogue conventions (e.g. greetings and leave taking), emotive-expressive language (e.g. expressions of joy and sadness) and power transactions (e.g. entrapment).  Within inertia were the functions boundary negotiation (e.g. beginning and end formulae), plot staging (e.g. initial complications) and temporal-spatial functions (e.g. expressions of time).  Interestingly, much of the actual language used to express these functions was in the form of rich, culturally-engendered codes or motifs, such as:

• The so-called ‘Knot of the Three Narrows’, from which there is no escape
• The far-away house in the night, the magical qualities of its inhabitants and the liminal position that it represents for the hero
• The oath to neither sleep, eat nor drink until a hero finds his stolen wife
• Deploying a big headed, skinny legged man as a bludgeon against an attacking army

I hope to provide a fuller account of the findings and their theoretical implications in the coming year. 

References
Biber, Douglas, and Edward Finegan. 1994. Sociolinguistic perspectives on register, Oxford studies in sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bruford, Alan. 1966. ‘Gaelic Folk-Tales and Mediæval Romances: A Study of the Early Modern Irish “Romantic Tales” and Their Oral Derivatives.’ Béaloideas 34: i-285.

Campbell, John Francis. 1994. Popular Tales of the West Highlands. 2 Vols. Edinburgh: Birlinn.

O' Nolan, Kevin. 1971. ‘The Use of Formula in Storytelling.’ Béaloideas 39/41: 233-250.
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According to the conventionally held view, the strathspey or 'strathspey reel' was an eighteenth century innovation instigated by fiddlers of the Speyside region, such as the Browns of Kincardine and the Cummings of Grantown. However, the basic rhythmic characteristics inherent to the strathspey - a series of long and short notes, organised within two or four strong beats per bar - are found in Gaelic songs thought to be much older. Using a range of data from early fiddle collections and transcriptions of twentieth century audio recordings, this paper explores the musical and semantic connections between the strathspey and Gaelic song, suggesting an alternative developmental path for Scotland's national music.

At the end of 2013, Michael Newton sent me a blog (Newton 2014) that he had written challenging two of my recent papers: an article from last July (Lamb 2013), and another that was available to him before it was published (Lamb 2014).  His comments contest my account of the history and development of the musical form known as the strathspey.  This article is a response, focussing on two lynchpins of the ‘exogenous origin’ argument at the heart of his ‘Rebuttal’ in some detail: 1) that Gaelic social dance and dance-music are a ‘package’ which arrived from elsewhere and 2) that the Scottish Reel developed from a French dance form known as the hay (also hey, haye).  I also examine his assertion that Gaelic mouth music ('puirt-à-beul') cannot pre-date the 18th century due to a lack of noble references in them.

With the publication of the Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland (Ó Dochartaigh 1997), a detailed phonetic record of the language, much anticipated, had become available for the first time.  Even a cursory glimpse of the Survey volumes confirms the rich phonological variation that once characterised Gaelic in Scotland, and to an extent still does.  Remarkably, when the project commenced in the late 1940s, fluent Gaelic speakers could be found within most of the territory informally delineated by the mid-18th century ‘Highland Line’.  As a result, we can today continue to study the varieties of Gaelic once spoken in areas such as East Perthshire, Caithness, Nairn and Aberdeenshire. 

A number of publications have begun appearing which utilise the phonetic data in creative and compelling ways.  However, it is perhaps not well known that the questionnaire devised for the Linguistic Survey of Scotland (LSS) also encompassed sections on morphophonology, morphology and syntax.  These and other LSS materials remain unpublished and largely unanalysed.  Although O’Rahilly’s (1932: 124) statement that Gaelic has no ‘clear cut distinction between its dialects’ vis-à-vis Irish would find fewer supporters today than in his time, perhaps, Scottish Gaelic is often regarded as morpho-syntactically homogenous.  Whilst possibly true, in a relative sense at least, it remains a foregone conclusion in the absence of dedicated study. 

This paper is a first attempt at systematising the geographical variation of nominal case marking in Scottish Gaelic.  The results should interest those involved in language variation studies, and may also raise some questions for those working towards a standardised form of Scottish Gaelic.

There is little question that the Gesto Collection ranks amongst one of the premiere sources of Gaelic song and music.  Along with his other books, the Skye Collection of fiddle music and Puirt-à-Beul, its compiler, Dr Keith Norman MacDonald, has provided us with a wealth of source material for understanding and performing Gaelic music.  What makes the Gesto Collection particularly special, however, is – strangely, perhaps, for a book of music and song – its appendix.  There, we find perhaps 40 or so songs contributed by one of the most important early Gaelic song collectors, Miss Frances Tolmie.  Keith Norman MacDonald’s imprint on Gaelic musical publishing is perhaps more noticeable than Frances Tolmie’s, but hers is no less important, and in some ways, more so.

Research in fields as diverse as language acquisition, speech pathology and corpus linguistics has demonstrated the central role that formulaic language plays in human communication and cognition (Wray 2013).Once sidelined in theoretical linguistics as a peripheral concern (Wray 2002: 13), formulas are now recognised as pervasive and natural, and key to our understanding of human language (Bybee 2006: 712-713). Some registers, especially those that are repetitive and constrained in some way, seem to exhibit distinct types and a greater proportion of formulas than others. Scottish Gaelic traditional narrative is one such variety.