Gaelic

Focusing on the verbal rather than the visual elements of early and more modern headstones in eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, this essay will comment on a selection of Gaelic headstone inscriptions, highlighting such elements as word choice (whether secular or religious), cemetery location, time period, and the deceased’s background. Despite the striking paucity of Gaelic examples, it is our objective to discuss why Gaelic had a limited presence in Nova Scotia’s pioneer Scottish immigrant cemeteries and to demonstrate how these cemeteries were contested sites, which mirrored ongoing tensions between assimilation and cultural retention. In sum, this article will assess the importance of cemeteries as material articulations of language use and language maintenance among Nova Scotia’s diasporic Scots, set against the wider background of their struggles, aspirations, and shared values.

This paper is an acoustic investigation of laterals in contemporary Scottish Gaelic. Scottish Gaelic is described as having three phonemic laterals /l̪ˠ l̪ʲ l/, which have previously been the subject of small-scale acoustic and static palatographic work. I expand on previous acoustic studies, including static and dynamic formant measures, and consider data from the diverse contemporary Gaelic-speaking population including [1] older speakers in a Gaelic-heartland area, [2] middle-aged speakers living in Glasgow, [3] adolescent speakers in immersion education in a heartland area, [4] adolescents in immersion education in Glasgow. Results suggest overall maintenance of the triple lateral system, but with substantial variation in the production of (phonemically) palatalised laterals in particular, which some young Glaswegians do not produce. These results are discussed with reference to language change in language revitalisation contexts, language contact, and modes of acquisition in revitalisation contexts.

In 1996, The Quiet Man topped an Irish Times poll for the best Irish film of all time. Almost ten years later, with many more Irish (and Irish-themed) films made, The Quiet Man still occupied number four in a poll of 10,000 people across Ireland. John Ford's greatest commercial success, the film also set a template for Ireland's representation, and promotion, for over half a century.

This book, The Quiet Man ... and Beyond, involves both critical analysis of aspects of The Quiet Man as myth, commodity and fetish and the celebration of a film that has sustained considerable academic attention and popular appreciation since its release in 1952. Among the topics considered are the complexity of the film's relation to Ireland, to Irish literature and to John Ford's other films; its perceived place with regard to indigenous Irish cinema; and the phenomenon of its circulation and reception as a cult film over the years.

Contributors include Ruth Barton, James P. Byrne, Sean Crosson, Fidelma Farley, Roddy Flynn, Adrian Frazier, Luke Gibbons, Michael Patrick Gillespie, Conor Groome, John Hill, Des MacHale, Barry Monahan, Brian O'Conchubhair, Diog O'Connell, Caitriona O'Torna, Tom Paulus, Sean Ryder, Eamonn Slater and Rod Stoneman.

The Manx relative future tense occurs not only in future relative clauses (whence its name), but also in other contexts, such as some adverbial subordinate clauses, e.g. after raad ‘where’, tra ‘when’, my ‘if’, and in certain main clauses, as, for example, Shen-y-raad vees keayney as snaggeraght feeacklyn, ‘There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (Luke 13.28). Of course, positive affirmative future main clauses normally require the independent future tense. The objective of this study is to investigate in what contexts the relative future tense may be used in main clauses in Classical Manx. With that overall focus in mind, I also discuss and illustrate the use of the relative future in subordinate clauses, other than relative clauses themselves, about which I say little. I seek to establish in what contexts the relative future is required, in what contexts it is excluded, and in what contexts its use is variable.  The bulk of the exemplification involves the future tense of ve ‘be’; there are 1001 cases of the forms vee’m, veem’s, vees or vees mayd, the relative future paradigms of ve, in the Manx Bible, alongside well over 3000 of the independent and dependent future tense of ve (bee’m, beem’s, bee, bee mayd).

Music and song are both important influences on, and themes in, the poetry of Thomas Kinsella. His poetry also features several individuals associated with music, none more frequently than his close friend, the composer Seán Ó Riada, a central figure in the revival in popularity of Irish traditional music since the 1950s. This paper charts some significant developments in Kinsella's work from the late 1950s, and indeed, intriguing parallels, and shared emphases, apparent in the comments and work of both Kinsella and Ó Riada. For Kinsella, his experience of traditional song - described in his poem 'The Shoals Returning' - preceded the incorporation of Gaelic literature into his poetry while his recurring emphasis on the audience's role in the act of communication echoes his own identification of a central characteristic of the performance of traditional song, or sean-nós, in Irish.

Alongside true prepositions, such as fo ‘under’, lesh ‘with’, that are inflected with suffixes expressing personal pronoun objects (foym ‘under me’, lhiam ‘with me’, etc.), Manx has a number of expressions with broadly prepositional meaning that behave grammatically in some respects like nouns, and for the most part are derived from nouns. The personal pronoun objects of these prepositional nominals  are expressed by means of possessive (genitive) constructions, as in my chooyl ‘behind me’, nyn drooid or ny hrooid oc ‘through them’. In this paper I describe the usage of twenty such items in Classical Manx (c. 1700-1850).

Samhain, 1st of November, was the major festival which marked the opening of winter in early medieval Ireland; it is sometimes spelt Samain or Samuin, although the pronunciation was the same. In Tochmarc Emire it is the first of four quarter days mentioned by the heroine Emer; 'Samhain, when the summer goes to its rest'. To the writer of this text, probably working in the tenth century, it was therefore the opposite to the time of Beltane, being the period at which the livestock had been gathered in from the summer pastures and the cold and confined season was setting in for human and farm animal.

A systematic analysis and classification of Irish accentual verse-metres, this book will be of interest to linguists and students of metre as well as ethnomusicologists studying the context of Irish traditional song, and musicologists studying the historical development and dissemination of European song-forms. In the context of a metrical theory of Irish accentual verse, space is devoted to a phenomenologically-based discussion of the role of rhythm in spoken Irish and its implications for verse-structure. A taxonomy of Irish accentual verse-types based on line-length, as well as stanzaic and supra-stanzaic structure and verse-ornament, the musical context of verse, the ways in which musical metre differs from verse metre, and the implications of such differences for a system of versification primarily transmitted through a musical medium.

"[This book] provides a rigorous, linguistically and musically sophisticated, and above all practical approach to the totality of Gaelic non-syllabic verse [and] fills a large gap in scholarly understanding. Anyone whose work touches on Irish metrics will have to take this work into consideration. It is in the fullest sense a pioneering and groundbreaking work." -- Prof. William Gillies, U. of Edinburgh.

Because the purchase price of this book, whether from the publisher or other booksellers, is now well beyond the reach of most readers, it has been reformatted from the author's original files and is attached here in its entirety.

After the collapse of Northumbrian power in south-west Scotland, in the later ninth century, Gaelic speakers with links to the Vikings became the dominant force in the region. Some moved south from around the Firth of Clyde, others north and east from Dublin and Ireland. By the eleventh century a large part of south-west Scotland including Renfrewshire, Ayrshire, Nithsdale, Wigtownshire and the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright made up a Gaelic speaking 'greater Galloway'.

In the early twelfth century, Fergus of Galloway established himself as ruler of part of this territory- modern Galloway plus Carrick in south Ayrshire.

This is a study of settlement and society in the parish of Torosay on the Inner Hebridean island of Mull, through the earliest known settlement-names of two of its medieval districts: Forsa and Moloros. The earliest settlement-names, 35 in total, were coined in two languages: Gaelic and Old Norse (hereafter abbreviated to ON). The settlement-toponymy provides irrefutable evidence that ON-speakers settled locally and named their settlements in ON. In subsequent centuries, long after ON ceased to be spoken locally, these ON settlement-names were perpetuated by local Gaelic-speakers. Many of these ON settlement-names are still used locally and are recorded on modern maps; others have fallen out of use. The same can be said of the earliest settlement-names of Gaelic origin. New etymological analysis of the earliest known forms of these settlement-names, considered alongside local pronunciation where available, forms the basis of this thesis. Much of this analysis challenges previous research. A number of the settlement-names have not hitherto been located or been subject to etymological analysis, no previous study having comprehensively engaged with their earliest forms. The earliest known forms are recorded in fiscal evaluation dating to the final decade of the 15th century and, as such, the settlement-names provide a window on the Late Medieval period. The settlement-names also provide an invaluable insight into settlement and society in the Norse period; i.e. the period in which ON was spoken locally. Norse is employed here as both an adjective, as in the Norse period, and a noun, in reference to speakers of ON. Thus, application is broadly to what is now Scandinavia and contemporary inhabitants thereof, as opposed to the more typical modern application of Norse to Norway and its inhabitants. Individual place-name elements employed in ON settlement-names provide an insight into how the local landscape was perceived and utilised agriculturally by these immigrant ON-speakers. In some cases, proposed personal names identify individuals associated with specific settlements. At least one ON settlement-name is likely to provide evidence of the religion of those who coined the name. Syntactic analysis of the Gaelic settlement-names highlights the possibility that some were coined in the Early Medieval period. It also identifies names which are perhaps unlikely to have been coined before the early 10th century. Loan-words borrowed in both directions, i.e. from Gaelic to ON and from ON to Gaelic, are identified and these reveal something of the chronology of individual settlement-names, in addition to providing evidence for language contact. The distribution of ON settlement-names and the fiscal status of settlements bearing ON names can also reveal something of the status of immigrant ON-speakers and the status of local Gaelic-speaking communities. The date of the earliest known forms probably post-dates the period in which these ON names were coined by around six centuries and this clearly allows for significant displacement of settlement-toponymy. However, settlement-names of ON origin apply to both settlements of principal and of relatively low fiscal status and the implication is that there was a significant amount of continuity in settlement-toponymy up to the date of the earliest known fiscal sources. The dearth of contemporary textual sources for the Early Medieval and Norse periods and of local archaeology relating to these periods identifies these settlement-names as invaluable sources of information for contemporary settlement, society and language in the districts of Forsa and Moloros. Part One Chapter 1 sets the research in context in providing geographical, geological, topographical, tenurial, ecclesiastical and fiscal information for the two districts. Chapter 2 comprises a review of previous studies on local settlement-toponymy. Chapter 3 identifies the sources which provide the earliest known forms and outlines the employed methodology. Chapter 4 provides an historical framework and engages with Norse toponymy furth of Mull across Britain and Ireland. Chapter 5 presents discursive analysis addressing the predominant research questions. Chapter 6 presents conclusions. Part Two The place-name survey presents raw spatial data and etymological analysis, where not included in chapter 5, for each of the 35 settlement-names.

Archibald Cregeen’s "Dictionary of the Manks Language" is a major work of lexicography that has been used by generations of Manx learners since its publication in 1835. The distinctive way in which the information is presented has meant, however, that some of the dictionary’s potential value is not readily apparent to the user. Both the first edition of the Dictionary (1835) and the second (1910) comprise a strictly alphabetical list of word forms, which is particularly valuable for users not entirely familiar with the nature and range of variation in the initial letter of Manx words, due to initial consonant mutations, and to the addition of consonants (such as g-, d-  or n-) before certain forms of vowel-initial verbs. A consequence of this strictly alphabetical procedure, though, is that related forms of the same word, or word-family, are scattered throughout the dictionary. Thus, in a sense, Cregeen’s Dictionary as published is more like an index to a lexicon than a lexicon itself.

In this re-ordering of the entries of the Dictionary, lexically related forms are grouped together under a base form or lemma. It thereby becomes possible to consider together the various inflectional forms of each item, its affixal derivatives, and the phrases and compounds containing them. The reordering depends, of course, on correctly identifying the word relationships, and I may have made some erroneous connections, and missed some links that would be appropriate. I hope users will suggest improvements in this respect.

In this second edition (December 2015), the text of the citations from the Apocrypha has been included, and some errors have been corrected.

Clann Chruitín were among the most notable learned kindreds in Co. Clare in the late medieval period. They featured among the aos dána, the Gaelic learned class who specialised in, as the annals assert, ‘senchas agus le seinm’. Holding hereditary lands in west Co. Clare on the margins of the Atlantic coast, they attained the status of ollamhnacht in history (seanchas) and music (seinm) from the fourteenth century. Remarkably, learned members of Clann Chuitín continued to be associated with literary activity of he native tradition until the mid-nineteenth century when Séamas Mac Cruitín, self-described as ‘the last relic of the hereditary bards of Thomond’, died.

Land use and land classification traditions of Northeastern Algonquians remain poorly understood. Even less clear are traditions governing use of sacred lands: ceremonial places as well as hunting and gathering lands. Epistemic genocide (Bruchac 2012; Duran 2011), also called "erasure" (Bruchac 2011:31; Steeves 2017:50) and "vanishing act" (Bruchac 2011:35), in concert with destructive policy and oppressed Native narrative, obstruct our path to understanding. What is Northeastern Algonquian zoning practice? Through archaeology, ethnohistory, and linguistics, Northeastern Algonquian land classes and uses are described-sacred lands in particular. When informed by Native cultural sources, we can apprehend Algonquian land use patterns, knowledge that we can apply to improve sacred site preservation and plan for intelligent land management. Les traditions d'utilisation et de classification des terres par les Algonquins du nord-est demeurent mal comprises. Les traditions régissant l'utilisation des terres sacrées, des lieux de cérémonies ainsi que des territoires de chasse et de cueillette sont encore moins claires. Le génocide épistémique (Bruchac 2012; Duran 2011) aussi appelé « effacement » (Bruchac 2011:31, Steeves 2017:50) et « acte de disparition » (Bruchac 2011:35), de concert avec la politique destructrice et la narration d'oppression des indigènes nous barrent le chemin de la compréhension. En quoi consiste la pratique de zonage du Nord-est algonquien ? Grâce à l'archéologie, à l'ethnohistoire et à la linguistique, la classification et les utilisations des terres par les Algonquins du nord-est ont pu être décrites, en particulier en ce qui concerne les terres sacrées. Sur la base d'informations de sources culturelles autochtones, nous pouvons appréhender les modèles d'utilisation des terres algonquiennes, et nous pouvons mettre ces connaissances en application pour améliorer la préservation des sites sacrés et planifier la gestion intelligente des terres.

Can Scotland be considered an English colony? Is its experience and literature comparable to that of overseas postcolonial countries? Or are such comparisons no more than patriotic victimology to mask Scottish complicity in the British Empire and justify nationalism? These questions have been heatedly debated in recent years, especially in the run-up to the 2014 referendum on independence, and remain topical amid continuing campaigns for more autonomy and calls for a post-Brexit “indyref2.”  However, postcolonialism cannot be reduced to politics: cultural concerns are equally important. Focusing on the first centuries of the British Unions, Gaelic Scotland in the Colonial Imagination also offers a general introduction to the emerging field of postcolonial Scottish studies, assessing both its potential and limitations in order to promote further interdisciplinary dialogue. Accessible to readers from various backgrounds, the book combines overviews of theoretical, social, and cultural contexts with detailed case studies of literary and nonliterary texts. The main focus is on internal divisions between the anglophone Lowlands and traditionally Gaelic Highlands. Central to the ‘internal colonialism’ debate, these divisions also play a crucial role in Scottish–English relations. This study shows how the image of Scotland’s Gaelic margins changed under the influence of two simultaneous developments: the emergence of the modern nation state and the rise of overseas colonialism. Both sparked intense debates over ethnic hierarchies, progress and development, cultural intermixture, exploitation and resistance. Examples are drawn from novels, travel writing, poetry, political and administrative documents, writings by missionaries and educators, historiography, journalism, and anthropology.

The importance of Galloway's Gaelic clans (or kindreds) on the medieval and later history if south-west Scotland has been neglected. The research presented here re-assesses their importance and significant influence on the history of the region.

The following dissertation is a description of Celtic languages in the Indo-European context, where a brief statement about this linguistic phylum is presented, along with the families and languages composing it. Subsequently, an explanation about the origin theories of Celts and their languages will be provided, as well as a classification of the languages belonging to this family. Additionally, the main features that distinguish this phylum from the rest, and the ones which are more relevant, will be presented in a concise manner, as far as its phonology, morphology and syntax are concerned. To conclude, the case of Irish Gaelic will be deeply explained, as well as the example of Hiberno-Irish, including a comparison of borrowings between Irish and English.

This article looks at the writings of the County Clare Franciscan, Antonius Bruodin (c.1618-80), and his contention with fellow cleric, Thomas Carve (alias Carew). The writings of these two men, both clerics and living exiled on the continent in the second half of the 17th century, reveal much about Gaelic culture, native institutions and the Gaelic learned class. Bruodin was born into a learned family of the classical Gaelic tradition, the Clann Bhruaideadha (McBrodys), who had produced generations of official chroniclers and poets to the Ui Bhriain (O'Briens) of Thomond. His writings therefore contain first hand accounts of the methods of learning and the wealth and proprietorship enjoyed by the learned class in Gaelic lordships, prior to their reduction in status and loss of patronage from the early 17th century.

The end of Gaelic in Galloway is as obscure as its beginnings. It is likely that the survival of Gaelic was intimately bound up with the survival of a distinct Galwegian identity. The persistence of this Galwegian identity was a recurring source of conflict with Scottish kings from David I to David II. Crucially, it led Galloway’s Gaelic kindreds to support the Balliols against the Bruces in a struggle for the Scottish crown which lasted from 1286 to 1356, when David II prevailed over Edward Balliol. Even then, it was not until after Archibald Douglas established his lordship of Galloway in 1372 that the power of the Galwegian kindreds was diminished through the plantation of Scots speakers in Galloway. Under the Douglases, Scots began to displace Gaelic as the language of Galloway. By the end of Douglas rule in 1455, the once powerful Galwegian identity had faded into insignificance and the region was peacefully absorbed into Scotland. This acceptance of Scottish identity suggest that Scots had also replaced Gaelic as the language of Galloway.

The Book of Psalms has been translated into Manx Gaelic twice. The first version was made by John Phillips, Bishop of Sodor and Man, in 1610, as part of his translation of the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, a new edition of which had been published in 1605, under the direction of King James I of England, in which the version of the psalms was that of Coverdale’s Great Bible of 1539. It was not printed until 1895 (Moore & Rhŷs 1895), using the sole manuscript copy which was made between 1625 and 1630 (Manx National Heritage MS 00003; Wheeler 2019).
The second Manx translation was also part of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London in 1765 (Wheeler 2016).
This new edition of the two Manx translations of the Psalms is a contribution to the project of publishing digital editions of as much as possible of Manx Gaelic literature, and, in the case of translations, setting the Manx alongside the English originals.

This article explores the ways in which the Gaelic and English languages are portrayed or discussed in Scottish Gaelic poetry in the period c. 1700-c.1920, and the complex political and cultural implications of this treatment. The presentation of these issues often has a stock, stereotyped character. Familiar arguments and images are rehearsed again and again: Gaelic as the language of the Garden of Eden and the great Gaelic warrior-heroes, English as the cold, harsh language of rude city-folk and intrusive Lowland shepherds, and so on.  Yet there is also a minority strain in the poetry that gives a more rounded, complex view of the sociolinguistic context surrounding this work: complaints about Highlanders abandoning Gaelic in favour of English, laments about the difficulties of monoglot Gaels adrift in the alien Lowland towns.

The late eighteenth- and early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a flourishing of the Gaelic scribal tradition in the west of Ireland, notably in the counties of Cork and Clare. This flourishing benefited from the popularity of verse and storytelling among the general population, and the exchange of manuscripts and printed materials in Irish. However, the tradition was entering its final phase and over the course of the nineteenth century it hastened its decline
until, by the close of that century, it clung precariously to the remote and westerly fringes of the country. The tradition was inextricably linked to the Irish language, and in Clare it survived into the first half of the twentieth century, dying on the lips of speakers who lived in the north-western parishes of the county.

John Phillips’ translation of the Book of Common Prayer, with Psalter, is the earliest datable text in Manx Gaelic. It was made in 1610;  the only manuscript copy of it now in existence, (Manx Museum MS 00003), can be judged to have been written between 1625 and 1630, as it includes a prayer in the Litany for Charles I and his Queen, but not for their son, afterwards Charles II, who was born in the latter year. Phillips’ text was not printed until 1895, when A. W. Moore and Sir John Rhŷs edited it (Moore & Rhŷs 1895) and set it alongside the 1842 text of the later Manx translation (originally published in 1765).

In connection with the project to make as much as possible of Manx literature available in searchable digital form, I offer here a new transcription and an essentially diplomatic edition of Phillips’ Psalms.

The winter that I lived in Cape Breton I visited Peter MacLean, then 90 years old, at least once a week. He and his dogs would greet me boisterously at the doorway. After I had battled my way inside, past the barking and his bear hug we would settle in the kitchen by his beautiful "Modern Acorn" wood stove with our mugs of hot tea. Our chats usually began with my report of the road conditions on the 100 km drive south from St Ann's Bay to his house in Christmas Island: Was the Little Narrows ferry running? Was there more snow Down North? 1 From there we would progress to news about the neighbours or perhaps something he had heard on CBC Radio. Inevitably, conversation would lead us to the living room and the reel-to-reel machine that sat in state beside a cabinet holding shelves and shelves of tapes (see ). As we meandered through hours and hours of his recordings of Gaelic and English song, violin and piano I felt like a time traveler eavesdropping on house parties, quiet visits, concerts and radio shows. And once we had fallen down the rabbit hole where long-vanished sounds came to life we were not likely to surface for many hours.

This article draws on sociolinguistic fieldwork among speakers of one of Europe’s smallest indigenous language communities, a speaker group which persists after the loss of all of its “traditional speakers” within living memory. The extreme language shift experienced by Manx has not led to loss of the language as a spoken and literary medium due to the efforts of significant numbers of language activists and enthusiasts over several generations, from before the loss of the traditional language community to the present. Their actions have resulted in significant linguistic institutionalisation and a rapidly expanding number of speakers of various abilities, some of whom form a new “speaker community”. It discusses the constructions of linguistic authenticity and alternative models for the revival speaker, showing how core groups of speakers have been bestowed with authenticity by the wider non-speaker population, for whom linguists’ interest
in language endangerment and language death are not primary concerns. The
article shows how speakers appropriate and are accorded forms of authority and
legitimacy in the absence of traditional native speakers.

Manx adjectives may inflect for either of the categories comparative and plural, or for both, or for neither. There is no distinct superlative: comparative in Manx covers ‘comparative’ and ‘superlative’.
There are two suffixes available for the comparative: -ee and -ey. The comparative suffix -ee occurs almost exclusively with adjectives containing the suffix -agh, which is replaced by -ee in the comparative (e.g. graihagh ‘loving’ - graihee ‘more loving’). Cregeen gives 334 examples of adjectives in -agh that are inflected in this way. The comparative suffix -ey is sometimes accompanied by a change in the stem it is attached to, such as syncope (loss of a medial syllable, as in mennick ‘frequent’ - menkey ‘more frequent’), a change of stem vowel similar to what takes place in some noun genitives before the suffix -ey (e.g. liauyr ‘long’ - lhiurey ‘longer’), or a suppletive stem (e.g. olk ‘bad’ - (s)messey ‘worse’). In Cregeen there are some 117 comparatives in -ey. A dozen adjectives have irregular comparative forms, not involving a suffix, but some other change in the stem (e.g. lhean ‘wide’ - lhea ‘wider’), or a completely different stem (suppletive, e.g. beg ‘small’ - (s)loo ‘smaller’). When no comparative inflection is available for an adjective, the comparative sense comes from the comparative construction itself, which is used in the same way with uninflected and inflected comparatives, as, for example, in (uninflected) t’ee ny s’costal na rubieyn ‘she is more precious than rubies’; (inflected) va ny Nazariteyn eck ny s’glenney na sniaghtey ‘her Nazarites were purer than snow’.

The suffix used to make plural adjectives is also -ey. It is added to the basic singular stem (with nearly always no more than orthographic changes). Thus some adjectives that inflect with  -ey for both comparative and plural show a changed stem in the comparative, but not in the plural, e.g. çhionn ‘stiff, tight’, comp. çhienney, pl. çhionney. Cregeen gives some 92 plural adjective forms.

Contrary to received wisdom, while the phrase airer Goídel did have a geographical application, the name of the County of Argyll in Scotland has an entirely unrelated etymology, being a name transferred from Airgialla/Oriel in Ireland. This paper examines and distinguishes the two, explaining the difference and how the conflation occurred.

Paper presented at the 16th International Congress of Celtic Studies, Bangor University, July 2019. It is hoped to develop this study further with a larger sample from the Bible corpus. Thanks to AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training in the Celtic Languages for funding.

ABSTRACT:

This paper will examine the genesis and development of the Manx Bible translation, and seek to evaluate the extent to which the text (or texts) can be taken as representative of spontaneous spoken usage and contemporary linguistic variation in eighteenth-century Manx.

The first installment of the Bible (the gospel of Matthew) was published in 1748 and the final section of the Old Testament appeared in 1772. The task of translation was shared among the island’s Anglican clergy, who were generally native speakers of Manx, with an editorial team overseeing the work and seeking to standardize orthography and terminology, but seemingly less so morphology and syntax.

Substantial sections of the manuscript drafts of the translation survive and are preserved in the Manx National Heritage Library in Douglas (MS 5690C). The present study will investigate two samples from this manuscript corpus, from both the Old and New Testaments, as well as an earlier printed edition of St Matthew's Gospel, examining the editorial emendations on four dimensions: grammatical conservatism, closeness to the English text, idiomaticity, and verbosity.

Especially when the manuscript corpus is taken into account, it will be concluded that the language of the Manx Bible translation provides reasonably reliable testimony to contemporary spoken usage, if analysed judiciously. Indeed, Manx texts may offer one of the best insights available into the linguistic development of a vernacular Gaelic variety in the Early Modern period, unobscured by the inherent conservatism of a long-established pre-existing literary tradition.

The Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer with the texts to be spoken translated into Manx Gaelic was published by the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge in London in 1765. The translation was promoted by the Bishop of Sodor and Mann, Mark Hildesley, and undertaken by the Manx clergy, most particularly the Rev. Philip Moore, in conjunction with the Revv. Matthias Curghey and James Wilks, who had revised and completed the translation of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, published by the S.P.C.K. in 1763.
From the point of view of linguistic study, the advantage of translation literature is that the intended sense of the texts is clear. For that reason it may be valuable to make available, and searchable, as many texts as possible of the Manx translated literature of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the present edition, the original English text of the parts to be spoken is set alongside the Manx, being taken from The Book of Common Prayer..., printed by Joseph Bentham, Cambridge: University Press, 1765.
The text of the Epistle and Gospel passages prescribed in the Prayer Book for reading on each Sunday and Holy day throughout the year is that same as that which was included in the Manx New Testament (1763-67) and later in the complete Bible (1771-75), which also included the Psalms as in the Prayer Book. As the text of the Manx Bible is already available in searchable form, the text of the prescribed Epistle and Gospel passages and of the Psalms is omitted here.

The aim of this article is to try and extract the Scandinavian
element from this multitude of language layers in order to
investigate in which way the incoming Scandinavians influenced the appearance of Hebridean island names. This article sets out not just to provide an overview of island names of Scandinavian origin; it will also attempt to highlight the Scandinavian influence by bringing examples from the general island name material.

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Irish literature. Her work, drawing on Irish mythology, folklore and orature has also attracted considerable international acclaim and has been widely translated. However,  Ní Dhomhnaill  has also indicated an awareness of the problematical relationship of women historically to Irish literature. Women have for centuries being portrayed, whether in the Gaelic aisling or in the literature of the literary revival, as representative of Ireland, often to the neglect of their real lived experiences. Equally, within the Irish literary tradition, as Seán Ó Tuama has noted, “attested works by women are quite rare”(Ó Tuama, 1995). Women’s ‘literature’, as Ní Dhomhnaill suggests, was found largely in the oral tradition much of which went unrecorded. Throughout her work, she regularly draws on aspects of this legacy of women’s performances, including the lament and song traditions, to inform her work. This obvious intertextual process at work in her poetry is examined in this essay with regard to the traditional process of composition of songs and laments by women in Ireland and in relation to its use in other contexts. This paper also explores how this process of reclaiming aspects of Ireland’s oral culture represents Ní Dhomhnaill’s rewriting and replacing of the female voice within her own work while asserting her own right of expression in literature.

This article continues the series expounding and commenting on the grammatical information to be found in Archibald Cregeen’s Dictionary of the Manks Language (1835). Here, while the forms are taken from the Dictionary (supplemented in some cases by examples from the Manx Bible), the grammatical framework and terminology is for the most part my own. The Dictionary includes some 890 verbs, and, for nearly all, Cregeen gives a considerable amount of information on inflection.

In this article the role of different ideological viewpoints concerning corpus development within the Manx revival movement in the second half of the twentieth century is explored. In particular, the work of two prominent figures is examined: the Celtic scholar Robert L. Thomson, who published extensively especially on Manx language and literature, and also contributed to the revival, particularly as editor of several pedagogical resources and as a member of the translation committee Coonceil ny Gaelgey, and Douglas Fargher, a tireless activist and compiler of an English-Manx Dictionary (1979). Broadly speaking, Thomson was of a more preservationist bent, cautious in adapting the native resources of the language and wary of straying too far from attested usage of the traditional language, while Fargher was more radical and open especially to borrowing from Irish and Scottish sources. Both were concerned, in somewhat different ways, to remove perceived impurities or corruptions from the language, and were influenced by the assumptions of existing scholarship. A close reading of the work of these scholar-activists sheds light on the tensions within the revival movement regarding its response to the trauma of language death and the questions of legitimacy and authenticity in the revived variety. Particular space is devoted to an analysis of the preface of Fargher's dictionary, as well as certain features of the body of the work itself, since this volume is probably the most widely consulted guide to the use of the language today. Finally, it is argued that the Manx language movement today would benefit from a reassessment and discussion of the ideological currents of the past and present, and a judicious evaluation of both the strengths and weaknesses of existing reference works.

Final published version available open access at https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/scp/2/1/article-p97.xml

Clann Chraith (MGraths) of Munster were a pre-eminent literary family whose activities spanned eleventh to seventeenth century. As a hereditary learned family, their professional specialisation was in seanchas (historical lore) and filidheacht (poetry). From the late eleventh century their standing can be ascertained from the fact that they served as court poets to the royal Ui Bhriain dynasty. This paper investigates their bardic school which was established in the late medieval period at Burgess in south Tipperary. Their connections with north Waterford and the Sliabh gCua district is also investigated.

Of the grammatical works on Manx Gaelic, it is A. Cregeen’s A Dictionary of the Manks Language that provides by far the most detail of inflectional morphology. And it was prepared at a time when Manx was a living community language with a large number of native speakers. In this series of studies, I attempt to extract from the dictionary Cregeen’s contribution to a descriptive grammar of ‘Classical Manx’ —the language of written texts of the period 1700-1830. The information on plural inflections that follows in this first section is derived from Cregeen’s Dictionary, as are the meanings given. Where Cregeen mentions alternative inflections, I have added some information about usage in the Manx Bible. The classification of the inflectional patterns, however, is my own.

This paper describes the complex and sometimes ambiguous attitudes of Gaeltacht Irish speakers towards the intergenerational transmission of Irish. It focuses on first language speaker data that was gathered as part of a larger field-based project among fluent, habitual speakers of Irish in the Múscraí Gaeltacht region in County Cork, Ireland, and compares the findings to Ó Riagáin’s study of the more strongly Irish-speaking Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht region some 20 years beforehand. It concludes by describing a contemporary in-group initiative to encourage Irish-language socialisation and some of the challenges faced in persuading Irish speakers of the merits of an all-Irish household approach to language retention.

Ó hIfearnáin, T. (2013) 'Family language policy, first language Irish speaker attitudes and community-based response to language shift'. Journal of Multilingual And Multicultural Development, 34: 348-365.

Of the grammatical works on Manx Gaelic, it is A. Cregeen’s A Dictionary of the Manks Language that provides by far the most detail of inflectional morphology. And it was prepared at a time when Manx was a living community language with a large number of native speakers. In this series of studies, I attempt to extract from the dictionary Cregeen’s contribution to a descriptive grammar of ‘Classical Manx’ —the language of written texts of the period 1700-1830. The information on genitive case inflections that follows in this second section is derived from Cregeen’s Dictionary, to which have been added a handful from J. J. Kneen’s Grammar of the Manx Language. The classification of the inflectional patterns is my own. The classification is followed by extensive exemplification of genitive case usage in Cregeen’s dictionary and in the Manx Bible.

A new complete edition of the Manx Gaelic translation of the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer, except for the Psalter, setting the text of the 1765 and 1777 editions alongside the English original. The earlier partial translation found in MNH MS 13221/1/1 is also edited here for the first time.