Celtic Languages

IV. IRISH STUDIES

POSTPONED

V. STUDIES

By DERICK S. THOMSON, Professor of Celtic, University of Glasgow

Colm 6 Baoill, who helped on the Scottish side of Heinrich Wagner's Linguistic Atlas and Survey of Irish Dialects, has publ. Contributions to a Comparative Study of Ulster Irish and Scottish Gaelic, lnst. of Irish Studies, The Queen's Univ. of Belfast, xxxii + 323 pp. This painstaking and detailed compilation lists correspondences in lexis, phonology and morphology between Ulster and Scottish Gaelic forms, using publ. and unpubl. dialect descriptions; the author's criteria in quoting selectively from Scottish Gaelic lit. sources are not clear, and some of his Scottish assumptions are not justified but this is nevertheless a valuable piece of groundwork. The comparisons are made piecemeal, between selected parts of Scotland and Ulster, and there is some duplication of treatment. There are maps giving locations of dialect information points, but it is considered premature to suggest hard-and-fast isoglosses at this stage. W. B. Lockwood, 'Chr. Matras' studies on the Gaelic element in Faroese: conclusions and results', SGS, I 3: I I 2-26, provides a useful summary of M.'s investigations, with addi• tional comm. by L. himself. He deals, e.g., with sornur < sorn, drunnur < dronn (linking very interesting wedding customs involving impromptu verse-making in the Faroes and in Gaelic Scotland), blak < *blathach (with short a), slavak < *slabac, kjalldmur < *cerr tam, kokja < caigeann, soppur < sopp, etc., while adding the interesting suggestion that Lewis Gaelic mircean is the relic of a Hebridean Norn form *myrkjanni (itselfinvolving borrowing from Gaelic *muirchenn) taken back into Modern Gaelic. Anders Ahlqvist, 'Oratio Dominica Waldensis', SC, I2-I3, ( I977/I978): 2 I I-I6, discusses this so-called Waldensian version, first publ. in a polyglot collection 566 Scottish Gaelic Studies of Lord's Prayers in I 699; he distinguishes various Irish and Scottish Gaelic features in it, and concludes that it was a trans!. from English, and was made by someone whose dialect s to be placed 'somewhere around south-west Scotland or north-east Ireland'. He suggests, but insists that this is fairly speculative, that the text may derive from Galloway. Nancy Dorian, 'The preservation of the vocative in a dying Gaelic dialect', SGS, I3:98-Io2, shows that, despite evidence of the approaching extinction of East Gaelic (spoken in Brora, Golspie and Embo), various markers of the vocative case are well preserved: initial mutation almost universally, palatalization in the case ending in a few instances, plural in f-uf (!-if) in fewer, adjective lenition common in the singular, and extending to the plural (a difference from standard Gaelic). Anders Ahlqvist, 'On preposed adverbials', ib., 66-8o, argues that 'Old Irish and Scottish Gaelic both distinguish preposed adverbials from other preposed consti• tuents, but they do so by very different means', whereas Manx and Mod. Irish do not make this distinction. The paucity of early Scottish material unfortunately leaves much to specula• tion. Sean de Burca argues in 'Syllabicity and palatalization', SC, I 2-I 3: 396-404, that original vowels commonly retain segmental presence in Eastern Gaelic in cases where a latent rising diphthong or the loss of the first element of the diphthong has become regular in Irish. This is a conservative feature of some Scottish Gaelic dialects. Its effect on the labial quality of consonants is discussed. Donald MacAulay, 'Intra-dialectal variation as an area of Gaelic linguistic research', SGS, I 3: 8I-97, discusses a range of phenomena reasonably familiar to older Gaelic speakers, such as areal sub-dialects, and dialectal and lexical features associated with various kinds of network. He touches on such topics as morphological change, bilingual• ism, and register, making the point forcibly that there is a rich area of detailed linguistic research urgently needing to be exploited. V. Durkacz, 'The source of the language problem in Scottish education, I 688-I 709', SHR, 57: 28-39, shows clearly that the determined efforts of the Scottish Episcopalian clergyman James Kirkwood to encourage Gaelic literacy in the Highlands met with the same sort of attitudes that had given rise to the earlier anti-Gaelic legislation. Some light is shed in