Universität Potsdam Hildegard L. C. Tristram (ed.) The Celtic Englishes IV The Interface between English and the Celtic Languages Potsdam University Press In memoriam Alan R. Thomas Contents Hildegard L.C. Tristram Inroduction .................................................................................................... 1 Alan M. Kent “Bringin’ the Dunkey Down from the Carn:” Cornu-English in Context 1549-2005 – A Provisional Analysis.................. 6 Gary German Anthroponyms as Markers of Celticity in Brittany, Cornwall and Wales................................................................. 34 Liam Mac Mathúna What’s in an Irish Name? A Study of the Personal Naming Systems of Irish and Irish English ......... 64 John M. Kirk and Jeffrey L. Kallen Irish Standard English: How Celticised? How Standardised?.................... 88 Séamus Mac Mathúna Remarks on Standardisation in Irish English, Irish and Welsh ................ 114 Kevin McCafferty Be after V-ing on the Past Grammaticalisation Path: How Far Is It after Coming? ..................................................................... 130 Ailbhe Ó Corráin On the ‘After Perfect’ in Irish and Hiberno-English................................. 152 II Contents Elvira Veselinovi How to put up with cur suas le rud and the Bidirectionality of Contact .................................................................. 173 Erich Poppe Celtic Influence on English Relative Clauses? ......................................... 191 Malcolm Williams Response to Erich Poppe’s Contribution on “Celtic Influence on English Relative Clauses?”...................................... 212 Augustin Simo Bobda Irish Presence in Colonial Cameroon and Its Linguistic Legacy .......................................................................... 217 Raymond Hickey Contact, Shift and Language Change Irish English and South African Indian English ....................................... 234 Claudia Lange Reflexivity and Intensification in Irish English and Other New Englishes.......................................................................... 259 Peter Siemund Independent Developments in the Genesis of Irish English ..................... 283 David L. White On the Areal Pattern of ‘Brittonicity’ in English and Its Implications...................................................................... 306 Name Index ............................................................................................... 336 Subject Index............................................................................................. 343 Introduction Hildegard L.C. Tristram (Potsdam University) The fourth and final international Colloquium on the “Celtic Englishes” at the University of Potsdam in Golm (Germany) was held from the 22nd to 25th of Sep- tember, 2004. The title of this Colloquium was “Exploring the Celticity of the Celtic Englishes.” Some fifty scholars from various countries in Europe, North America, India and Africa convened in Golm to discuss current views about the linguistic status of the varieties of English spoken in the Celtic countries and in the Celtic diaspora. As the series of Colloquia on the Celtic Englishes at the University of Pots- dam comes to a close after a period of 10 years, I wish to strongly stress the point that this project, which started from modest beginnings in 1995, gained wide recognition and was paid liberal tribute to by the anonymous assessors of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (The Federal German Research Founda- tion). These assessors very generously granted travel stipends for the foreign participants of this Colloquium from Europe and from as far away as Cameroon, Texas, Chicago, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This most generous grant al- lowed us to change the format of the previous Colloquia from an ordinary style to a “seminar” style Colloquium, which meant that the fourteen prepublications submitted were reviewed and commented upon by two respondents each and in one case even by three respondents. From this a very lively and fruitful, even controversial discussion developed. I am sure that the great expectations which the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft placed in this Colloquium were met by all of the participants. I also wish to extend gracious thanks to the “Cultural Relations Committee / Comhar Cultúra Éireann” of the Department of Foreign Affairs / An Roinn Gnóthaí Eachtracha of the Government of the Republic of Ireland, which, as in the years before, granted financial support towards the travel expenses of the convenors from the Republic of Ireland. It is so rewarding to have trustworthy and reliable friends. Cordial thanks go to the Ambassador of Ireland in Berlin, HE Seán O’Huiginn, for his most generous invitation of the convenors to his Residency in Berlin-Grunewald for an evening of Irish music and conviviality. 2 Hildegard L.C. Tristram The Colloquium was opened by the welcome address of the Dean of the Fac- ulty of Arts of Potsdam University, Prof. Dr. Bernhard R. Kroener, followed by that of the Director Germany of the British Council in Berlin, Kathryn Board OBE, and of Dr. Seán Ó Riain, First Secretary of the Embassy of Ireland, Berlin. Dr. Ó Riain also acted as a respondent to Liam Mac Mathúna’s contribution on “What’s in an Irish Name? A Study of the Personal Naming Systems of Irish and Irish English.” He participated in the general discussions as well. For the program, speakers, respondents and the picture gallery, please see < http://www.celtic-englishes.de/ >, The Celtic Englishes IV. I hope that, with the Potsdam Colloquia on the Celtic Englishes having come to a close, this field of study will continue to stimulate interest in the many as- pects of the intense and prolonged linguistic interaction between speakers of English and speakers of the Insular Celtic languages in the Atlantic Archipelago. The topics explored in this Colloquium and the contributions published in this volume broadened the scope of research compared to the previous Colloquia and volumes. They moved from the more obvious linguistic transfers of Celtic to English to a number of issues not dealt with before. The first group of papers deals with the issue of “Celticity” and ethnic identity construction. The recent fashion of resorting to the use of Celtic personal names in Brittany, Wales and Ireland, as discussed by Gary German and Liam Mac Math- úna, attests to the rising awareness which many parents have of their “Celtic” heri- tage. It is this perceived “Celticity” that they wish to pass on to their children. The popularity of the Celtic anthroponyms attests to their desire to overtly dis- play their “Celtic” identity. As citizens of nation states with predominantly Eng- lish and French speakers, they use the Celtic names in order to demonstrate their “otherness.” Names of Celtic origin are of great popularity in North America as well, but they do not express the same desire of ethnic identity formation. “Otherness” as an expression of a perceived Celtic identity also plays an im- portant role in three contributions on the “Celticity” of Standard English. David White presents cumulative evidence of the “otherness from Germanic” of many grammatical markers of Standard English. He makes a strong case that the obvi- ous typological parallels between Standard English and the Insular Celtic lan- guages need to be viewed in conjunction with recent historical and archaeologi- cal evidence concerning the Anglo-Saxon Conquest. It is suggested that the na- tive Britons adapted themselves on a large scale to the culture of their conquer- ors. Linguistically, such acculturation hints at a grammatical convergence of English and Neo-Brittonic (“bottom-up language shift”), thereby alienating Eng- lish from other Germanic languages. Jeffrey Kallen and John Kirk point out, using the data from ICE-Ireland, that the use of Standard English in the South of Ireland as well as in the North shows that the occurrence of specific lexical and grammatical features marks it as specifically Irish rather than British. Moreover, northernisms can be distin- guished from southernisms, so that, in spite of the low frequency of such diag- nostic forms, their salience serves overt identity constructions. These are per- Introduction 3 ceived as being largely of Celtic origin. Séamus Mac Mathúna’s remarks on Kallen and Kirk’s paper suggest that the “Celticised” or regionalised standard of the English language in Ireland needs to be confronted with the problems of the standardisation of Irish and, by comparison, Welsh. Lesser used languages often suffer from the stigma of fragmentation due to the absence of a supra-regional standard. The perceived “Celticity” of the standard languages in Ireland, Wales, and perhaps elsewhere in the British Isles, seems to serve identity constructions of the Celtic Englishes, as well as that of the Celtic languages. Some of the grammatical features considered to be especially diagnostic of the “Celtic Englishes” are discussed in a second group of contributions. Kevin McCafferty, Ailbhe Ó Corráin, Erich Poppe, Malcolm Williams, Claudia Lan- ge, and Peter Siemund deal with non-standard properties such as the expression of perfectivity (esp. the after-perfect), relativity (esp. contact clauses and preposition stranding), and intensification (unbound self-forms). The common typological shift of verbal word formation from syntheticity to analycity is broached in the contribution by Elvira Veselinovi. The overriding question in all of these arti- cles is how “really