Afro - Cosmic Goidelic
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- Duration: 3:19
- Published: 2010-09-21
- Uploaded: 2010-10-07
- Author: repl4
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| Name | Goidelic |
|---|---|
| Altname | Gaelic |
| Region | Ireland, Scotland, Isle of Man |
| Familycolor | Indo-European |
| Fam1 | Indo-European |
| Fam2 | Celtic |
| Fam3 | Insular Celtic |
| Child1 | Irish |
| Child2 | Scottish Gaelic |
| Child3 | Manx |
Classical Gaelic, otherwise known as Early Modern Irish, was used as a literary language in Ireland and northwest Scotland from around the year 1200 until the 18th century, and was the sociolect of the educated elite. As these during the 17th century, 18th century and 19th century either emigrated, were executed, reduced to poverty, or became anglicised, the regional dialects started coming to the fore, with divergence of the traditional orthography. However, most orthographic divergence has been held to a minimum through standardisation into a pluricentristic orthography with a certain amount of freedom to represent regional forms, be these spelling variants (e.g. ciad vs ceud in Scotland, Classical Gaelic céad "hundred"), or vocabulary or idiomatic variants. The Manx orthography introduced in the 16th century and 17th century was based on English and Welsh practice, however was never widely in use, as the educated elite were of Anglo-Norman descent at the time. A similar spelling system was in some use in Scotland, however never took hold.
The Goidelic languages are generally classified in comparative/linguistic short-hand parlance as the Q-Celtic division of the Celtic languages.
The names used in the dialects/languages themselves, Gaolainn Munster, Gaeilge Connaght, Gaelic Ulster, Gaelg/Gailck Isle of Man, and Gàidhlig Scotland) are derived from Old Irish Goídelc, based on Goidel (Modern Gaelic Gael (Irish), Gàidheal (Scottish) Gaelic person), derived from the Old Welsh Gwyddel meaning "pirate, raider".
As with all such family trees which represent what is in reality a dialect chain, there is a large amount of over-simplification. Northern Irish and Southern Scottish Gaelic tend to have much more in common than either with the dialects further to the north or the south.
Goidelic was once restricted to Ireland, but sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries groups of Irish, called by the Romans by the general term Scoti, began migrating from Ireland to what is now Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. Those who settled in Cornwall and Wales made little longterm impact, however the Dál Riada settlers in Scotland eventually assimilated the Picts (a group of peoples who may have spoken a Brythonic language) who lived throughout Scotland. Manx, the former language of the Isle of Man, is closely akin to the Irish spoken in northeast and eastern Ireland and the now extinct Gaelic of Galloway (in southwest Scotland), with some influence from Old Norse through the Viking invasions and from the previous British inhabitants.
The oldest written Goidelic language is Primitive Irish, which is attested in Ogham inscriptions up to about the 4th century. The forms of this speech are very close, and often identical, to the forms of Gaulish recorded before and during the Roman Empire. The next stage, Old Irish, is found in the margins of Latin religious manuscripts from the 6th to the 10th century, as well as in archaic texts copied/recorded in Middle Irish texts. Middle Irish, the immediate predecessor of the modern Goidelic languages, is the term for the language as recorded from the 10th to the 12th century: a great deal of literature survives in it, including the early Irish law texts. Early Modern Irish (alt. Early Modern Gaelic) covers the period from the 13th to the 17th century: its literary form was used as a literary language in Ireland and Scotland consistently until the 18th century and in some cases well into the 19th century. This is often called Classical Irish, while the Ethnologue gives the name "Hiberno-Scottish Gaelic" to this standardised written language. As long as this written language was the norm, Ireland was considered the Gaelic homeland to the Scottish literati.
In the early 16th century the dialects of northern Middle English, also known as Early Scots, which had developed in Lothian and had come to be spoken elsewhere in the Kingdom of Scotland themselves later appropriated the name Scots. By the 17th century Gaelic speakers were restricted largely to the Highlands and the Hebrides. Furthermore, the culturally repressive measures taken against the rebellious Highland communities by the British crown following the 2nd Jacobite Rebellion of 1746 caused still further decline in the language's use – to a large extent by enforced emigration. Even more decline followed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Scottish Parliament has afforded the language a secure statutory status and equal respect (but not full equality in legal status within Scots Law ) with English, sparking hopes that Scottish Gaelic can be saved from extinction and perhaps even revived.
Shelta language is sometimes thought to be a Goidelic language, but is in fact a cant based on Irish and English, with a primarily English-based syntax.
The Bungee language in Canada is an English dialect spoken by Métis that was influenced by Orkney English, Scots English, Cree, Ojibwe, and Scottish Gaelic.
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
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