Notes to Lùthais MacGriogair, Celtic Languages Facebook group

These were notes to a certain Lùthais MacGriogair, certified boor, and an administrator in a prominent Celtic Languages Facebook group who was always questioning my linguistic background, assuming that I had no right, or scholarly training to make or post comments, that I didn’t have a linguistic leg to stand on. That got me in a lather. My reply grew by leaps and bounds as I hosed him down. I eventually grew weary of his overprivileged snottiness, and left the group, as he was only interested in linguistic slogging matches. I have little patience for the pejorative male ego. So much for having fun in a Facebook group, gawdforbid!

I’ve studied several versions of Irish, from Archaic to modern, skipping Middle Irish—probably the very language I needed in order to read the later manuscripts, but I did make linear translations of the early Irish epics, including the Táin Bó Fraích at UC Berkeley, where I also took a course on medieval Welsh, which didn’t stick. But we did translate a tale from the Mabinogion, and another tale. 

When I was young, my Corkonian grandmother from Bantry, b. 1893—her parents spoke Irish—tried to instill in me some basic Gaelic League Irish. An gort glas. So I can read the old writing. 

When I was in Leuven, there was something written in the old style script, which my Dutch friend couldn’t read, above an iron gate and I turned to my polyglot Dutch companion and told him what it said, it was an Irish college dedicated to St. James. He said you do realize it’s written in Irish, don’t you? Startled, I looked up at the gate. And thus began my lifelong interest in the Medieval Celtic realm—especially the Irish on the Continent. 

When I was young, I traveled to Switzerland to work, and unfortunately I did not know that there were Irish manuscripts in the library in Saint Gall, where I was stuck for a time, but I do remember pondering the beauty of the locked doors of the library. In another Swiss village, I did find Celtic artifacts—mostly weapons—all the small Swiss museums—they have not buried their Celtic heritage. The village where I lived paid homage to their Celtic ancestors. 

I began to realize all that crazy information my grandmother tried to impart in me, long before modern archaeology supported her claims, via the oral tradition, was in fact, true. In my 20s and 30s I did try to keep up my Irish studies by unsuccessfully using various learning systems, including Teach Yourself Irish, and Teach Yourself Gaelic, a Donegal primer, a Scots primer for kids, Buntús Cainte and Myles Dillon. Later, DuoLingo, etc. 

Because I have been so long away from the languages—not much opportunity to converse in Archaic Irish—and since I’ve hardly used any of it, it is all in danger of slipping away. But oddly, language is persistent as well, and sometimes words rise up unbidden in the psyche, and pester me. Ear worms. Chun, for example. At least there are no eels in my hovercraft. 

I can more or less slog through something written in Irish and get the gist of it and make a very rough translation. But the tenses are slipping away, especially the past tense, fittingly. I want to learn more, or keep what little Irish I do have, alive—which is more than the average bear, but bears don’t speak Irish, now do they? That’s why I joined this group.

• A slogging match on Manx orthography

A slogging match on Manx orthography

Someone posted an old Manx grammar book on Manx idioms and phrases. I enthusiastically wrote back, Fantastic. I recounted how at one point I found copies of some Manx manuscripts, and had to read them out loud, in order to hear the cognates in Irish. 

I said, Sadly, Manx was written down with an English orthography, versus Irish which used Latin orthography. Had both been transcribed in Latin, then it would be so much easier to find the common cognates, and that would’ve enriched the early history of both languages/dialects enormously. Can you please copy a few pages and post them here?

And then Celtic languages administrator, Lùthais MacGriogair said, Mo Hurley Manx spelling isn't really "English-based". If you read most words as if they were English, you don't get the Manx pronunciation of the words. The letters and groups of letters don't always have the same phonetic value in English and in Manx. Concerning the "Latin orthography" of Irish, what do you mean?

I said, Lùthais MacGriogair When Old Irish was transcribed into writing, monks used Latin orthography as their model. Since Archaic Irish probably predated Latin, I’m sure there were compromises, and a fair bit of shoehorning to make Irish fit the Latinate grammatical structure.

Manx, first written down in modern times, is much closer to English pronunciation than to Irish! The first transcribing of Manx was by English/Welsh speaker, Bishop Phillips in the 16th century.

“When, however, about the seventeenth century it became so, a system of spelling was adopted which, based upon English with a dash of Welsh, aimed at being phonetic, instead of, like Irish and Scotch, preserving the etymology of words. As a matter of fact it succeeded very well in not preserving the etymology; but unless the pronunciation has materially altered, its other object was not such a success. “

I cited a paper, MANX LANGUAGE ITS GRAMMAR, LITERATURE, AND PRESENT STATE

Lùthais MacGriogair said, "When Old Irish was transcribed into writing, monks used Latin orthography as the model."

Latin orthography with the letters' values they would use when reading Latin with their Irish pronunciation, ie. intervocalic d as [ð], intervocalic g as [ɣ] etc, plus all the innovations needed to transcribe sounds that don't exist in ("hiberno") Latin : χ, θ... and many diphthongs, etc. But nowadays when talking about the Modern Irish spelling, one can't say it's based on Latin because its spelling has become completely different.

I tried to clarify my point: "Manx, first written down in modern times, is much closer to English pronunciation than to Irish! The first transcribing of Manx was by English/Welsh speaker, Bishop Phillips in the 16th century."

Still Lùthais MacGriogair wouldn’t concede the point, he said, If you know the pronunciation of Manx words compared to their spelling you know well that the Manx orthography isn't simply English... Knowing English barely helps to learn how to pronounce Manx words...

I said, exasperated, Lùthais MacGriogair, did I say Manx orthography was simply English? No. I said Manx was transcribed into modern English, not unlike Old Irish into Latin. So, yes, English (with a Welsh sensibility because the bishop was a native Welsh speaker) informs pronunciation.

I explained, Manx was not a written language. It was a spoken language. Somebody had to physically write it down. This happened relatively recently, in the 17th c., unlike Old Irish, which was written down in Latin orthography in the 7th-12th cs. Before that, Archaic Irish was sometimes written using Ogham. But we really don’t have any way of guessing what it sounded like—using Latin as a guideline is about as good as it gets. 

When a language is transcribed, you have to keep in mind the foster language alphabet pronunciation guide. A good example of this going awry is when Americans try to pronounce a Native American word transposed into English via the Spanish. And they fail miserably. Matilija poppy, a Chumash word, transcribed by the Spanish comes out very different in English pronunciation.

Still he kept at it, refusing to acknowledge my point, I sold him, Lùthais MacGriogair you’re nitpicking. If the same orthographic system that was used to transcribe Old Irish was used on transcribing Manx, we would know significantly more about most languages, because, root words.

Have you studied Archaic, or Old Irish? It is different than modern Irish, but there are many words that are spelled similarly—then Modern Irish decided to modernize and reform spelling which created confusion.

Lùthais MacGriogair said, You wrote "Sadly, Manx was written down with an English orthography, and it's just wrong.” Also Old Irish uses a very modified form of "Latin-based" orthography. If you know Latin and try to read Old Irish aloud, your pronunciation will be very, very far from the Old Irish pronunciation.

I said, Lùthais MacGriogair You are still missing the point. If both languages had been recorded with the same orthographic system, we would have far more preserved embedded archaic information about the history and the development of the language itself. As it stands now, it’s a rough translation between the two languages because two different orthographies were used. Old Irish is actually more direct than modern Irish in terms of pronunciation and spelling because modern Irish has changed significantly. Ditto that with Scots Gaelic.

Today I found this: The Manx phonetic system is the worst, being based upon English principles of spelling (if such there be).

Today I was looking for examples of “faoi reim” and look what I found, dated 1901. Page 6. Someone in a Celtic linguistics group reamed me a new one for suggesting that Manx was written in phonetic English

I cited Celtia, a Pan-Celtic Monthly Magazine, 1901, as a reference.

And still he wouldn’t let it go, and followed me to another post. Manx uses certain digraphs borrowed from English but it doesn't mean they have to be pronounced as in English. Actually if you know English and read Manx words as if they were English words, most of the time you won't get the Manx pronunciation.

I said, I never said that you pronounced Manx words as English, I said Manx was written down using English orthography, and that by saying the words aloud in English—it informed me. I was able to grasp an understanding of what was written, that I otherwise had no access to, as there were no Manx speakers available. Irish was written down using Latin orthography, so there are different pronunciation rules.

Now I’m waiting to see if I’ll be kicked out of the group for talking back.

• Notes to Lùthais MacGriogair 

Clan vs Clann

I know you are just frothing to read this post on Old Irish spelling and Pronunciation by Dennis King (Focal an Lae—a website I used to visit often at the turn of the century). I came to the link rather curiously. Old lives meeting new ones, converging all at once—with rather odd results in the Twitterverse, of all places.

I "met" Dennis, who butted in mid-conversation on Twitter last night. OK, so it was already bizarre, to have five-way twitter conversations all in Irish—me, the only one writing in English—until Google Translate up and quit on me.

It all began because I posted this:

“Rolihlahla Mandela was born into the Xhosa Madiba clan in Mvezo, in the Umtata district in Transkei, on July 18, 1918, to Nonqaphi Nosekeni and Nkosi Mphakanyiswa Gadla Mandela. Nelson was a Christian name given to Rolihlahla in school. The clan name of Madiba, which is often used as a form of address for Mandela, comes from the ancestral chief.”

Someone immediately corrected my spelling of clan to clann and said that it meant children, or offspring, not tribe. Another said stet. leave it be. The battle lines were drawn. I said: it’s not a misspelling at all. The word clan entered into English from the Highlands ca. 1425. Clan is a kinship organized by founding member or symbolic apical ancestor. We were off on a fascinating linguistic bent.

The original question on the table was: why is the word clan spelled clann in Irish? (But not always in Scots-Gaelic). What were the rules?

Dennis, a latecomer to the conversation, instead of answering the question, decided I was the weak link and derided my lack of knowledge of Irish, in Irish. Ní gá. Is léir nach bhfuil tú eolach ar an tSean-Gh ná ar na lámhscríbhinní. Slán. It got worse. Flustered chickens could do no better at chest puffing.

Maybe there was no battle of words, maybe it was merely a case of what gets lost in translation. They were all writing in Irish—mostly in Belfast Metro Irish, at that. That's when he tried to rip me a new one because I dared to ask why. He ranted as if credentials were questioned. To be fair, I hadn't a clue as to who he was—other than he was turning out to be a twit boor.

He let fly. There was a palpable pause, a Twitter dite in the Twitterverse replete with sad emoticons. For my part, clan wars ensued. So, I Googled him, then to put it to rest, I name-dropped. I said: I'll ask my Irish professor, Dan Meila. Perhaps he can shed some light. A hit! A palpable hit!

Let's just say Dennis backpaddled: Tá an Nollaig ag teacht agus chuile strus is straidhn a thagann léi, móide laethanta giorra! His link was a peace-offering, I suspect.

But I'm sure you're all champing at the bit to find out what the frothy lit-bits were all about.

It turns out that clann was originally spelled cland in Old Irish. In the Online Etymological Dictionary we found that clann was a word imported from Latin, planta (a green twig, cutting, graft). Huh? I wasn't taking that at face value.

A little more research yielded that cland arrived via the Welsh word for child, plant. It was a borrowing from Old Welsh plant, which was, itself, a borrowing from the Latin planta. 

Because Irish is Goidelic, vs. Brythinic Welsh, and the Irish substituted k- or c- sound for the Welsh (or Latin) p- sound. (See Welsh map/mab, and Irish macc (son).) But not for the Irish word, páiste, the later, an imported Anglo-Norman word for child (from page). The original Irish word for child was Ieanbh. In this case, both words existed side by side. (The Handbook of Language Contact)

Of course this raises the question, what did the Welsh and Irish call themselves before they got all Latinate, —túath? But that means tribe in the larger sense. In one dictionary I found that the Irish word for clan is treibh. Circular breathing. And why did the Irish even need to import a word like clan? Or child, for that matter? What does that say about the evolving structure of identity in Medieval Irish/Celtic society? Planta doesn't seem to mean family tree in Latin. Fodder for another time.

Some of my basic orthographic questions: do clann & crann follow the same spelling rule (-nn). And why? Where does it come from? Not sure about other double consonant words like tonn, or crann.

After cracking open five dictionaries smelling of mildew an age, I found nothing, except a scrap of yellowed paper—something my grandmother had written long ago, transliterating Spanish and Nahual into Irish. That's fodder for another blog. My eyes hurt from trying to read the small print, magnifying glasses were in order. Nada. So I dusted off my old Irish grammar books.

What I found: Rudolf Thurneysen, in Old Irish Grammar, wrote that scribes refrained from doubling consonants in unlenited groups (p 86)—and it was written as cland, not clann.

Clann was also written as cland—not clann—in Old Irish Paradigms—John Strachan (p 175).

As a rule, it seems that medieval scribes didn't write -nn—as it wasted precious parchment space. It looks like a lack of lenition also affects use of double consonants.

Someone said the -nn also lengthens the vowel sound. Or it replaced lost fadas. So the double -nn is modern Irish rectifying scribal error in old manuscripts?

If cland is a Latin loanword, it explains why I didn't find it in the Táin Bó Cuailgne or the Táin Bó Fraich. But I did rediscover the saying: Atmu!


Atmu! I said to myself, beating my hand to my chest in oath, like the warrior CuChullain. It was a battle of words, alright. To the bitter end. But we emerged, a tribe.

At least I dusted off all my old Irish books—it's been decades. I’m sure this is way more than you ever wanted to know.



Some lit bits:

Richard Sharpe - Irish manuscripts and the complex page

Online Etymology Dictionary Compilation fo several dictionaries including OED

Lexilogos Portal to multiple Latin (and other) dicitionaries

DIZIONARIO LATIN great for conjugating.

MacBain's Dictionary - Gaelic Languages clann children, clan, so Irish, Old Irish cland, Welsh plant, *qlanatâ: Indo-European root qel; Greek @GtÈlos, company; Old Slavonic celjadi@u, family, Lithuanian kiltis = Lettic zilts, race, stock; Sanskrit k˙la, race. Some have added Latin populus. Usually regarded as borrowed from Latin planta, a sprout, English plant, whence Gaelic clannach, comatus.

eDIL electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (eDIL) is a digital edition of the complete contents of the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language based on Old and Middle Irish materials. clan atmu

Wictionary: Old Irish cland Borrowing from Old Welsh plant, from Latin planta.
macc From Primitive Irish genitive ᚋᚐᚊᚊᚔ (maqqi), from Proto-Celtic *makkʷos, a variant of*makwos (“son”), (compare Welsh mab, Gaulish mapos, Maponos), from Proto-Indo-European *meh₂ḱ- (“long, thin”) (compare Ancient Greek μακρός (makros, “long”),Latin macer (“thin”).[1]
túath Proto-Celtic *toutā, from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh

Wictionary: Old Welsh not much use
Welsh terms derived from Latin plant

IRISH WORD  clan treibh

Readings in Old and Middle Irish. 700-1200; Holland

Readings in Old and Middle Irish. 700-1200; 
Prof. Gary Holland, Linguistics,
SPRING 2001: Celtic Studies 105B (4 units), 
 (Full participation/grade/audit)
I'm afraid I dismally flunked the final in this class. But I'm glad I persevered.

Designed to offer students who have already taken the basic grammar course in Old and Middle Irish (105A) further opportunity to work with important texts written in the period A.D. 700-1200 and to refine their knowledge of the language as well as their grasp of the vernacular tradition as a whole. Texts will include both prose and poetry, and major genres such as epic, legend, and genealogy.

Prerequisites: Successful completion of Celtic Studies 105A or equivalent. Consent of instructor.

TEXTS:

Wolfgang Meid (ed.), Táin Bó Froech

Rudolph Thurneysend (ed.), Scéla Muicce Mac Dathó

Xeroxed poems 


I was in way over my head in both of Gary's classes, the other students were real linguists, so this was easy for them. Me? I was the auditing poet. One guy, can't remember his name, was simultaneously taking other Indo-European language classes—Hittite!  I loved the class. I didn/don't know the basics of forensic grammar (you can still write well and not know the basic functions or the forensics of language). So that was a huge handicap. I learned some useful things but I'm still shaky, grammatically speaking. But hey, I know what VSOP stands for.

 This class was enough to drive me to drink, but then, who had the time? I got up at 6 AM, translated a paragraph, and again in the evening, until midnight. There wasn't much room for anything else in my life, no time to write poetry, let alone, dreamtime. Dan Melia called Old Irish Bloodbath 101 A at Harvard. There sure was a lot of slaughter going on. But the chill delight when I translated aloud, in class, Cuchullan's epic line: The enemy of your enemy is my friend, it haunts me to this day. Magic and absolute wonder. What a distilled learning moment. I was so owl-eyed that I think even Gary got a kick out of it. Thank you Gary for that moment in time.

Had Dan been teaching the Old Irish class, I probably would've fared significantly better. His teaching style, is more suited to my learning style, such as it is. But I worked hard, and was diligent, with my nose to the books... it gave me a new insight into reading the Irish epics, having transcribed them, word for word from the Old Irish. The learning and knowledge is in my head, somewhere, and sometimes I can actually retrieve bits of it from my imperfect knowledge database. Who knew I would learn to like parsing lines? I felt I was doing real work. Delving deep into something almost unnameable and profound, unlocking those words from the past, like that. And earning the story, word by word.

I eventually plan to transcribe my Celtic Studies class notes, so this post is a placeholder (as well as a reading list). A reminder, a smack in the gob. What brought this on: I was asked to do a lecture on Celtic Bardic Poetry at Sacramento Poetry Center, and a) I was far too long gone from this material, b) I couldn't put my hands on the notes,. But I at least still had some of the books, and TG for the internet. So many medieval texts are now online (not so in 1999). I was able to reconstruct what I needed. But it was almost as bad as reinventing the wheel.   —MH 11/2015