Outlander Gaelic

[O'Callaghan]

One other thing. You talk of Gaelic and Broad Scots. Most people don't even realise that the two are entirely unrelated. A lot of people think the words they hear in Scots that they don't recognise are Gaelic words, but they aren't. Doric, aka Scots, is related to English, and tends to exist nowadays in the form of mixtures of the two, although I think they always overlapped quite a bit. Gaelic is pretty much unrelated, apart from also being an Indo-European language.

Of course, even there you have Gaelidh (Scots Gaelic) and Gaelige (Irish), plus Manx (Isle of Man), although I'm told they are mostly mutually intelligible. I think there are three or four distinct dialects of Irish, and probably a similar number of Scots Gaelic dialects. I know a few bits and pieces of Irish, but have never seen Outlander anyway.

Brythonic dialects are quite a bit different from Gaelic, although related to Gaelic as well as to eachother. Brythonic comprises Welsh, Cornish (SW England) and Breton (Brittany in France). Cornish was reconstructed from a dead language, which was possible because written records survived, unlike say Cumbrian (NW England Brythonic) or Pictish (Scottish and thought to be Brythonic, but there's some debate over that), which I believe died out with no written records to refer to. The last speaker of Nore also died in the North of Scotland circa late 1700s, with nothing to reconstruct it from, although it was a form of Norse, and some nouns survive in modern use, at least up there. Modern Cornish must differ from the dead language, but is as close as possible without anyone having heard it.

[OC Richard]

A bit like those who claim to speak Cornish?

Not sure what is meant here. The corpus of Cornish is quite large, and anyone who has studied it knows how to pronounce it. Any such person could read any of the thousands of surviving lines of Cornish and be speaking Cornish.

If you mean conversing in Cornish, I met a linguist who is equally fluent in Welsh, Breton, and Cornish. Whenever he meets another person fluent in Cornish, well, they can converse as well and you and me in English.

[The Q]

The last true native speaker is believed to be John Mann who died in 1914, anyone since is a learner. Yes the written language is available, yes there are those enthusiasts who have learnt the language, but in reality it's a dead language not used in day to day use.
Much like Latin outside of the church or the fossilised Latin taught in some schools it's there, it exists, but no longer lives or develops.

[freep]

One other thing. You talk of Gaelic and Broad Scots. Most people don't even realise that the two are entirely unrelated. <snip>

Of course, even there you have Gaelidh (Scots Gaelic) and Gaelige (Irish), plus Manx (Isle of Man), although I'm told they are mostly mutually intelligible. I think there are three or four distinct dialects of Irish, and probably a similar number of Scots Gaelic dialects. I know a few bits and pieces of Irish, but have never seen Outlander anyway.


Brythonic dialects are quite a bit different from Gaelic, although related to Gaelic as well as to eachother. Brythonic comprises Welsh, Cornish (SW England) and Breton (Brittany in France). <snip>

I knew most of the above.

The last speaker of Nore also died in the North of Scotland circa late 1700s, with nothing to reconstruct it from, although it was a form of Norse, and some nouns survive in modern use, at least up there. <snip>

Hadn't heard of Nore. It would make sense though, given the Norse influences up there.

[Bruce Scott]

Oh, and viking is properly pronounced "wicking." At least in Swedish and Norwegian. As I recall from that trip the Danes say, "Meh, have some schnapps!"

My wife is Norwegian and she pronounces the word as vick-ing with a 'V'. Swedish, Norwegian and Danish pronunciations can be heard here: http://forvo.com/word/viking/

[freep]

All the Norwegians and Swedes I spoke to (and I asked most of them about viking stuff) said 'wicking.' Regional thing maybe? We were in Stockholm, Oslo and Bergen.

[freep]

My wife is Norwegian and she pronounces the word as vick-ing with a 'V'. Swedish, Norwegian and Danish pronunciations can be heard here: http://forvo.com/word/viking/

Listened to all the forvo pronunciations and you are correct. It is a 'v' sound, however, the whole word is pronounced not in the US English manner of VY-king but more like veek-ING, which to my ear on a casual listen causes it to sound like week-ING.

I stand corrected.

[Bruce Scott]

Yes, Lise's pronunciation sounds very much like veek-ing to my ear.

[OC Richard]

Brythonic dialects are quite a bit different from Gaelic, although related to Gaelic as well as to each other.

Just to bring attention to correct normal usage, Cornish, Welsh, and Breton are languages, not dialects. Each language will have a number of dialects within it.

The traditional usual deciding factor is mutual intelligibility. If two manners of speech are mutually intelligible they are dialects of a single language; if they are not mutually intelligible they are separate languages.

Of course there are numerous grey areas! For sure there are dialects of English which can be difficult to understand by people who only speak Standard English, and the same thing happens in every language.

The word "dialect" is widely misused, for example it seems to be universal in the Philippines to refer to the various languages spoken there as "dialects" when in fact they can be utterly unrelated languages, as different as English and Japanese.

Anyhow Celtic languages have two surviving language families, Brythonic or P-Celtic and Goidelic or Q-Celtic.

So "son" is map in Brythonic and mac in Goidelic. Place-names can hint at which was spoken in a particular place due to the commonness of "head" giving us Kenmare, Kintyre, Penzance, etc.

[neloon]

Alternatively,
"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy".
Alan