Outlander Gaelic

[OC Richard]

Cornish is a revived dead language, reconstructed from written documents that survived.

Sorry for being nit-picky, but "reconstructed" suggests (to me anyway) that only fragments survived and linguists have had to fill in the blanks with analogies and guesses. This isn't the case with Cornish, as far as my understanding goes.

We don't need to reconstruct Elizabethan English. Pick up a King James Bible and you'll know how to express pretty much anything a language might need to express.

Cornish isn't that fortunate, but there's a vast corpus, and as far as I know not much mystery about how to say things. One work alone is 9,000 lines long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_literature

My grandmother recalls her grandparents, Cornish miners, conversing in a language that wasn't English when they didn't want the grandkids to know what they were talking about. Was it Cornish? Was it Welsh, perhaps picked up from Welsh miners? I'll never know.

Anyhow here are people conversing in Cornish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Ks1xEWnNg

[neloon]

Here are weather forecasts in Welsh (spoken by about half a million people), Irish (spoken by 80,000 people) and Scots Gaelic (60,000). Sorry about the quality of the middle one- obviously recorded by camera off the TV. (The ancient Celtic word "celsius" is shared by all three)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GZpEp9RRdY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsBv1ukVp9U
http://learngaelic.net/watch/news.jsp?v=20150407_01
(with Gaelic and English text)


And here is Sarah doing a forecast in English - you can detect her Skye accent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOJ3gSAYRf0

Alan

[Wareyin]

I do not speak Gaelic, I DO like the Outlander tv series, I have not read the books. That being said my wife is a fan of the series too and she found this article and mentioned it to me a while ago. At least one of the actors has not gone to "method acting" at least according to this interview. When it comes time to speak Gaelic he speaks gibberish.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/1...hit_TV_series/

I do not speak Gaelic, so I don't know if Lacroix is actually speaking gibberish, or if he means that the Gaelic he speaks is incomprehensible to him, therefore gibberish to him. I've seen a fair number of actors just taught to make a certain set of sounds that are actually a phrase in another language, rather than knowing that language, so it's possible they just give him a guideline on what sounds to make.

Can anyone who speaks Gaelic comment on whether or not Murtagh Fraser is speaking gibberish?

[Carlo]

(The ancient Celtic word "celsius" is shared by all three)

Since "Celsius" is a name they would share that word

By the way probably the only one I do understand

[OC Richard]

The ancient Celtic word "celsius" is shared by all three

Interesting how Celtic and Latin form a subgroup of Indo-European.

I was reading how the jury is out, among linguists, as to whether certain words were originally Latin and borrowed by the early Celts, or the other way round, due to the languages getting more similar the further one goes back.

One such word was "car".

Anyhow here's the weather in Scots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IF6hhxTuTY

[neloon]

Well that weather forecast is so corny it's just ridiculous.
You might fancy this in Doric where at least the accent is right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxAdpQ5-pXA
There is also the posh version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTPdEKGEBs

Alan

[OC Richard]

Oh I know, I was just being silly. I should have put a little happy face there...

[jthk]

Hello! FYI Irish is spoken by approximately 143,250 native speakers and by approx. 1.2 million people on the island of Ireland.

Outside of Ireland, here in the US (well, I'm in Ireland for the summer but ...) approx 21,000 people speak Irish at home, including my family.

There we go!
Jonathan

Here are weather forecasts in Welsh (spoken by about half a million people), Irish (spoken by 80,000 people) and Scots Gaelic (60,000). Sorry about the quality of the middle one- obviously recorded by camera off the TV. (The ancient Celtic word "celsius" is shared by all three)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GZpEp9RRdY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsBv1ukVp9U
http://learngaelic.net/watch/news.jsp?v=20150407_01
(with Gaelic and English text)


And here is Sarah doing a forecast in English - you can detect her Skye accent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOJ3gSAYRf0

Alan

[SPS tools]

...
There is also the posh version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTPdEKGEBs

Alan

An unexpectedly good job of presenting the weather - better than some of the blond models we get occasionally.

[neloon]

Hello! FYI Irish is spoken by approximately 143,250 native speakers and by approx. 1.2 million people on the island of Ireland.

Outside of Ireland, here in the US (well, I'm in Ireland for the summer but ...) approx 21,000 people speak Irish at home, including my family.

There we go!
Jonathan

According to the 2011 census, 82,600 in Ireland speak Irish outside of school (where it is an obligatory subject). Obviously, because it is compulsory to study Irish in school, a larger number will have some understanding of the language just as for the figures for Wales and Scotland.

Alan