I have to point out that, while cute, this isn’t true. Irish / Scottish Gaelic is a dialect continuum, with the language boundary drawn to separate the literary languages; both shared a common literary language up until about 1600 AD. The dialects of Breton are pretty divergent themselves, but the closeness of Welsh and Breton is greatly, greatly exaggerated. Common vocabulary words are indeed close, but Welsh grammar has changed enormously and both languages have so much influence from English and French respectively that there’s no way they are mutually intelligible for ordinary conversation.
ETA: Yes, Brythonic / Goidelic mutual intelligibility is exactly nil, though Irish speakers have many advantages in learning Welsh and vice versa. Irish and Scottish Gaelic are NOT mutually intelligible, unless you speak Donegal Irish and you’re talking to a Gaelic speaker from southwestern Scotland (or, again, vice versa). Most people who have been educated in Gaelic, however, become familiar with a variety of dialects and older forms of the language, and for that reason they can often communicate.
Manx and Cornish are sadly extinct today, but each has societies of enthusiastic revivalists. So if one of them taught herself to speak Manx and went and spoke it on the isle of Lewis* or in County Galway,** how well would she be understood by the locals?
*The biggest Scots Gaelic speaking area
**The biggest Irish speaking area
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Yeah, I’d also wanted to say that Welsh and Breton aren’t all that similar. I think whoever coined the quip fudged over that part to make a symmetrical fit. For the coining of witticisms, crispness and elegance are prioritized over accuracy.
Well, they certainly were connected but it’s an awful long time ago. I find it hard to believe that linguistic similarities or differences would have anything to do with Doggerland.
Only that the geologically recent coastlines are a relatively short sail from each other, just a hop across one of the narrower parts of the North Sea. One route to invade England from the continent.
The latest date given for Doggerland was 6,200 BC. The Germanic language section of Indo-European did not exist yet. So Doggerland could not have been a land bridge for Germanic or Celtic speakers. Most likely few if any Indo-European speakers got to travel there, for Proto-Indo-European 6,200 BC was not spoken near the North Sea. It was over in Ukraine or someplace. So the Doggerese people whose spearpoints have been dredged up from the seabed, because it was a rich hunting land, had to have been pre-Indo-European. Perhaps speaking a language related to Basque. Perhaps related to Cheddar Man language. Perhaps not. No way to tell. It’s nonzero possibility but doubtful if Doggerese would have left any traces in languages still living.
Edward Rutherfurd’s novel *Sarum *starts at the end of the last Ice Age, as a traveler from Britain visits Doggerland just in time to see the rising North Sea breach the last ridge of land and catastrophically flood over it. Rutherfurd didn’t use the name Doggerland, but that was the place he was describing. The traveler who observes this massive flooding is so impressed he makes a legend of it that is passed down through generations, for thousands of years, long after his descendants have forgotten what the legend is talking about. The last of that line dies out back in ancient times, though, and no trace of the legend survives in recent British lore.
As far as I know (and I am not an expert), she would be understood very well by native Irish speakers. Written Manx looks very different to Irish because of the different spelling. But if you sound out the words as they are spelt, you can “hear” the Irish words and it seems like just another dialect of Irish.
Manx looks strongly to me like a sort of Irish that has been respelled according to anglicizing orthography. As how it would appear transcribed more or less anglo-phonetically by English visitors to the island.
I saw on TV some years ago two men speaking Manx at Yn Cruinneaght, and if it weren’t for the context, I would have said they were speaking standard Irish. Their “Manx” seemed not only mutually intelligible with Irish, but almost indistinguishable.
The one summer I spent in France I wound up drinking too much beer with native Flemish speakers, who spoke much better English than French. When they spoke amongst themselves in Flemish, it gave me the strangest sensation that I was hearing some obscure dialect from the remotest part of England… and that if only I could listen a little more closely, I’d pick up the meaning that seemed just past the threshold of intelligibility. I guess they had the tune of English if not the words.
A native Manx speaker would NOT be understood very well by native Irish speakers. You’re quite right about Manx orthography, and there’s enough recorded Manx that the reconstructed language is quite genuine, but they’re not that similar. Further, a Manx person would have a much more difficult time understanding Irish Gaelic, simply because Irish has retained so many features lost by Manx.
The Manxwoman (or Manxman) would have better luck on Lewis, but not much. I would say that language would be no barrier to trade and little barrier to big ideas, but the finer details would require a lot of patience and gesture. Examples:
I am tired:
Ir. Tá tuirse orm. (pr. ta tursheh orum)
M. Ta mee skee (pr. ta mi ski)
ScG. Tha mi sgìth (pr. ha mi ski)
Pass the salt:
Ir. Tabhair dom an salann
M. Cur dou yn sollan
ScG. Thoir dhomh an salann.
Where are we going?
Ir. Cá bhfuil ár dtriall?
M. C’raad ta shin goll?
ScG. Càite bheil sinn a’ dol?
Obviously, the more complex the syntax, the more chance of divergence. It’s kind of hard to explain, but in the last example the last two would be mutually intelligible and both would understand the “where are…” part of the Irish. The Irish would understand shin / sinn, but unless they’d had some education the Manx & ScG speakers would have a hard time with “ár dtriall”. In the salt example, the Manx word for “salt” would cause more problems than the “cur dou” part because of cognates with only slightly divergent meaning. In other words, the situation on the ground is not quite as neat as yes or no, and it depends which language you’re starting from and which you’re listening to.
Credit to Marion Gunn’s Da Mihi Manum for the examples above.
I am aware of the points you make; thank you for placing the proper vocabulary. Note my use of the term “presumption”; what I was trying to do was clarify the status of Scots based o the popular, non-professional distinction. Lowlands and Highlands Scots English today are dialects of a mutually intelligible multicentric English language with a broad dialect spectrum. (Lowlands) Scots was in the past a standardized dialect held by its own speakers to be other than what the Sassenachs south of the Border spoke.
The thing about these examples is, they only show one way of saying the relevant phrase in each language, and it doesn’t mean the other way wouldn’t be understood.
The word scíth meaning fatigue would be familiar to any Irish speaker, from the phrases “lig do scíth” or “gort scíth”. So they would understand the Manx or Scottish speaker.
Perfectly comprehensible, especially in context.
Standard Irish for “where are we going?” is “Cá bhfuilimid a’dul?” (or “Cén áit…” or other variations). The “tá sinn” variant from Manx would be perfectly understandable. The hardest part to understand would be “C’raad”.
As for “Cá bhfuil ár dtriall?”, I never came across it and wouldn’t have a clue what it meant.
No i’m not exaggerating at all. Of course i’ve watched british movies and TV shows. Alot of her pronunciation is unintelligible over the phone unless i’m really paying attention. As I said, it’s not everything, more like every 5th word. She’s from Birmingham, so I guess picture talking to Ozzy Osbourne. It’s not like listening to a BBC news anchor.
I know she just told me “I went to __” or “I did ____” or “I told him _". Its the "” that I often have to ask her to repeat. It’s only over phone that its hard to understand, not face to face.
I’ve talked to people from Birmingham, and I learned to understand their dialect reasonably well eventually. It didn’t take years and years. It tooks months perhaps, not years and years. Incidentally, why did it take you six months to reply to my post?
Their names are Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö and yes, it represents reality. Danish can be a bit hard to understand for Swedes, but if you ask me it’s mostly a matter of making an effort to understand (and be understandable) and being accustomed to hearing the other language. The truth is that not even Danes can understand each others in some cases as the language is presently undergoing a period of increasing incomprehensibility due to more and more slurred pronunciation. For what it’s worth I listened to a lot of Danish radio last weekend and I must say that I had no problems at all to understand the presenters, but I assume that they make an effort to be understandable.
Rubbish. I can imagine some peasant Swedes think so of Norwegians but in general we get along quite well.
It’s not like listening to a BBC news anchor.