My wife and I were riding on a bus on the Isle of Man and three young men got on and sat near us. They started conversing rapidly in what I assumed was Manx Gaelic. I was surprised that I could follow the flow of the conversation as well as I could. I couldn’t understand the words at all (except for the occasional borrowed term – “snowboard” and “cafeteria”) but it didn’t sound as foreign as Japanese, for example.
I got to wondering how closely related Gaelic is to English. A quick internet search turned up a statement that Celtic, the ancestor to the Gaelic languages was fairly close to Italic, the ancestor to Latin. This being the internet, however, I thought it would be a good idea to check.
Do any of you Irish or Welsh or Manx or Scottish or Breton, etc., Dopers have the Straight Dope? Or can you point me to a reliable website showing the relationship between English and Gaelic?
Well, The Indo-European Language chart in my American Heritage Dictionary shows the Celtic family of languages as in between the ancient Italic and Germanic tongues(so, yes, it is a indoeuropean language). Somewhere along the way, Celtic split into continental and insular branches, with the continental branch(Gaulish, Celtiberian and Lepontic) dying out. Given that the surviving(insular) branch spent quite a long time segregated from most of the Continental European languages, It seems unlikely that there is much resemblance between them and English, excepting modern terms that may have been borrowed more recently. This isn’t really my area of expertice, but I hope that helps
Ethnologue has come under much criticism from linguists for the way they break up non-European languages into little fragments (e.g., they don’t have “Arabic”, they just treat Arabic as spoken in different countries each as a separate “language;” they don’t acknowledge that Malay and Indonesian are the same language, or that Hindu and Urdu are considered essentially the same language by linguists, etc. They seem to classify European languages differently, making them seem larger and more important in comparison to non-European languages). So I wouldn’t wholeheartedly endorse Ethnologue as the “best” source for linguistic information. Better to contact the linguists at the sci.lang newsgroup if you want good information. Ethnologue, it should be known, has a Christian missionary agenda behind it.
The native Manx language is indeed a form of Gaelic, closely related to Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic. The words are spelled differently, but the pronunciation is basically the same. I didn’t know anyone still spoke Manx. Are you sure the Celtic speakers you heard weren’t visitors from Scotland or Ireland — or even Wales? I asked about Wales because Welsh is the only Celtic language that still has a thriving number of native speakers. Could you tell spoken Welsh from spoken Gaelic just from the sound of it?
There was a thread (now alas! annihilated) a couple months ago in which I posted an explanation and demonstration of the Italo-Celtic subgroup of Indo-European. How there was a common division cutting right across the Italic languages as well as the Gaelic languages. It’s quite fascinating, really, but I’m too fatigued now to reconstruct the intricate examples I gave on it. Maybe another time.
I just have a pet peeve about when they say the name “Gaelic” alone with no other qualifier, it’s assumed to mean only the Scots Gaelic variety. As if anything British is taken by default to be the one and only. The unmarked form, a linguistically privileged position, is reserved for the British and everyone else has to use a marked form. A remnant of British imperialistic attitudes? I mean, Irish is equally as Gaelic as is Scots Gaelic, so why can’t “Gaelic” also mean Irish? Cad chuige nach, ambaiste? Tá an Éirannach teanga Gaelige fosta, eol tú.
As far as I know, Manx Gaelic completely died out some decades if not centuries ago, so the only people who can speak it are learners. I speculate that the three men on the bus were tourists speaking some other European language (could well have been Welsh.) It’s not been unknown for the English language to go unrecognised as such; the Isle of Man lies with easy reach of areas in Scotland, England and Ireland with very strong accents and dialects.
according to ethnologue, Manx Gaelic is indeed extinct as a first language. It is spoken as a second language by 200-300 people however, so it’s not impossible that you might come across a speaker. seems unlikely though.
> Ethnologue has come under much criticism from linguists for the
> way they break up non-European languages into little
> fragments (e.g., they don’t have “Arabic”, they just treat Arabic
> as spoken in different countries each as a separate
> “language;” they don’t acknowledge that Malay and
> Indonesian are the same language, or that Hindu and Urdu are
> considered essentially the same language by linguists, etc.
> They seem to classify European languages differently, making
> them seem larger and more important in comparison to non-
> European languages). So I wouldn’t wholeheartedly endorse.
> Ethnologue as the “best” source for linguistic information.
> Better to contact the linguists at the sci.lang newsgroup if you
> want good information. Ethnologue, it should be known, has a
> Christian missionary agenda behind it.
I said that Ethnologue was the best online source for language questions (although I should perhaps qualify that by saying the best quick online source). I didn’t say that it was the perfect source. It’s the nearest thing in language questions to something like the Internet Movie Database for questions about movies and TV. It’s something that you can go to by clicking on it and get your answers by doing a simple search. In contrast, it would take hours, if not days, to get an answer to questions like this if you were to use the sci.lang newsgroup.
Yes, they do tend to split up languages too much, but they do this for European languages as well as for non-European ones. Check how many languages they split German into.
The problem is that deciding when to split up a language into several languages (rather than just calling it a language with several dialects) is a difficult question. It hasn’t even been completely settled theoretically, and it’s complicated by political factors. Ethnologue does not do a perfect job of splitting up languages correctly or of counting the number of speakers, but neither does anyone else.
Yes, they do have a Christian missionary agenda. So what? Everybody has an agenda. You just have to learn to compensate for that.
I think that in answering questions on the SDMB we should be going beyond just giving an answer to people’s questions by giving people sources by which they can look the answers up themselves in the future. I thought it would be useful to pluto to know that there’s a website where one can quickly find out which language family any language belongs to. Yes, one should be wary of completely accepting it, just like one should be wary of completely accepting anyone’s information. It’s still a useful quick source.
They also break up Italian in the same way.
I assumed that by ‘dividing’ Arabic or Chinese they were actually ponting out to westerners that there is a great deal of diversity within these “languages”. I don’t interpret it as an indication that Arabic is somehow less important than Russian or French because it is divided into ‘dialects’ that are very distinct. Of course they should make it clearer that the written forms are largely united across the superlanguage - and perhaps unite the numbers of these languages when ranking the numbers of total speakers. I remember using their list to compare language speakers and thinking that they had forgotten Arabic - until I reached “Arabic, Egyptian”
Of course, languages are largely politically defined (what was Serbocroatian 15 years ago may now deemed Sebian and Croatian by some). I suppose if the western Roman Empire survived politically as long as dynastic China did, we may very well refer to modern Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and other Romance languages as “Modern Latin” -with several very divergent dialects.
But the Irish and Manx don’t use a marked form, generally. They’ll refer to their country’s native language as “Irish” or “Manx”, period. But because of the existence of Scots (the Germanic language) the Scottish can’t abbreviate their Gaelic-language name in that way, so it’s not really surprising they abbreviate it to “Gaelic” instead. It’s really nothing to get worked up over, nobody here does.
NB 1. The type of people who would allow “British imperialistic attitudes” to dictate their vocabulary would be more likely to ignore the existence of Gaelic altogether than to try to claim exclusive ownership of the term.
NB 2. As I said the last time you posted this complaint, it works the same way here in Ireland. Even though people generally refer to the language as “Irish” and not as “Gaelic”, if you say “Gaelic” to an Irish person s/he will assume you mean the Irish variety unless you specify otherwise. I’d expect the same to be the case on the Isle of Man.
According to what I read on our visit to the Isle of Man the last native Manx speaker died in 1974. I assumed the young men were speaking Manx mostly because of where we were, but I was a little curious that all three of them spoke a learned language with such facility. It was typical teenage talk – no hesitation or grasping for words, lots of laughter. They were almost certainly not tourists – just some kids going into town. My revised guess is that they were speaking Irish. There are a lot of Irish people on Man, certainly enough that its reasonable to suppose these kids spoke Irish at home.
It was not English. The odd English word or place name (“Liverpool”) leapt out. I’m sure they spoke English but were using their other language to keep nosy tourists from eavesdropping.
Thank you all for your help. Clearly all the varieties of Gaelic are Indo-European. I did not know that.
ruadh, as always we apprecilove your informative insight into all things Gaeilge. Did I compose that Gaelic sentence correctly? I meant to say ‘Why not, indeed? The Irish language is Gaelic too, know thou’. (Actually, I wanted to use the tag “you know” but I can’t conjugate the verb so I used the imperative.) Or did I get the syntax all wrong? Go raibh maith agat.
“Manx Gaelic passed into oblivion as a native spoken language on the 24 December 1974 with the death of Edward (`Ned’) Maddrell, the last reputed native speaker of the language. With him an Indo-European language disappeared, the first this century, one branch less on the tree.”
This page has a wealth of information: http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~stephen/
Well, I understood what you were saying, anyway. I’d change it in this way:
Cad chuige nach, ambaiste?
Cad chuige nach chiallódh sí, cinnte? - I think you have to repeat the verb and pronoun in this phrase. And “cinnte” just sounds better to me than “ambaiste” there.
Tá an Éirannach teanga Gaelige fosta
Well you’d need to switch around “teanga” and “Éireannach” (note spelling), for one thing, and use “Gaelach” (the adjective) rather than “Gaeilge” (the noun). To be honest I’m not completely sure if you’d want to use tá or the copula here (the ser/estar problem we all remember from high school Spanish). To be on the safe side I’d use a different construction in which the copula is definitely required: is Gaeilge í teanga Ghaelach fosta - “Irish is a Gaelic language too”.
eol tú
You can’t translate “to know” directly into Irish, so you need to use a construction that translates (more or less) as “you have knowledge”. For this kind of “you know”, I’d use mar is eol duit.
Hibernicus should be along shortly to correct all the errors in this post
I know a guy who swears that Irish Gaelic is directly related to Hebrew. He was ranting about how they say “yes” almost the same, but that seemed to be all of the evidence he had. Are there any other reasons why he would think this?
Well, first off they don’t “say yes almost the same”. The Hebrew word for yes is ken; the Irish say yes by repeating the verb. There is an Irish word which you could argue is sort of an informal equivalent of “yes”, but it’s tá, which is clearly nothing like ken.
That said, he’s not the only one who thinks so, in fact we had a thread about this once before, I think. There are a few words in each language that bear a resemblance to the corresponding word in the other language, but there’s no reason to think that’s anything more than coincidence. You could probably do the same with any two random languages you wanted to pick.
Of course, the crackpots will always find the similarities they want to find.
Thanks. I was thinking about using this to get him to shut up next time, but he’s not really big on reasoning or evidence unless it supports him. Oh well.
