[Bards] Ansteorran History and trival

[sam cooper]

Taking Robin's facts into account, it is still possible to isolate a
geographical area and study the language as it exists now, which - in my
limited understanding - is how historian-linguists match families of
languages together, and the time of the separation of those languages by how
many changes have happened between the two.

After all the American dialect of English, while not a separate language
(quite) from the British original, does differ very markedly, particularly
in the meaning of some common words and phrases. I discovered that for a
fact when I worked several weeks in Scotland.

I have only been studying with a view toward Irish (or Galiege, more
properly) as it was spoken in the Ulster region during the 14th century. My
family emigrated in 1856, but my aunt has traced our patriarchal line back
500 years to the 14th century in the region of McGee county, Ireland. Church
and burials, Bible fly-leaves, and the like were her sources for names,
weddings, and children's names. Given that the word Siobhan comes directly
down as Shawn - my own little brother's name, and that the b is softened by
the h, which in Galiege is an operation to soften (not really aspirate, but
akin to that act) the preceeding letter, the b, which said as w, and that
the Irish monastic record kept much of the Latin record alive through the
Dark ages, it might indeed have some academic foundation. More than wild
guess, at least for that region and time. The letter V didn't show up there
in common use until significantly later in the local writings - or at least,
that is my current understanding.

I am neither a Latin scholar nor a linguist, and I have as yet achieved only
parroted-phrase fluency in Middle Irish, so take all that with much salt. I
do know that Gaelic is properly said as GALL-ick, refering to the spoken
language of the Scots. Welsh is more difficult than either one. Middle
English is fun but extremely difficult, it almost makes sense, but
everything is said differently enough to trip your tongue.

I'm fairly certain Celtic is anachronistic to historical usage. It is an
after-Period academic term, applied to all of the cultures in precedence to
Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Gallic France, and some early Austrian and Germanic
tribes. As far as I can determine, it was never used in the historical
period by any of the tribes of people it groups together.

Slan,
Si'le


On 6/14/07, Jay Rudin <rudin at ev1.net> wrote:
>
>  Two facts you must keep in mind when discussing the pronunciation of
> Latin in our period.
>
> 1. Nobody you have ever met has ever heard a medieval person speaking
> Latin.
> 2.Over the entire European continent, over the course of sixteen centuries
> from the height of Rome until the end of the Renaissance, there were many,
> many ways that Latin was pronounced.  (Roughly how many ways is English
> pronounced today?)
>
> Robin of Gilwell / Jay Rudin
>
> Some twenty+ years ago at BYU we were taught to pronounce the Vs as Ws and
> our instructors made a very good case for that pronounciation as being the
> ancient pronounciation.  I just wish I could remember what that case was.
> Old age--ACK!
>
> Melody
>
>
>
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