<div>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.
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.
<br><br>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.
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Slan,</div>
<div>Si'le</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 6/14/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jay Rudin</b> <<a href="mailto:rudin@ev1.net">rudin@ev1.net</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff">
<div><font face="Arial">Two facts you must keep in mind when discussing the pronunciation of Latin in our period.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial"></font> </div>
<div><font face="Arial">1. Nobody you have ever met has ever heard a medieval person speaking Latin.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial">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?)
</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial"></font> </div>
<div><font face="Arial">Robin of Gilwell / Jay Rudin</font></div>
<blockquote style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<div style="FONT: 10pt arial">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!
<br><br>Melody<br> </div></blockquote></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>Bards mailing list<br><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="mailto:Bards@lists.ansteorra.org">Bards@lists.ansteorra.org
</a><br><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/bards-ansteorra.org" target="_blank">http://lists.ansteorra.org/listinfo.cgi/bards-ansteorra.org</a><br></blockquote>
</div><br>