Genee, Inge, “Latin influence on Old Irish? A case study in medieval language contact”, Journal of Celtic Linguistics 9 (2005): 33–72.
- journal article
This paper evaluates proposals for Latin influence on a number of developments in medieval Irish against recent theories of contact-induced change as presented by Thomason and Kaufman (1988) and Thomason (2001). Given the relevant sociolinguistic context, we would expect the medieval Latin/Irish contact situation to be a special type of non-oral borrowing scenario involving influence from a prestigious literary/sacral language on a developing standard vernacular. In such a scenario the expectations are for heavy lexical borrowing of non-basic vocabulary items combined with minor borrowing of non-invasive structural items such as certain types of function words, new phonemes restricted to loanwords and high-prestige morphosyntactic construction types which do not affect basic syntax of the borrowing language. All proposals found in the literature for lexical and structural borrowing of Latin elements in medieval Irish are shown to fit into this general classification. However, closer examination of the proposals for structural borrowing reveals that most are better explained as having internal causes, either exclusively or at least additionally. Only borrowing related to the lexicon can be firmly established, confirming the claim that the role of Latin in medieval Ireland remained linguistically limited.
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