Linguistics
Multilingualism and language contact
Priscian’s Latin Grammar was originally written to enable Greek-speakers to study Latin. In this ninth-century manuscript, a further dimension is added by the presence of over 9,400 annotations written sometimes in Latin, sometimes in Old Irish, and often code-switching between the two, all in the service of the study of linguistic science.
Seventh-century Gaelic law-tracts delineate professional poets (filid) who earned high social status through formal training. These poets cooperated with the Church to create an innovative bilingual intellectual culture in Old Gaelic and Latin. Bede described Anglo-Saxon students who availed themselves of free education in Ireland at this culturally dynamic time. Gaelic scholars called sapientes (“wise ones”) produced texts in Old Gaelic and Latin that demonstrate how Anglo-Saxon students were influenced by contact with Gaelic ecclesiastical and secular scholarship. Seventh-century Northumbria was ruled for over 50 years by Gaelic-speaking kings who could access Gaelic traditions. Gaelic literary traditions provide the closest analogues for Bede’s description of Cædmon’s production of Old English poetry. This ground-breaking study displays the transformations created by the growth of vernacular literatures and bilingual intellectual cultures. Gaelic missionaries and educational opportunities helped shape the Northumbrian “Golden Age”, its manuscripts, hagiography, and writings of Aldhelm and Bede.
The manuscript known as Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 153 contains a copy of Martianus Capella’s Latin text De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae. Written in Wales around 900 CE, it includes marginal annotations in Latin and Old Welsh that open a window on the spread of Carolingian educational culture to Celtic-speaking Britain. Evidence is examined here for close interaction between some of the indigenous languages of the island and the learned Latin of the schools, and even for surviving traces of the variety of spoken Latin that had been current in Britain under the Empire.
The Irish Liber Hymnorum is a collection of hymns and para-liturgical material contained in two glossed and richly-decorated manuscripts from the late eleventh century. The hymns themselves, and the commentary apparatus, exhibit a pattern of alternation and even virtual merger between Latin and Old Irish. It is argued here that this interaction between languages is essential to the representation of the poems as a national poetic and spiritual canon.
The ‘Book of Ballymote’ is a late fourteenth-century manuscript written in Ireland and predominantly in the vernacular (the Irish language). In its focus on history, local, regional and global, it draws on and develops biblical and classical themes. It does so in a way that demonstrates how medieval Irish scholars moulded their own language to occupy this international cultural space. Their continued use of Latin in specific contexts underlies their creativity and skill.
Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 12 is a predominantly Welsh-language miscellany that also contains texts in Middle English and Latin. On folio 79v is the inscription ‘Llyfr Hugh Evans yw hwn Anno 1583’, that is ‘This is Hugh Evans’s book, in the year 1583’. As a miscellany the manuscript is of interest as much for what it suggests about the process of compilation as for its contents, for while it is in one sense of the late 16th century, a number of significant parts are gatherings from medieval manuscripts, both Welsh and English. The evidence of the process of compilation that the manuscript yields has much to suggest about the interplay between Welsh-language and English-language culture over a broad historical perspective, and this raises questions about the linguistic and cultural history of medieval and early modern Wales.
This study explores bilingualism in the area of literary education, that is, the formal study of another language using written documents. Its focus is the study of Greek in early medieval Ireland, in the period from the seventh to the ninth century. Though never absorbed into the Roman Empire, by the seventh century Ireland had thoroughly embraced Christian culture, and with it the prerequisite of Latin literacy. In their study of the Latin language, using late antique school books and commentaries, the monastic schools of early medieval Ireland might be regarded to some extent as inheritors of the Graeco-Roman tradition, and in particular the late antique grammatical tradition. It has long been suggested that the Irish interest in classical languages was not limited to Latin (itself a foreign language), but extended also to Greek. Although the means by which such a knowledge may have been acquired has never been clear, this discussion presents new evidence for the study of Greek in Ireland, and explores how late antique manuals of bilingual Greek–Latin instruction were later reused in circumstances far removed from those of their origins.
Knowledge of Greek in the West is generally held to have declined sharply by the end of the fifth century, when the compilatory efforts of Latin writers Boethius, Macrobius and Martianus Capella provided the main points of access to Greek literary culture for subsequent generations. There are plenty of indications, however, that the Greek language maintained a special prestige. It was recognised as the language of the New Testament and featured on the titulus of Christ's cross. Accordingly it was classed among the ‘three sacred languages’ (tres linguae sacrae) during the Middle Ages, along with Latin and Hebrew. Augustine regarded these as ‘pre-eminent languages’, and praised Jerome for his singular attainment in all three. Greek learning was also acknowledged as the foundation of secular scholarshipOne effect of language contact on the system of Manx Gaelic has been the erosion of the spectrum commanded by fully functional languages. In Manx, 'Classical Manx', the highly formal and archaic written language of the Bible, occupies one end of this spectrum, the other being occupied by the fragmented, English-influenced speech of a handful of bilinguals recorded in the mid-twentieth century. Other parts of the spectrum were until recent times virtually invisible. Modern speakers look to the latter for phonological information, and to the former for syntactic, semantic and morphological information. Many factors have contributed to the muddying of the waters; however, twenty-first-century Manx is recapturing a degree of subtlety through the re-establishment of categories and functions. Gaps in the spectrum are now being filled.
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.
L’étude cherche à évaluer la connaissance effective de la langue galloise chez Giraud de Cambrie, telle qu’elle se reflète dans ses ouvrages «Itinerarium Kambriae» et «Descriptio Kambriae» à travers la traduction, ou le commentaire de différents noms propres ou noms communs, sans exclure toute autre information pertinente fournie par l’auteur. Une attention spéciale est prêtée aux remarques «linguistiques» de Giraud sur les rapports du gallois et du grec. Les résultats de l’enquête apportent un nouvel éclairage dans le débat déjà ancien concernant le caractère gallois de Giraud.
[EN] The article investigates Gerald's actual knowledge of the Welsh language as reflected in his books 'Itinerarium Kambriae' and 'Descriptio Kambriae' by translations of and comments on various names and appellatives, as well as other relevant information provided by the author. A special paragraph studies Gerald's 'linguistic' remarks on the relationship of Welsh and Greek. The results shed new light on the long-discussed question of Gerald's 'Welshness'.
