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The aim is to produce an historical dictionary of Scottish Gaelic comparable to the multi-volume resources already available for Scots and English, namely the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, the Scottish National Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. These resources are now available on-line. The Dictionary of the Scottish Gaelic Language will be published initially in electronic format.
The dictionary will document fully the history of the Gaelic language and culture from the earliest manuscript material onwards, placing Gaelic in context with Irish and Scots. By allowing identification of the Gaelic/Scots interface throughout Scottish history, it will increase our understanding of our linguistic national heritage and will reveal the fundamental role of Gaelic in the linguistic identity of Scotland. Of equal importance, it will show the relationship between Scottish Gaelic and Irish.
The dictionary will respond to the needs of the Gaelic language in the 21st century by providing an authoritative foundation for smaller bilingual and monolingual dictionaries and language learning materials. Thus, the dictionary will be geared to meet the needs of students, teachers and parents in the growing sector of Gaelic-medium education.
The Dictionary will be the major language project for Scottish Gaelic, providing a foundation and a stimulus for future language initiatives.The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture will be a complete online record of all the surviving Romanesque sculpture in Britain and Ireland, at more than 5000 sites. It provides us with a unique window on the aesthetics, beliefs, daily life, preoccupations, humour and technical skills of the artists and people of this creative and formative era from the late 11th century to the late 12th century.
Every entry is freely available and includes information on the historical and architectural context of the building, a first-class photographic record, and a scholarly description of the sculpture. Our work continues and many sites are already available on this website.
This repertoire reflects a many-faceted image of society and its preoccupations. It gives voice to the illiterate as well as to educated people, to the underclass as well as to the elite. It’s topics are abundant: from news in brief to great events, from praise to satire, from daily life to prognostications of all varieties ...
Produced by volunteers, the principle aim of this free, unsubsidised site is to help the research of those who access it.Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches is a collaborative project which has been set up to preserve, digitise, catalogue and make available online several thousand hours of Gaelic and Scots recordings. This website contains a wealth of material such as folklore, songs, music, history, poetry, traditions, stories and other information. The material has been collected from all over Scotland and beyond from the 1930s onwards.
The recordings come from the School of Scottish Studies (University of Edinburgh), BBC Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland's Canna Collection.
Please note that not all material from the School of Scottish Studies Archives is available on the website.
Examples from these collections include- Stories recorded by John Lorne Campbell on wax cylinders in 1937
- Folklore collected all over Scotland by Calum Maclean in the 19
- 50s Scots songs recorded by Hamish Henderson from travelling people in the 1960s
- Conversations recorded on Radio nan Gàidheal
The ADS Library brings together bibliographic records and e-prints for published and unpublished archaeological documents. It includes data from the following sources: OASIS ... Digitised Journals and Monographs ... Internet Archaeology ... Publisher Feeds ... Grey Literature Scanning Projects ... Grey Literature from ADS Archives ... Irish and Irish Archaeological Bibliography (BIAB).
The RI OPAC is a freely accessible literature database for medieval research in the entire European language area, covering all disciplines. The database serves both the regestae database as source for the cited literature, as well as universal research tool for searching for publications. It is characterized in particular by the indexing of dependent articles from a variety of journals and anthologies of even the most remote provenance. Specialist literature from the 16th century onwards is taken into account, which deals with the period from Late Antiquity to the Reformation.
Beyond 2022 is an all-island and international collaborative research project working to create a virtual reconstruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland, which was destroyed in the opening engagement of the Civil War on June 30th, 1922.
The ‘Record Treasury’ at the Public Record Office of Ireland stored seven centuries of Irish records dating back to the time of the Normans. Together with our 5 Core Archival Partners and over 40 other Participating Institutions in Ireland, Britain and the USA, we are working to recover what was lost in that terrible fire one hundred years ago.
On the centenary of the Four Courts blaze next year (30 June 2022), we will launch the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland online. Many millions of words from destroyed documents will be linked and reassembled from copies, transcripts and other records scattered among the collections of our archival partners. We will bring together this rich array of replacement items within an immersive 3-D reconstruction of the destroyed building.
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland will be an open-access resource, freely available online to all those interested in Irish history at home and abroad. Many of the most important memory institutions worldwide are joining us in this shared mission to reconstruct Ireland’s lost history. The Virtual Record Treasury will serve as a living and growing legacy from the Decade of Centenaries.Digital Scriptorium is a growing consortium of American libraries and museums committed to free online access to their collections of pre-modern manuscripts. Our website unites scattered resources from many institutions into a national digital platform for teaching and scholarly research. It serves to connect an international user community to multiple repositories by means of a digital union catalog with sample images and searchable metadata. Many DS records also link out to the websites of our contributors, where users can discover further information about these collections.
The Archives Hub brings together descriptions of thousands of the UK’s archive collections. Representing over 350 institutions across the country, the Archives Hub is an effective way to discover unique and often little-known sources to support your research. New descriptions are added every week, often representing collections being made available for the first time.
Fragmentarium’s primary objective is to develop a digital laboratory specialized for medieval manuscript fragment research. Although based on the many years of experience of e-codices — Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, the Fragmentarium Digital Laboratory has an international orientation. First and foremost it is conceived as a platform for libraries, scholars and students to do scholarly work on fragments. It conforms to the latest standards set by digital libraries and will set new standards, especially in the area of interoperability.
Manus Online (MOL) è un database che comprende la descrizione e la digitalizzazione (integrale e/o parziale) dei manoscritti conservati nelle biblioteche italiane pubbliche, ecclesiastiche e private. Il censimento, avviato nel 1988 a cura dell'Istituto centrale per il catalogo unico e le informazioni bibliografiche (ICCU), si pone come obiettivo l'individuazione e la catalogazione dei manoscritti (latini, greci, arabi, ecc.) prodotti dal Medioevo all'età contemporanea, compresi i carteggi.
Cantus is a database of the Latin chants found in manuscripts and early printed books, primarily from medieval Europe. This searchable digital archive holds inventories of antiphoners and breviaries -- the main sources for the music sung in the Latin liturgical Office -- as well as graduals and other sources for music of the Mass.
HMML Reading Room (vhmml.org) offers resources for the study of manuscripts and currently features manuscript cultures from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The site houses high-resolution images of manuscripts, many of them digitized as part of the global mission of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), Collegeville, MN, to preserve and share important, endangered, and inaccessible manuscript collections through digital photography, archiving, and cataloging. It also contains descriptions of manuscripts from HMML's legacy microfilm collection, with scans of some of these films.
The Celtic Studies On-line Bibliography Project is the only ongoing bibliography of Celtic studies that attempts to cover all aspects of Celtic studies (language, literature, history, culture) and work on and in all the Celtic languages (ancient and modern). It is a joint project of the Celtic Studies Association of North America (which used to publish earlier versions of the Bibliography) and UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
The purpose of the present volume is to provide an accessible overview and entry into the complex literary creation known as Dindshenchas Érenn ‘History of the Notable Places of Ireland’. The five chapters in the book consider different aspects of the Dindshenchas corpus, ranging from the manuscript sources; the format and structure of the various texts so labelled; an overview of the scholarship published to date; the dating of the corpus; the Dindshenchas as a branch of aetiological literature; and an analysis of the literary connections between the Dindshenchas and medieval Irish literature generally.
Harvard University has the largest collection of Irish-language codices in North America, held in Houghton Library, its rare book repository. The manuscripts are a part of the age-old heritage of Irish book production, dating to the early Middle Ages. Handwritten works in Houghton contain versions of medieval poetry and sagas, recopied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to which period most of the library’s documents belong. Contemporary writings from that time, as well as ones by the post-Famine Irish immigrant community in the United States, are included. This catalogue describes the collection in full for the first time and will be an invaluable aid to research on Irish and Irish American cultural and literary output. The author’s introduction examines how the collection was formed. This untold story is an important chapter in America’s intellectual history, reflecting a phase of unprecedented expansion in Harvard University’s scholarship and teaching during the early twentieth century when the institution’s program of studies began to accommodate an increasing range of European languages and literatures and their sources. This indispensable guide to a major repository’s records of the Irish past, and of America’s Irish diaspora, will interest specialists in early and post-medieval codices. It should prove of relevance as well to scholars and students of comparative literature, cultural studies, and Irish and Irish American history.
For more than two centuries after 1199, Ireland was ruled by Plantagenet kings, lineal descendants of Henry II. The island became closely tied to the English crown not just by English law and by direct administration, but through other networks, above all the allegiance of a settler establishment led by aristocratic, ecclesiastical and civic elites that benefited from being within the orbit of royal patronage and service. This book contains fifteen interlinked studies, several of which appear here for the first time. The opening chapters trace Ireland’s changing place within a wider Plantagenet realm that itself altered geographically and institutionally during the period. In the thirteenth century Gaelic leaders were pushed to the geographical and political margins. In the fourteenth, English control and English custom retreated, posing fresh challenges to the crown and its ministers. Despite the alarmist claims of settler communities, Plantagenet Ireland was far from collapsing. Later chapters explore the altered distribution of power across the island. English chief governors, some of whom had experience of other borderlands of the Plantagenet realm, exercised power in a mixture of cultural modes, which enabled them to draw in, rather than simply confront, Gaelic lords and marcher lineages.
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 ‘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.
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.
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.
Early medieval writers viewed the world as divided into gentes ("peoples"). These were groups that could be differentiated from each other according to certain characteristics - by the language they spoke or the territory they inhabited, for example. The same writers played a key role in deciding which characteristics were important and using these to construct ethnic identities. This book explores this process of identity construction in texts from early medieval Wales, focusing primarily on the early ninth-century Latin history of the Britons (Historia Brittonum), the biography of Alfred the Great composed by the Welsh scholar Asser in 893, and the tenth-century vernacular poem Armes Prydein Vawr ("The Great Prophecy of Britain"). It examines how these writers set about distinguishing between the Welsh and the other gentes inhabiting the island of Britain through the use of names, attention to linguistic difference, and the writing of history and origin legends. Crucially important was the identity of the Welsh as Britons, the rightful inhabitants of the entirety of Britain; its significance and durability are investigated, alongside its interaction with the emergence of an identity focused on the geographical unit of Wales.
In this paper, we examine the distribution of epenthesis in final clusters and initial syllable deletion in trisyllabic words in Welsh using a corpus of Twitter data (Jones et al. 2015). We show that the generalisations established in Hannahs 2009, Hannahs 2011, and Hannahs 2013 are largely borne out, but there are additional lexical and phonological complications.
Specifically, we show that these two processes are subject to lexical frequency effects that go in opposite directions. While this seems at first paradoxical, we go on to show that the frequency effects make sense given what we know about phonological processes generally and what we know about Welsh phonotactics specifically.
The organization of this paper is as follows. We first review Hannahs's foot-based account of the facts. We then turn to our Twitter data testing Hannahs's claims, but also considering additional variables. We show that: i) the phenomena are gradient; and ii) that they are subject to lexical frequency effects. We then argue that these effects are, in fact, to be expected and we justify that claim by looking at further data from another corpus.

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