Talk:Scottish Gaelic/Archive 2

Edits By 81.154.92.125
I agree with the latest edit by An Siarach. Perhaps it's not downright vandalism, but it is difficult looking at his history of edits not to suspect the intents of our anonymous editor, esp. when you look at his wider editing history SEE HERE. Besides, I fail to see what these spurious edits add to the article, sourced or not. - Calgacus 15:22, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
 * If it is verifiable by means of published sources that a significant portion of Lowland Scots resent the promotion of Gaelic, that is encyclopedic information that should be included, from the NPOV of course. And if it can be verified that a BBC spok'sesman has said funding will be reduced for Gaelic broadcasting in the future, that is also encyclopedic information that should be included. Looking over the anon's other edits, he does not seem to me to be a vandal, just a newbie who hasn't quite learned how things are done at WP, such as citing sources for controversial claims. --Angr (t·c) 15:40, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
 * That's a very positive interpretation, if I may say so. One of his earlier edits contained "The BBC has come into criticm recently for showing no programming in or about the Scots language the only true native tongue of the South of Scotland". This is not someone reporting facts, it's someone with an agenda. Complaints about Gaelic programming in Scotland are minimal. Certainly the topic does not deserve a whole section to itself just because some anonymous editor has an agenda. Perhaps an aside in another relevant section. If the section survived, it is so spurious in any case, that it probably wouldn't survive the attention of other editors - Calgacus 15:55, 13 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I think that two people have been in violation of Three Revert Rule. This is an edit war, and both sides should be discussing the points here rather than turning the page into a battleground. Notinasnaid 16:10, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I don't think anyone has violated that "rule", and besides, user 81.154.92.125 blurs the line between vandal and non-vandal. - Calgacus 16:16, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Calgacus. 81.154.92.125 is simply a vandal who has no aim but to put forth his own agenda with no interest in attempting to support it. He is has also vandalised other articles as you will see if you look through some of his other edits. An Siarach


 * Being a POV pusher is not the same thing as being a vandal, and reverting his edits does not count as reverting "simple vandalism" for purposes of the 3RR. --Angr (t·c) 16:49, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Can we not get this 81.154.92.125 fellow banned? I defy anyone to look through his persistent attacks on this page as well as the idiotic, petulant nonsense (which attempts to be insulting) spouted on the talk pages of myself, calgacus and himself and defend him as a well-meaning contributor.

An Siarach

Pronunciation of the name of the language
This page gives the pronunciation as. Is this meant to be how the native name Gàidhlig is pronounced in Gaelic, or is it meant to be how Gaelic (in the Scottish context) is pronounced in English? If it's the former, I think I've normally seen for the Gaelic à (e.g. on http://www.akerbeltz.org/fuaimean/fuaimreagan.htm, which also doesn't use .  If it's the latter (i.e. it's suggesting that the English word is pronounced like non-rhotic garlic) what's the source?  In my experience it's pronounced either  or  if you're using RP-style transcriptions.


 * My Gaelic teacher got quite het up about this as I remember. (Transcriptions that follow are SSE.) for him meant Irish Gaelic only. Scottish Gaelic was pronounced . I don't think I've ever heard, either in SSE or anns a' Ghàidhlig. I will be bold and change it. Mendor 19:53, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Gàidhlig is pronounced roughly as Gaallick in the language itself.

An Siarach

Sources for Goidelic in Argyll and elsewhere
An Siarach requested a source for these. For the "elsewhere", the only thing I am aware of is Alan Bruford's What happened to the Caledonians ? (in Cowan & McDonald's Alba), where he argues for Q-Celtic in Atholl. I am not an expert, but the premise of the paper seems rather fantastical to me (that it relies on dsA and needs the Caledones to be the northern Picts and the Verturiones the southern ones doesn't help).

That said, Goidelic in Argyll is easier (likewise Wales, parts of sw Scotland and sw England). Specifically for Argyll, Cummins' The Age of the Picts and Campbells Were the Scots Irish ? (Antiquity 75, pp285-292) and Saints and Sea-kings advance the argument. Campbell's Antiquity stuff would be a likely place to start, but I haven't seen it. Forsyth says (Oxford Companion to Scottish History, p378, this published in 2001) that "[t]he origin of the Goidelic/Q-Celtic language is disputed" and proceeds to give the two versions. Price's Languages in Britain & Ireland (2000 ed) gives the invasionist version for Argyll. Magnus Magnusson's history (published 2003) is anti-invasionist and refers to Campbell. Forsyth's chapter of Wormald's Scotland: A History takes the same undecided position as her earlier piece.

I have changed it to Argyll only, mentioned that it is disputed, and removed the ref request.

Angus McLellan 19:16, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

On Scottish vs. Irish Gaelic
(I have copied this discussion here, as it is probably best located on the Gaelic talk page...)

As per our conversations about the point at which Scottish Gaelic shows divergences from Irish, see for example Breandan O'Buachalla, "Common Gaelic Revisited", in Rannsachadh na Gaidhlig 2000, (eds.) Colm O'Baoill and Nancy McGuire, 2002, Celtic Dept of Aberdeen University. Gaelicmichael 14:12, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for that reference; I'll see if I can find it in the library. However, I don't think that one person's paper should outweigh decades of scholarly consensus. By all means add a statement saying "Ó Buachalla (2002) has argued that..." or the like, but the article shouldn't be written in such a way as to suggest that Ó Buachalla's findings have been universally accepted. Angr (talk • contribs) 14:19, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Part of his article is to show that there has never been a consensus on this!! It's more that the domineering personality of Kenneth Jackson created a false sense of agreement. I know about it exactly because everybody in Scotland was talking about it when I was doing post-graduate work in Celtic Studies in Scotland, and that was 6 years ago!  There are other articles covering different aspects of these divergences, but O'Buachalla's is one of the most comprehensive articles to date, and it was close at hand.  But there is no doubt more like this.   Another problem is that because Ireland has had a disproportionately larger and longer influence in the development of Gaelic Studies, it is inherently Hibernocentric and the Scottish element has been underplayed.  But things are starting to change.  Gaelicmichael 20:16, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
 * One thing I'll add is that the Gaelic of eastern Scotland is extinct and has been for about 5 centuries, and almost nothing of it survives; the surviving Gaelic dialects are mostly those which have been subject to continuing Irish influence up until early modern era, so our basis for concluding anything about Scoto-Irish diversion is shaky at best. And Michael, you're absolutely correct, Gaelic studies are horribly Hiberno-centric. For much of the 20th century, the only places you could properly learn Old Irish were Ireland and Germany, and unfortunately the former was going through a period of extreme intellectual nationalism at the time. This has left the field with decades, if not centuries, of rebalancng to do. It's interesting that in the 18th century, many Scottish Gaelic intellectuals thought (and took for granted that) Scotland the source of the Scottish Gaelic language; but in Scotland, intellectual trends were affected by the opposite forces, and scholarship was seriously disabled by anti-Irish, anti-Gaelic, anti-Catholic, anti-Jacobite, (British) imperialist and Germanicist ideology which sought to make Scotland's past as Germanic as possible, and quite happy to discard all Celticness as a horrible Irish import; remember, these people invented the idea (and many high profile scholars genuinely believed) that the Picts were a Gothic tribe which gave birth to Lowland Scots, and that the "Scots" were a temporary imposter race of inferior stock who almost miraculously got control of the country for half a millenium and left their racial dregs in the Highland zone that passed into the 18th and 19th centuries. This has affected the course of studies; e.g. virtually all anthologies of "Scottish" literature before Clancy's Triumph Tree begin in the later middle ages, discarding previous Celtic or Romance literature, and scholars have been trapped with the terms "Old Irish" and "Middle Irish". You're certainly correct that this is changing; Scottish historians tend to use the terms "Old Gaelic" and "Middle Gaelic"; and Bede, with the few tenth century + documents - highly problematic as they are (i.e. a few genealogies, a few poems and a heavily interpolated Dalriadic "survey") - which trace the Scoto-Pictish kings to Ireland (not the people!), used as the basis that Gaelic originates in Ireland, are beginning to pale into insignificance compared with the contemporary Roman sources, archaeological data and placename evidence which contradicts this. Time will only tell though. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 21:32, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I have been drawn to this intriguing discussion. As Wikipedia must be easily understandable to the average reader, two very simple points arise. Was not the name given by the Romans to the people of Ireland the Scotti, and secondly, the Gaels were the inhabitants of Ireland. And of course the Picts were of old Scotland. Does that not make the word Gaelic and the word Irish interchangeable? River run 22:33, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
 * That's a case of inverted class logic: all cats are mammals, therefore all mammals are cats. The Latin word for Irishman is Hibernus, the Latin word for Gael is Scotus. There is no point in history when one can say that the Gaels were confined to Ireland; they're in Argyll as soon as we know anything about Argyll. And if you just had late antique Latin sources, you'd assume the Scoti existed only in Britain, e.g. Ammianus Marcellinus, writing for the year 360 AD: "... In Britain, during Constantius' tenth and Julian's third consulship, the wild tribes of the Scoti and Picti broke their undertaking to keep the peace, laid waste the country near the frontier, and caused alarm among the provincials, who were exhausted by the repeated disasters". (AM 20.1) Britain had only one frontier at this time, Hadrian's Wall. For Ammianus and 4th century Romans, the Scoti were a people who lived to the north of the province, not across the water in Hibernia. That does not mean Gaels come from Scotland, but its reminds us that if you want to make the Gaels originate in Ireland, you basically have to rely on much later, unverifiable sources, and use your imagination. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 22:53, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, the Scoti were raiders from old Ireland, they wouldn't be called Scoti until they had in fact raided, and the object of their raids was of course Britain. The Gaels originally came from old Ireland as did the Gaelic language. The two languages, Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic are too closely linguistically related to have broken apart in the distant past. River run 23:24, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


 * You are reading more than can be read into the word "Scot/i". The fact that there were raiders from Ireland does not mean that "Scot" means "raider" by definition. We in fact do not know exactly what it meant or where it came from. Let me quote from Alex Woolf, 'The "When, Why & Wherefore" of Scotland", History Scotland 2.2 (March/April 2002), which has a discussion of the word and how it came to be used: 'Whatever the origin of the word Scoti meaning 'raiders from Ireland', the term had before long taken on a much wider meaning, and for much of the next six or seven hundred years modern historians translate the Latin word Scotus as 'Irishman'. Once again, it is not as simple as that...  This means that those old confusing stories that 'Scot' used to mean 'Irishman' and 'Scotia' used to mean 'Ireland' are probably wrong and it is far better to think of an early medieval 'Scot' as being a Gael and 'Scotia' being neither Ireland nor Scotland but 'Gaeldom'. This use of 'Scot' to mean Gael continued into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries...'  As to the statement that 'Gaels originally came from old Ireland as did the Gaelic language' - that is an old assumption that is being re-examined, as it ought to. It is certainly accepted that Goidelic is more conservative than Brythonic, so why couldn't have Goidelic been able to be in Scotland before being "imported" from Ireland?  Read more on recent research on how the veneer of standard orthographic/linguistic conventions at an elite level hide the dialectical divergences that were already appearing in the Old Gaelic period. And what do you mean by "Eastern Scottish Gaelic" being dead for centuries??  Gaelic in Aberdeenshire and Eastern Perthshire survived into the 1980s!!  Gaelicmichael 03:04, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I take it the last question was addressed to me. Well, Perthshire and western Aberdeenshire Gaelic may be like the old Gaelic of the actual east coast (excluding Ross, Sutherland, etc), Fife, eastern Aberdeenshire, Angus, Mearns, etc, but we'll never know; if we had these Gaelic dialects from the High Middle Ages, we would definitely be in a better position to comment of diversion. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 13:16, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

On the topic of 'Scoti' and the origin of the name one theory ive read is that it comes from the word 'Sgaothaich' which was (apparently) the native name of the Scoti for themselves. The only place ive found this word used or the theory put forward was in 'Eachdraidh na h-Alba', a book on the history of Scotland from the mid 19th century by an Aonghas Mac Coinnich/Angus MacKenneth. He postulates that Scoti was simply a Latinized rendition of the word 'Sgaothaich' adapted to Latin phonetics. Now as ive said ive not seen this word or the idea behind it put forward anywhere else (and so its fairly safe to assume its not valid) but i am curious as to whether or not any of you have come across this or something similar. An Siarach


 * Please read the article by Woolf referenced above for this!Gaelicmichael 12:54, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I seriously do think it's more about national pride. The Picts left us very little or nothing and all we have really is Gaelic. The English dominated us for a long long time, so we have to claim something of our own. What else do we really have? 216.86.153.120 15:14, 5 April 2006 (UTC)


 * This is a very important link, and should be preserved. Can't see what the problem is. River run 22:21, 5 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree. The link is entirely pertinent, very important and should be maintained regardless of how one feels regarding the common classification of 'Old Gaelic' as 'Old Irish'. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by An Siarach (talk • contribs) 10:33, 6 April 2006  (UTC)

What Scottish Gaelic descends from
Michael, it is uncontroversial that Scottish Gaelic descends from the language commonly referred to as Old Irish. If that name strikes you as being "Hibernocentric", it doesn't change the facts. Perhaps "Old Goidelic" or "Old Gaelic" would have been a better name for the language, but those names are not the ones in common use. It's exactly parallel to saying that Scots is derived from Old English -- maybe that name seems to "give unwarranted geographic primacy to England" to you, but the fact remains "Old English" is what the language is called nowadays. Angr (talk • contribs) 14:35, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Im also of the mindset that the naming of Old Gaelic as Old Irish is hibernocentric and ideally the former would be the more common term used but as Angr points out Old Irish is the term most commonly used and thats that. I do disagree with the parallel drawn between the situation with Old English though. Old English was spoken by the English people - whether they lived in England or Scotland that is what they were and how they classed themselves and English ( or whatever equivalent spelling they had at the time) is what they called their language. The term 'Old English' is just as accurate and neutral as 'Old Gaelic' would be and both are more accurate terms respectively than 'Old Irish' which is essentially misleading and based upon an exonymic term never used by speakers of that language to refer to themselves or to their language. An Siarach

It is important to avoid using Irish when referring to the Gaelic language and culture in Scotland. Irish implies something foreign which is an anathema to the true inheritors of Caledonia. 84.135.220.237 18:49, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Let me reiterate two points: (1) It is already stated in the wiki entry that "Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic are all members of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages." That is as concise as we need to be, and about as much consensus as exists in the field of scholarship about relationships. To state further that they all derive directly from Old Gaelic/Irish cannot be sustained without debate. (2) The genetic model of direct derivation from Old Gaelic/Irish is oversimplified; not only do we see dialectal differences by the Old Gaelic/Irish period, but there are also features in Northern Gaelic that closely resemble Brythonic. Whether this is due to substratum interference or to independent dialectical divergences is not yet clear. But again, to claim that Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic derive directly from Old Gaelic/Irish ignores significant complications such as this. I thus stand by my position that the statement ought to be removed, not merely on the grounds of geo-politics or identity politics, but because the history of the language really is more complicated than the labels let on. Gaelicmichael 13:25, 6 April 2006 (UTC)


 * It's a pretty bewildering idea that Gaelic in Ireland and Gaelic in Scotland developed separately into a convergent language, it would fit quite nicely into the theory of parallel universes. From my studies, during the times of no books, no newspapers, no TV ect languages diverged pretty rapidly. Just take English as a simple example and how it has changed this last 1000 years. I really think that you are into pseudo history to dismiss the common roots of the language. River run 13:50, 6 April 2006 (UTC)


 * There are sound changes like /θ/ > /h/ and /ð/ > that (1) are present in all modern Goidelic languages, (2) could not have happened earlier than Middle Irish, and (3) are phonologically too peculiar to have happened in separate languages independently. To me this basically proves that Scots Gaelic, Manx, and Irish did not diverge significantly from each other until after this sound change, which can have been no earlier than about the eleventh century. Angr (talk • contribs) 14:14, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

River run and Angr, could you two please stop letting facts get in the way of a good article. 84.135.221.253 15:04, 6 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Good point there! This situation not to allow the phrase Old Irish or Middle Irish onto the Scottish pages really is more akin to POV and it's setting a new standard which I hope others wont follow. Very very disappointing!  The conclusion of this logic is that the likes of User:Calgacus should not be editing Old Irish or Middle Irish pages.  Not a healthy development! -- River run 23:26, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

All the different POVs should be most welcome, and then a consensus reached. Bel air 00:16, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Don't let the similarities between Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic lull you into concluding that they probably have a common ancestor. The fact is that after man started building the Tower of Babel God prevented this project from succeeding by confusing man's languages so that each spoke a different language and then scattered the builders to different parts of Earth. Those speaking Irish ended up in Ireland and those speaking Scottish Gaelic ended up in Scotland.
 * The similarities in the Swadesh list and the use of a form of Middle Irish, known as  'Classical Gaelic', as a literary language in Ireland until the 17th century and in Scotland until the 18th century are just pure coincidence.
 * There is no reason why User:Calgacus shouldn't edit Old Irish or Middle Irish pages if knowledge of the subject is at him.
 * 84.135.255.115 12:23, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * QuoteThere is no reason why User:Calgacus shouldn't edit Old Irish or Middle Irish pages if knowledge of the subject is at him. Unquote Yes I totally and absolutely agree with you. But if User:Calgacus believes that Old Irish and Middle Irish have no connection with Gaelic spoken in Scotland and User:Calgacus has never studied Irish, Old Irish or Middle Irish then that would be very debatable! I see that User:Calgacus does in fact edit Old Irish or/and Middle Irish pages. This is all based on User:Gaelicmichael and User:Calgacus not connection theory, of course! River run 13:41, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I do not argue nor even do I believe that Gaelic does not come from Ireland, neither do I object to the terms "Old Irish" and "Middle Irish". You are totally misrepresenting me; I'm merely pointing out that the reasons for believing this are highly dubious, and that the terms Old Irish and Middle Irish are the modern inventions of hibernocentric scholars. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 16:26, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Hibernocentric, it was that word that led my interest to this subject in the first instance. It's a word I had never heard of before, and that was part of my fascination with this subject. Some interesting questions arise about this word and it's use. Is it pejorative? Is it a word used to marginalise others? Is it a blame word? Is it an excuse word? Is it cover all our explanitions word? Not sure if I like this word, it doesn't explain anything and yet seems to get used where there seems to be lack of substance. Interesting word is hibernocentric. Slainte River run 22:26, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree with the above sentiment. Hibernocentric is usually used in a pejorative fashion to dismiss certain aspects of Gaelic language history. Actually it more often reveals more about the user of the word and 'generally' it shouldn't be used in any serious study.  It's somewhat akin to complaining that the history of the origins of French is a bit too much Francocentered, or of Latin, Romacentered. Best done without. - MacPhersonAndy 12:13, 8 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Hibernocentric is just an anglo-latin compound that means "Ireland centered"; as Gaelic has always been spoken in both Scotland and Ireland since records began, and as "Irish" was never the word used by speakers of Goidelic languages to refer to their language (it's interesting that early Gaelic speakers borrowed a Brythonic word rather than their own word for "Irish"), the terms "Old Irish" and "Middle Irish" are by definition Hibernocentric. No-one denies that Irish Gaelic is the ancient language of Ireland, and all the ancient Irish, but that doesn't mean Gaelic speakers in Scotland are "Irish" too. Even Irish historians, such as Seán Duffy, admit early 20th century Gaelic studies are Ireland-centric to the detriment of Scottish Gaelic studies, it's not really a controversial statement. It's only pejorative if the speaker is ravingly anti-Irish, or the listener is extremely paranoid or defensively POV. And BTW, almost no Scottish historian ever uses the word "Irish" to desribe the medieval Gaelic language. While some will call the language of, say, Áedan mac Gabráin, "Irish", no-one would ever call the language of King Máel Coluim II or Earl Ferchar of Ross "Irish" - it's simply Gaelic. So because "Old Irish" and "Middle Irish" are accepted linguistic terms for the languages as languages, it doesn't follow that one can go around medieval Scottish articles replacing "Gaelic" with "Irish". Editing articles like these and replacing Gaelic with Irish is just POV spam. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 12:34, 8 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Sorry, maybe I have lost the plot, or else the page has lost the plot. I thought this discussion was about getting the link to Old Irish back onto the Scottish Gaelic language page.  Probably a bit too Hibernocentric according to Gaelicmichael, whatever he means! The nub of the problem here is thus - is the the Scottish Gaelic language open to all contributors or does one have to pass the anti-Hibernocentric test first. - MacPhersonAndy 13:09, 8 April 2006 (UTC)


 * If that's what this discussion about, then I've lost track; I'm just dealing with the subissues which come up. Users can be as Hibernocentric as they like, it's Hibernocentric edits people might object to. I don't see anything wrong with the link to Old Irish being there (I myself have put Old Irish links in loads of Scottish articles), although GaelicMichael should be free to add a subclause stating the complications of the issue. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 15:00, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

People would do well to read more attentively. At no point does Calgacus question the connection between Old and Middle Irish and Gaelic in Scotland. The point, however, is that these terms are - despite having the weight of popular use behind them - misleading and less accurate than equivalent terms which designate the same language such as Old or Middle Gaelic. The nuances of history in the British Isles has left us with a situation where the older forms of Gaelic are referred to as 'Irish' which is somewhat akin to referring to all historical variants of the Romance languages as forms of Italian.An Siarach.


 * The same nuances of history in the British Isles has left us with a situation where the older forms of Lowland Scots are referred to as 'Middle English' and not Old Scots. Probably just the Anglo-centric nature of those who write about such things;-)
 * 84.135.242.177 18:15, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * To be frank, I'm not into this subject in a big way, and thought to tease out the arguments for and against. Interesting debate, learnt a lot! River run 14:15, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Neither do I deny a close connection between the various forms of Goidelic spoken throughout the British Isles. Please read a little more carefully what I've written, and look up the references provided. Similar phonetic developments do not necessarily mean that there was a single language throughout which the changes propagated; it could merely mean that there was a pan-Gaelic elite (or other similar social channels) through which certain changes came. Neither does this preclude the simultaneous existence and continued divergence of other linguistic features.  You can hardly study Scottish Gaelic and Munster Irish, for example, without being overwhelmed by the differences.  A quote, for example, from Roibeard O Maolalaigh, 'The Development of Eclipses in Gaelic', in Scottish Language 14/15 (1995/6): 'The present paper argues quite forcibly against the theory of Common Gaelic, as it implies a significant split between Gaelic dialects in the matter of eclipses at an early stage, presumably during the Old Irish period itself.'  An even more useful article (in its breadth) by the same author on this topic is 'Place-names as a Resource for the Historical Linguist' in (ed.) Simon Taylor, The Uses of Place-Names (1998). Gaelicmichael 22:44, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

The older forms of Lowland Scots are Middle English. As has been pointed out those who spoke it were English, referred to themselves as English and referred to their language as English. Lowland Scots 'became' Scots when its speakers started to refer to it as such(and themselves as such lets not forget) rather than as English and to retrospectively confer the status of 'Old Scots' on the forms of English whch preceded it makes no sense. The situation is not analoguous to that of Gaelic and its speakers where the most common term used to refer to its ancestral forms is misleading and innacurate ( and most importantly, based upon an exononym the speakers never used to refer to themselves or their language) - unlike the situation with Scots and its ancestral forms where they are referred to by a term which states perfectly accurately what they were and is based upon what they were called by those who spoke them. An Siarach


 * Fair point, so assumedly Lowland Scots first became Scots when its speakers started referring to it as such. Seems a bit disingenous, Scottish English would seem more accurate. Then again how could it be Scottish if its English? Intererestingly over in Ireland the Gaels there prefer that their Gaelic dialects, which they refer to as Gaeilge, are referred to by the exononym Irish because Gaelic suggests that the language is as distant and unrelated to modern Irish life whereas Irish indicates that it is and should be the proper national language of the Irish people. All very confusing. :-/
 * 84.135.242.146 12:02, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

TBH if you were to objectively name Lowland Scots it would be referred to as the 'Anglo-Scots' language/Old Scottish English or something similar to avoid any ambiguity or possible misinterpretation but Scots is what it has been named by its speakers. "How could it be Scottish if its English?" It is Scottish as it is of Scotland and unique to that country but it is not the Scottish language. Im aware of the situation in Ireland where people are quite likely to be offended if you were to refer to Gaeilge as Gaeilge rather than as 'Irish'. Indeed this nationalist feeling/backlash has led to the rather chauvinistic classing of all Gaelic languages and dialects as dialects of Irish - search on Amazon and youl find books dealing with dialects of Scottish Gaelic in places like Kintyre etc which are part of a series of books called "Irish language: Scottish dialects" - quite infuriating for those of us who are not Irish ; can you imagine the outroar if the Italians had the gall to class early, medieval or even modern Spanish/French/Portugese/Romanian as dialects of Italian? Given the pro-Irish/anti-English feeling which often surrounds the language and its support/propagation i do find it quite ironic that they base its promotion upon an exonym gifted by the very language/people they try to distance themselves from. An Siarach

An Siarach, some books have unfortunate names, I agree, and titles can be more infuriating than the contents! About exonym, when one is speaking Irish, ta siad ag labhairt as Gaeilge(they are speaking Irish), basically it's called Irish or less often Gaelic when one is speaking English and Gaeilge when one is speaking Irish. If one is speaking English then the Gaeilge is referred as Irish. You should try something similar in Scotland. (confused!) - Dia ár gcumhdach! An-gabhar 09:18, 10 April 2006 (UTC) Just to add something here, I believe here in Ireland Gaeilge is a translation of the word Irish and visa versa regardless of academic arguements of the origin of the word, as all words must have an origin somewhere, so it follows that any derivative of the word Gael..... in it's various forms would refer back to the original word. An-gabhar 12:11, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Oh come on. The Irish word for "Irish" is Éireannach, Gaeilge/Gaelach is "Gaelic" (e.g. Gaeilge na hAlban). My understanding is that the latter is almost certainly a borrowing from a medieval Welsh or Pictish word meaning "foreigner". "Irish" is firmly an exonym; in medieval Latin they maintained the same differentiation, Irish is Hibernus and Gaelic is Scotus; by the Anglo-Norman period, Scotus was still used to mean Gaelic (in Ireland as well as Scotland), but increasingly meant just Scottish Gaelic, so Lingua Hibernica became more common to describe Irish Gaelic than Lingua Scotica. But the actual Gaelic word(s) for the language(s) was the same then as now. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 12:22, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

That's why I said, I believe in Ireland, Scotland might differ on this one as scholars say language diverged circa 1000 years ago. An-gabhar 13:16, 10 April 2006 (UTC)


 * So, if Gaeilge really is a translation of "Irish", does Gaeltacht then mean Ireland? We would then have Gaeltachtaí meaning "Irelands". :) - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 13:39, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Rightly or wrongly, na Gaeil translate to the Irish in the Irish language, maybe that's what 1000 years of seperation does. My focus is that Scottish Gaelic should just be called Scottish, just like Spanish-Italian is called just Spanish, Portuguese-Italian simply called Portuguese etc, just like Irish Gaelic. Adding the the word Gaelic after the word Scottish should/maybe be taken as superflorous. An-gabhar 15:09, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

People simply would not accept popular reference to Gàidhlig as (the) Scottish in Scotland - centuries of lies, propaganda,pseudo-history and racism have seen to that and it would take decades of promoting Scottish history ( something our government is utterly loath to do ) to create the kind of knowledgeable atmosphere where the status of Gàidhlig might be accepted and even then many, if not most, would reject it. With regard to the use of Gaeilge/Irish in their respective languages in Ireland i can fully sympathise with the feeling behind this fear of having the status of the language eroded or taken away - no (historically aware) speaker of Scottish Gaelic could fail to sympathise as this erosion/disassocation of status is what happened to our language courtesy of the English speaking population of our country. An Siarach


 * I don't doubt the presence of "lies, propaganda, pseuo-history and racism" in this debate, but there are stronger reasons for why 'Scottish' would be an inappropriate name for Scottish Gaelic. Chief among these is that even if there were a period in which Gaelic was the majority language of what is now Scotland, it could only have been for a relatively short period in the history of the nation. As such, Gaelic has a very weak claim to being the national language, a claim that the use of the word 'Scottish' would confer.--Nmcmurdo 00:35, 19 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Whether or not Gaelic was the majority language for a single year or a thousand doesnt really have any bearing on its status and the tired old claim that this period of majority, which cannot reasonably be doubted as having occured, was for a very short period of time is tied in with a misunderstanding which accords far too great an importance to the language of the aristocracy in certain regions as inherently showing the language of the region as being the same and various other outdated historical views. Gaelic is the language of the original Scots, the language which defined them, and it was these same Scots who founded Scotland and for whom the north of Britain was named Scotland. Without the Scots/Gaelic speakers there would be no such thing as a Scotland or Scottish people. Gaelic has neither a 'strong' or a 'weak' claim to being the Scottish language anymore than English has a 'strong' claim or otherwise to being the English language ; it simply is the Scottish language and nothing can change this undeniable fact, regardles of how badly the adherants of various forms of English in Scotland might wish otherwise - the historical facts relevant to this question are not in doubt. siarach 11:47, 19 September 2006 (UTC)


 * These are very weak arguments. The same faulty reasoning would lead us to the “undeniable fact” that the West Germanic ‘Old Frankish’ is the national language of France. Scottish Gaelic is essentially regional language of the North-West that for a relatively short period of Scottish history had a more widespread geographic influence (particularly on placenames). Given the rich multilingual history of Scotland, I don’t think any language has a claim to the term ‘Scottish’.--Nmcmurdo 12:06, 19 September 2006 (UTC)


 * "Very weak" is an interesting way of describing a list of historical facts which are irrefutable. I am not familiar enough with the more intimate details of early French history to go into any elaborate discussion with regard to it but there i do know that the situation with regard to France is not the same as that regarding the Scots. Whether or not Scotland has a "rich multilingual history" or not ( find me a region which does not) is utterly irrelevant - does the existence of Old Welsh and Latin and the later introduction of Norman French and Danish in what would become England affect the status of English as the English language? Of course it doesnt. The language which is ancestral to the Scottish people, the language which defined them/which named them as such and the language of these same people who founded the Scottish nation is of course the Scottish language - there is absolutely no ambiguity over this progression of facts. You can dispute the status of Gaelic as the Scottish language or even the existence of any Scottish language but you cannot do so without rendering the very idea of any language holding any such status anywhere as something fairly ridiculous and ephemeral and ive yet to encounter any of anti-Gaelic (usually pro-English) antagonists who debate this issue who maintain the slightest consistency with regard to applying their rationale outwith the Scottish microcosm which is hardly surprising as their arguments rarely have a foot to stand on. Nations (in particular those with pre-modern era roots) are/were defined by a people, not the other way around. Scotland is no exception to this, as painful as this fact obviously is to many who wish to ignore the historical status of the Gaelic language..siarach 12:27, 19 September 2006 (UTC)


 * As you are well aware, the case for Scottish Gaelic to be renamed ‘Scottish’ cannot rest simply on a “list of historical facts”! I am not disputing the facts (those being that Scotland is named after the Scots; and that the Scots spoke Gaelic). I am instead saying that your case for Gaelic to be renamed ‘Scottish’ rests either upon an eccentric definition of ‘Scottish’, or that the argument is a non-sequitur.


 * Defining Scottish as ‘of the (Dalriada) Scots’, where Scots refers specifically to the original Goidelic settlers of Dalriada, has to be regarded as eccentric. Today most people use Scottish to mean ‘of (the country we now call) Scotland’ – certainly that is how the ascription of the term ‘Scottish’ to Gaelic would be regarded. To do so on the basis of the former definition would be thoroughly misleading.


 * But if we take Scottish to mean ‘of Scotland’ rather than ‘of the Scots’, your conclusion simply does not follow from its premises, unless we equate the history of the Scots with the history of Scotland, which is surely invalid. The country founded by Kenneth MacAlpin in 848 was very different territorially from what we now call Scotland (for example, most of today’s Scottish population do not live in that area). That these Gaelic-speaking people eventually gave their name to a country we would now recognise reflected that they were first to ‘unify’ the land. However, shortly after this unification, Gaelic declined in usage and importance for Scotland as a whole. Gaelic was thus the dominant language (it may even never have been spoken by the majority) of Scotland (as contrasted with the Scots) for a relatively short period of time.


 * Comparison with French and English is instructive. The Franks gave their name to France, but the national language is French, which owes much more to Latin than it does to Frankish. Similarly, whilst English has followed a complicated path, even Old English owed far more to the West Saxon influence (after the formation of Wessex) than it did to the Angles. If we were use your system of “undeniable facts” to establish the national languages of France and England, the former would still be called French but would be de facto ‘Old Frankish’, and the latter would be de facto what we now call English, but renamed ‘West Saxon’! --Nmcmurdo 17:33, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

An interesting set of "arguments" as every one falls into the traps or fallacies/bigotries i had previously described. The arguments i have put forward stand and i defy anyone to argue against them while maintaining a consistent stance with regard to the history and/or perception of any other nation of a similar nature to Scotland in the world. An Siarach 01:48, 25 September 2006 (UTC)


 * "So, if Gaeilge really is a translation of "Irish", does Gaeltacht then mean Ireland? We would then have Gaeltachtaí meaning "Irelands" (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ). Surely Gaeltacht is simply a word denoting an area where Irish is spoken. Gaeltachtaí meaning areas where Irish is spoken.
 * 84.135.215.60 15:01, 11 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Exactly. Just one of the problems with pretending that Gael and Irish are interchangable. Don't know either what Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington would have thought of being called collectively na Gaeil. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ)

Is it a problem though? A Gael would refer to an Irish-speaker. "Na Gaeil" would imply that the afore mentioned chaps were Irish-speakers. Irish generally means an Irish person, the use of Irish for the language is usually clear from context. 84.135.202.217 13:51, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

There is a serious difficulty with Scottish Gaelic studies, which I've at least alluded to in my wiki entries, a sociological problem. There has historically been a huge imbalance between the number of Irish speakers vs. Scottish Gaelic speakers, with that order of magnitude being reflected in the number of scholars engaged in linguistic and literary research. There is a paltry number of active Scottish Gaelic scholars, clearly few of them (who are severely overworked) have time to be engaged in WikiPedia entries.

Beyond that, with the severance of the pan-Gaelic world in the 17th century, each side (Scotland and Ireland) became more provencial and inward looking. The Irish nationalist movement, which had from its late-nineteenth century inception a notion of Gaelic Ireland, had out of necessity, to take an "integral island" approach, which further estranged itself from the pan-Gaelic perspective.

With Ireland free and Celtic Studies there really reaching maturity, scholars are doing great work re-examining old assumptions, but Scotland is hardly a priority. Fortunately, since the 1990s Scotland is also seeing a renaissance in historical and linguistic scholarship, but it is still quite small in scale and inadequately funded. Those who are engaged are quite overworked, and the general public in Scotland is quite mixed in its reception to the notion of Celts and the Gaelic language throughout Scotland -- which is not surprising given centuries of anti-Gaelic propaganda. It will take years yet for the state of the art research to reach print and trickle down.

I do not, nor have I ever, claimed that there is no close historical connection between Gaelic Scotland and Ireland. Indeed, such sea-linked cultural exchanges (esp during the Lordship of the Isles) were crucial in keeping Gaelic culture vibrant and sustainable over centuries in all the islands. The problem that I have is in the assertion that all Scottish Gaelic culture or language is directly derived from any one form of Irish. While the majority of documentary material that survives is from the elite, where the Hibernocentric perspective is strongest, there is plenty of evidence of independent cultural production in Gaelic Scotland -- Fenian ballads composed in Scotland that travelled to Ireland, for example.

For more on the nuances of and problems with the pan-Gaelic approach in the medieval period, see Wilson McLeod, 2004, Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland 1200-1650, Oxford University Press. I've given references galore to current research, done by the few authorities actually doing the work about the evolution of Goidelic languages and cultures, so if you're not current enough on this work to maintain a reasonable discussion about it, you can get off your duff and learn something new. Gaelicmichael 13:40, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Added IPA to phrases
Just to let everyone know that I replaced the horrid pseudo-English "phonetics" in the phrases section with IPA. I;m not an IPA expert, but I transcribed the way I pronounce those phrases as best I could. Of course there are other ways of pronouncing them ([laʰt̪] instead of [lɛʰt̪], [ʃiv] instead of [ʃu], etc.) so if anyone has strong feeling for or against a certain pronunciation I don't mind edits.

I intend, during the course of the coming weeks, to rework the pronunciation and orthography sections, which could IMO be much improved. I also want to put up a much more detailed grammar section, but I am thinking that as the article is so long already, it would be better to create a new main article "Scottish Gaelic Grammar". Hopefully there are no objections to that. Callanish 14:41, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I like the idea of splitting the article/creating a seperate one for Grammer. An Siarach
 * Good job on the IPA! I kept telling myself I was going to get around to that someday, but I never did. A separate article on grammar would be okay, maybe even better would be two separate articles, one on Scottish Gaelic morphology and one on Scottish Gaelic syntax. (For a parallel case, see Irish morphology and Irish syntax; there's also Welsh morphology but no Welsh syntax article yet.) Angr (talk • contribs) 14:53, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Various questions/responses
Please forgive the creation of a new thread for what properly belongs under other threads above, but I'm new to Wikipedia and I can only see an "add new" tab; I can't figure out how to add to an existing thread. If anyone could tell me how I'd be grateful.

Re: Old Irish: I agree that Gaelic studies in general have been, and remain, very Hibernocentric, and that Old Gaelic (and Middle Gaelic, Early Modern Gaelic, etc.) is a better name for the earlier stages of the language than Old Irish, etc.; indeed the former was the preferred term used in the Celtic department at my university (Univ. of Aberdeen) when I was doing my Gaelic Studies degree. However, having said that, regardless of one's *personal* academic or political opinion, the fact is that the terms Old Irish, etc. are currently more widely used and more widely recognised. I think the best thing to do is to say Old Irish (or Middle Irish, whatever period is being referred to) and add a remark somewhere (following, or in the Old Irish article to which it links, perhaps) that some scholars, primarily Scottish Gaelic scholars, prefer the names Old Gaelic, etc., perhaps explaining why it is preferable, and leave it at that.

Likewise, regarding the history of Gaelic, as far as am aware, the following remain the generally accepted theories, or as one user above put it, "decades of scholarly consensus": 1. Modern Scottish Gaelic is, like modern Irish and Manx, a direct descendant of Old Irish/Gaelic, through Middle Irish/Gaelic and Early Modern Irish/Gaelic. 2. Scottish Gaelic was brought to Scotland around the 5th century AD by settlers/invaders/etc. from northern Ireland, by way of Argyll and Dal Riata 3. Western Gaelic (Irish) split off developmentally from Eastern Gaelic (Scottish and Manx) circa the 13th century, and Scottish Gaelic and Manx then split off from each other around the 15th century.

Now apparently there is recent research challenging some or all of these points. This is good. (I have Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig, so I'll look up the O'Buachalla article that gaelicmichael mentioned). However, these dissenting opinions are not yet in general acceptance as far as I can tell, and certainly not in general circulation (otherwise I'm pretty confident I would have heard about them before now). So I really think that we are bound in the interest of good scholarship to put forth the conventional, accepted theories first, and then say that "recent research has challenged this", "however, scholar X has put forth the theory that...", and so on, and provide note numbers and references in a bibliography section at the end of the article (the article currently has no bibliography at all!)

The whole history section of the article, and its edits, smacks strongly of political agendas being pushed, which is really inappropriate (but unfortunately easily done!) in a forum like Wikipedia.

I would also like to ask for bibliographical references in regard to the so-called "Lowland Gaelic" (as distinct from Highland Gaelic = Scottish Gaelic) mentioned in the final paragraph in the history section, as this language seems to have passed entirely unnoticed through four years of classes, reading and research in Gaelic Studies at university, and all subsequent "keep-up" reading I've done in the general area over the last 7-8 years. Callanish 15:25, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Callanish, the way to add a comment to the same thread is to click on the small word "edit" on the right side next to the heading of the thread you want to respond to. That opens up just that one thread. You can also click "edit this page" at the top and that will open the entire page to editing and you can add your comments wherever you like.
 * I agree with you that it's important to keep political agendas out of linguistics articles while still maintaining NPOV and being sure modern research isn't ignored. I don't have any sources for Lowland Gaelic, but there is an article Galwegian Gaelic which may take you further. Angr (talk • contribs) 15:45, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
 * PS. See also User:Calgacus/Archive I for a conversation between Calgacus and me regarding Galwegian Gaelic. Angr (talk • contribs) 15:51, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I too have never heard of the term "Lowland Gaelic" (I've never much encountered the term "Highland Gaelic" either); Gaelic dialects are classified according to country (e.g. Scottish, Irish and Manx) without much reference to comprehensibiity factors, and dialects of Scottish Gaelic which survived long enough to be recorded are classified according to region (e.g. Perthshire, Easter Ross, etc), not according to Highland-Lowland. The latter terminology would be useless in any case, as the concept of Highlands and Lowlands are constructs of the later middle ages and early modern period, and would have been meaningless to anyone before that date (they are irrelevant today too). In the case of Galwegian Gaelic, it is historically impossible to attribute its spread to either Dalriada, the Kingdoms of the Picts or the Kingdom of the Scots, since Galloway did not come under the control of Scotland until the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and must have been of direct Irish or Norse-Gaelic origin. Therefore, calling it a dialect of "Scottish Gaelic" is purely political. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 16:20, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Gaelic as a majority language in Scotland?
The text refers to Gaelic becoming the majority language of Scotland. This seems difficult to verify. Even if it were the case it seems likely that it could only have been for a short historical period - at most the two centuries following the late 11 century, but most probably much shorter given the continued presence of English / Scots in Lothian, and the administrative events following William's arrival in Scotland. Further, Old Norse would likely be prevalent in the North East and perhaps some of the Isles.--Nmcmurdo 00:03, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

The Government has wasted Millions of pounds in thirty plus years promoting this dead language. Every census shows that less and less people speak Gaelic and it has reduced to the level that more people go to an old firm game.

Holden 27

Well, expect a lot more money to be wasted if we're stupid enough to elect that bunch of reactionary farmers and their 18th century mentality next year! --Nmcmurdo 18:40, 17 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Gaelic was almost certainly the majority language of "Scotland" from the early middle ages until about 1500, roughly the beginning of the early modern era (though there is no way of proving that directly, you can't prove anything like that directly); ceasing to be the only language of the court after the accession of David I in 1124 does not mean it went into decline amongst the general population of the Lowlands (excluding Galloway and Carrick, not even 1/3rd of the Scottish landmass) outside Lothian; place-name and other evidence suggests that this did not begin to happen until at least the later 1200s). Regarding the other point, the money of course is not necessarily wasted; this is like saying hospitals are a waste of money because everyone is going to die anyway. Everything is a waste of money with that mindset. Regards. Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 21:14, 17 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I think we need to judge the penetration of a language by the number of speakers, rather than coverage of "landmass"! (unless perhaps sheep and bracken were fluent Gaelic speakers...) But frivolity aside, I'm interested in your view that Gaelic was the majority language in the early Middle Ages. What does research say about this? During much of this period 'Scotland' had at least four, possibly five (I understand we don't know much about 'Pictish'!), languages. The others must have been very small if Gaelic were really spoken by the majority. I don't doubt there was probably a period in the High Middle Ages when Gaelic was the majority language., although 1500 seems extraordinarily late.--Nmcmurdo 22:18, 17 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Well all of Scotland was sparsely populated in the middle ages; the idea that the highlands is empty is purely the result of modern population trends. Half of Scotland's population now lives within a few miles of Glasgow, but in the 18th century half of Scotland's population still lived north of the river Tay. Anyways, there's no direct way of assessing how much was spoken where and when. Most historians imply that Gaelic was prolly the majority language by 900; but to me it isn't that clear that the evidence allows us to tell what the difference between Gaelic and Pictish actually was; modern Scottish "Gaelic" words like Srath, Inbhir, Beinn as well as medieval "Scottish" words like aber, pett, mormaer, etc, do not exist in Irish and can only be explained by a "Pictish" inheritance. Whatever Pictish was, it was probably similar enough to Irish to converge into the "lingua scotica" (which we now styled "Gaelic") of the high and later middle ages. But there can be absolutely no doubt that in the mid-12th century languages other than Gaelic in "Scotland" are confined to far north-east (i.e. easter Caithness) and the far south-east. In David I's reign, there are a large number of landlords and priests settled in the English-speaking lands of "Lothian" (e.g. Midlothian, East Lothian, Peebles-shire, etc) - these guys disappear by the 13th century, but the "Gaelic" society of the Scottish Lowlands north of the Forth seems still to be fully in tact at the highest levels in the mid-13th century. With great earldoms like Fife, Strathearn and Mar in Gaelic hands way into the 14th century, with somewhere between a third and a quarter of the Scottish population behind the highland line even in the 18th century, adding the vastness of Galloway and Carrick into the equation, it's very difficult to argue that English could have become a majority language significantly before 1500, if even then. You could say that this is all speculation, but equally saying that English was the majority language before 1500 is also speculation and happens to be based on even less evidence. Regards, Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 22:57, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

School in Glasgow?
This article says in the Official recognition:


 * The first solely Gaelic medium secondary school will open in Glasgow in 2005 (several Gaelic medium primary schools and partially Gaelic medium secondary schools already exist).

2005 in over, does anyone know whether the school was indeed opened?--Amir E. Aharoni 07:38, 9 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Err im pretty sure it has been but dont quote me on that. An Siarach


 * I'm editing to include Sgoil Ghaidhlig Ghlaschu, hope it's right.--Amir E. Aharoni 14:36, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Confirmed Sockpuppetry
It has been discovered on WP:RFCU that, , , ,  , , and  are all socks. has been engaging in sockpuppetry to further the wikipedian strength of his POV on this and other pages. All except Bluegold have been permanently blocked, and Bluegold himself has been blocked for 24 hours. Moreover, is a suspected sock, but may be just, if Bluegold was telling the truth on the investigation page, Bluegold's work colleague trying to help him out. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 20:05, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Unclear phrase
While editing I came across this phrase...

Using the spelling rule, it is sometimes unclear whether a vowel has been introduced for its own pronunciation or for its effect upon a consonant.

and this embedded comment (left by someone who presumably hadn't discovered talk pages):

''What was here didn't make any sense. Can someone provide an example of what's being talked about?''

I replaced the phrase with one which I hope is a bit clearer, and I think has the same meaning, but as the original phrase was rather unclear it's hard to be certain.

Where pairs of vowels occur in writing, it is sometimes unclear which vowel is to be pronounced and which vowel has been introduced to satisfy this spelling rule.

This is certainly my experience as someone who attempts to pronounce Gaelic names with very little knowledge of the language, whether or not it's what the original author meant! But an example and/or further rephrasing would still be welcome. Blisco 19:30, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Regional variations
One of the problems I have had in learning Gaelic is that different native speakers have such diverse pronunciations of basic phonemes, including wide differences in patterns of consonant dropping. This article gives quite a good introduction to the pronunciation of the language beginners ought to learn, but possibly suggests that there is a greater degree of standardisation than in fact pertains. At any rate, I have searched the web in vain for a good explanation of what pronunciation features are typical of which islands, and would be very grateful if someone could summarise the issue here. --Doric Loon 16:16, 20 May 2006 (UTC)


 * This probably complicates things rather than helps, but on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, the claim is that the Gaelic spoken near Christmas Island and Iona is 'Barra' Gaelic (after the island), whereas the Gaelic spoken near Mabou is 'Lochaber' Gaelic -- in each case the early Gaelic settlers were from the given area. I know that's true for some of my ancestors who lived in Mabou, but I'm not competent to say what the variations are.  Possibly sources would be the Gaelic College in St. Ann's or St. Francis Xavier U. in Antigonish, N.S.


 * Similarly, L with a broad vowel is often pronounced like English W (e.g., in a song from the mid-1800s, widely-know in Cape Breton, chi mi Ceap Breatuinn, mo luaidh); this is reportedly called the "Eigg cluck," says Scottish Gaelic in Canada. — OtherDave 15:34, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Current distribution in Scotland
The map seems to indicate a concentration of Gaelic speakers in the Borders in an area bordering on Dumfries and Galloway representig some 2 to 4 percent of the Borders' population. If this is taken to be 109,270 then at 2 percent there should be some 2185 Gaelic speakers in the area marked on the map. Is this because of some kind of New Age neo-Celtic commune in the area or a village of native speakers using an inherited community language? Similarly with the concentration in East Ayrshire, population 119,720, which at 2 percent would represent some 2394 Gaelic speakers and a small area in Moray, population 87,720 which at 2 percent would represent some 1754 Gaelic speakers. Or is the map just Banff and Macduff? 84.135.220.246 18:44, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't the map was done on that scale. It seems to have been done by council ward or unit of similar size. For the two southern areas in question, which aren't very densely populated, it may be nothing more than 50-100 people who put the Gaelic population above 2%. Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 19:48, 26 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I see said the blind man who walked into the lampost. The coloured areas indicate that in those particular locations there are 2-4 percent Gaelic speakers present. It would still be interesting to know whether these assumed 50-100 people are a cluster of native speakers using an inherited community language, Gaelic speaking incomers or enthusiatic learners or a combination of all three. Perhaps it was simply an occurrence of the Jedi census phenomenon. 84.135.220.246 11:46, 27 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I made the map considering Civil Parishes, a concrete area type that allows the comparison of results all throughout the 20th Century (because the census has always considered it and results are always available for this area size). If you have any curiosity, this map is directly comparable to those published by Kenneth MacKinnon for the years 1891 and 1981 in http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/STELLA/STARN/lang/GAELIC/figure47.htm. The reduction of Gaelic speakers throughout the years is sadly evident all throughout the land.
 * The map has been made considering all the data that the "General Register Office for Scotland" has published in the website www.scrol.gov.uk (Scottish Census Results online).
 * Taking this into account, there are three "special" civil parishes which, although are not in the traditional Gàidhealtachd area, are over the 2% threshold. The reason for this is that their population is very small. These civil parishes are:

- Kildrummy (Aberdeenshire): Total population over 3 years old 188; Gaelic speakers 4 (2,13%) - Barr (South Ayrshire): Total population over 3 years old 195; Gaelic speakers 4 (2,05%) - Ettrick (Borders): Total population over 3 years old 100; Gaelic speakers 2 (2,00%)
 * Apart from this I have received no comments on the map. Maybe somebody has any indication about how to improve it...

The map is somewhat hard to read, the many colours make it hard to grasp at one glance how the speakers of Gaelic are distributed. I suggest you use black for areas with more than 70% Gaelic speakers blue: between 50% and 70% red: between 30% and 50% yellow: between 10% and 30%. no colour (white): under 10%Unoffensive text or character 08:12, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree with the last proposal here - the map does use too many colours imo. siarach 09:02, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Why no mention of initial consonant mutations?
It's only mentioned in passing, but it's one of the distinctive traits of the Celtic languages. FilipeS 12:12, 18 September 2006 (UTC)


 * It's mentioned more than just in passing, I guess. The spelling and pronunciation are explained, it's mentioned for the past tense, it's mentioned for the relevant determiners, it's even indirectly there in the explanation of why people get named "Hamish"… That's relatively good (ignoring the fact that the entire grammar section could use a general clean-up). Do you mean why has nobody mentioned the initial consonant mutation article? That's easily fixed. Or why no one mentions the term "initial consonant mutation"? Maybe because Sc. Gaelic only has lenition, so we don't need a more general term?

I think that the reference to initial consonant mutations could be more fleshed out in the Grammar section. Compare with the articles on Welsh morphology, or Breton language, or Irish language. Regards. FilipeS 11:46, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

New stuff in Grammar section
I just added a bunch of tables to explain how the definite article works. Possibly in too much detail, feel free to cut down or add some kinder, gentler explanatory text. Please check the examples, some of my sources are 100 years old and there has surely been some paradigm levelling and other changes in the meantime. Let's definitely move the grammar section out of this long article (although I would vote for a single "grammar" article instead of separate "syntax" and "morphology" articles right away, as suggested before). CapnPrep 02:21, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

New UK passport - "Rìoghachd Aonaichte Bhreatainn is Éireann a Tuath"?
The new UK passport is said to use the translation "Rìoghachd Aonaichte Bhreatainn is Éireann a Tuath". That translation appears to be either a neologism (a Google search provides zero hits for the exact term) or a mistranscription (the guy that transcribed it was not even sure what language it was). Please see: --Mais oui! 11:53, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Talk:United_Kingdom

"Rìoghachd Aonaichte Bhreatainn is Éireann a' Tuath" this is Scottish Gaelic and literally translates into: "Kingdom United of Britain and Ireland of the North". You were near enough right, but your definate article "a" needed the apostrophe (') placed after it "a'". if you search for: Rìoghachd Aonaichte Bhreatainn is Éireann a' Tuath in Google you get 18 hits.

Page split
The article is too long, so following WP practice for other major languages, I have moved the grammar section into a separate article Scottish Gaelic grammar. I would suggest also creating Scottish Gaelic orthography and Scottish Gaelic phonology (I will leave it to someone who has contributed more to those sections).

I also moved the list of Gaelic place names into a new article List of Scottish Gaelic place names (this is an established WP category).

CapnPrep 05:49, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Minimal pairs
I have looked long and hard for a usable collection of Gaelic minimal pairs. These are very useful for phonological analysis, but are also extremely useful for language learners. As I am a not-so-advanced Gaelic learner I could benefit from these, but would not really have the competence to put them together without help. Is there anyone out there, perhaps someone who has worked on the phonology section of this article, who would like to join forces with me in creating such a thing. I think it should have a page of its own, but be closely linked with the phonology section of this page. Alternatively, if the phonology section IS going to become a page in its own right, this could be done there. But it might become a bit long. The idea is to take each pair of phonemes which are similar enough in their articulation that learners might confuse them or linguists might want to analyse the difference, and give three minimal pairs showing the distinction at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of a word (sometimes not all three will be possible). For each pair to be dealt with, we might have a heading, a short explanation and then a table something like this:

Does anyone else think this would be worth investing a little time on? --Doric Loon 10:42, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Beann/binn; inbhear; sruth
Halló ó hÉirinn! Bíonn na focail a scríobh tú anseo ag rith fós i nGaeilg!

The words you wrote here are still in use in modern Irish:

Beann/binn = point/apex/gable

inbhear =estuary

sruth =stream

159.134.221.79 02:16, 19 November 2006 (UTC)James; Éirinn agus Álbain abú!

Language Check and IPA
We could use an IPA pronunciation and Gaelic check over at Bean Nighe (and also a little bit at Banshee). Tapadh Leibh! --Kathryn NicDhàna ♫♦♫ 03:33, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Concise title
This article should be moved to Scottish Gaelic as per Naming conventions (languages). The disambiguator serves no purpose as far as I can see.

Peter Isotalo 01:03, 7 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Yup, this looks fairly obvious to me (in fact it's been annoying me for a while). I've raised it at Requested moves. --Blisco 18:36, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Related Articles that could use some work
An Comunn Gàidhealach and Comunn na Gàidhlig are stubs needing expansion. Also, ACG's website seems to be down. --Kathryn NicDhàna ♫ ♦ ♫ 09:06, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Velarization/Palatalization
The article mentions this, even a mention of Palatalization works (albeit in Primitive Irish), but gets into no detail. Does it work like modern Irish, where a, o, and u make a consonant broad and e and i make a consonant slender, or does it work a different way? Nothing really specific on this point is mentioned in the article. --Lim e tom 11:11, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

POV in Official Recognition
I have flaged this section with regards POV. Please could someone tidy this. 194.200.145.5 15:33, 18 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I removed the POV tag. For one thing, it was placed in the Grammar section, not the "Official Recognition" section.  However, in reading the Official Recognition section, I see no hint of POV.  Before attempting to replace the tag, please be more specific (give examples) in your concerns, or better yet, forget the tag and just fix the language you believe to be POV.  Best wishes. --WilliamThweatt 15:47, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

I would prefer not to alter the text but I have a number of problems with the section. These consist POV but more importantly referencing. The section actually contains no references. The section to a lesser extent also has examples of original research and weasel words.

"After centuries of persecution, prejudice and neglect" These are extremly strong words, given with no explanation or references.

"People still living can recall being beaten for speaking Gaelic in school." A statement like this needs definetly needs to be referenced.

"In fact, this annoyance may be largely assumed" Without a reference is original research

"The Ordnance Survey has acted in recent years to correct many of the mistakes that appear on map......" Reference??

Weasal words in the article "whim", "completely ignored", "major blow".

I will refrain from adding a banner for now to give people time to find references. 194.200.145.5 09:08, 19 January 2007 (UTC)


 * The Tag you are looking for is "fact" not "POV". The first and second lines you quote are undoubtedly true - POV in no way comes into it - while the fourth seems hardly the kind of statement anyone would use to put forward a political opinion. siarach 14:44, 19 January 2007 (UTC)


 * User:194.200.145.5, Points well-made and well-taken. I have place the SectionUnreferenced tag at the top of the section.  As An Siarach points out, this is a more appropriate tag than POV.  I would also agree with An Siarach that the statements are both factual and true and not a reflection of any particular POV, but nonetheless definately need to be cited.  It shouldn't be too hard to find a source for these points.--WilliamThweatt 15:09, 19 January 2007 (UTC)


 * If it is verifiable by means of published sources that a significant portion of Lowland Scots resent the promotion of Gaelic, that is encyclopedic information that should be included, from the NPOV of course. And if it can be verified that a BBC spok'sesman has said funding will be reduced for Gaelic broadcasting in the future, that is also encyclopedic information that should be included. Looking over the anon's other edits, he does not seem to me to be a vandal, just a newbie who hasn't quite learned how things are done at WP, such as citing sources for controversial claims. --Angr (t·c) 15:40, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
 * That's a very positive interpretation, if I may say so. One of his earlier edits contained "The BBC has come into criticm recently for showing no programming in or about the Scots language the only true native tongue of the South of Scotland". This is not someone reporting facts, it's someone with an agenda. Complaints about Gaelic programming in Scotland are minimal. Certainly the topic does not deserve a whole section to itself just because some anonymous editor has an agenda. Perhaps an aside in another relevant section. If the section survived, it is so spurious in any case, that it probably wouldn't survive the attention of other editors - Calgacus 15:55, 13 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I think that two people have been in violation of Three Revert Rule. This is an edit war, and both sides should be discussing the points here rather than turning the page into a battleground. Notinasnaid 16:10, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
 * I don't think anyone has violated that "rule", and besides, user 81.154.92.125 blurs the line between vandal and non-vandal. - Calgacus 16:16, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

I agree with Calgacus. 81.154.92.125 is simply a vandal who has no aim but to put forth his own agenda with no interest in attempting to support it. He is has also vandalised other articles as you will see if you look through some of his other edits. An Siarach


 * Being a POV pusher is not the same thing as being a vandal, and reverting his edits does not count as reverting "simple vandalism" for purposes of the 3RR. --Angr (t·c) 16:49, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Can we not get this 81.154.92.125 fellow banned? I defy anyone to look through his persistent attacks on this page as well as the idiotic, petulant nonsense (which attempts to be insulting) spouted on the talk pages of myself, calgacus and himself and defend him as a well-meaning contributor.

An Siarach

Pronunciation of the name of the language
This page gives the pronunciation as. Is this meant to be how the native name Gàidhlig is pronounced in Gaelic, or is it meant to be how Gaelic (in the Scottish context) is pronounced in English? If it's the former, I think I've normally seen for the Gaelic à (e.g. on http://www.akerbeltz.org/fuaimean/fuaimreagan.htm, which also doesn't use .  If it's the latter (i.e. it's suggesting that the English word is pronounced like non-rhotic garlic) what's the source?  In my experience it's pronounced either  or  if you're using RP-style transcriptions.


 * My Gaelic teacher got quite het up about this as I remember. (Transcriptions that follow are SSE.) for him meant Irish Gaelic only. Scottish Gaelic was pronounced . I don't think I've ever heard, either in SSE or anns a' Ghàidhlig. I will be bold and change it. Mendor 19:53, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Gàidhlig is pronounced roughly as Gaallick in the language itself.

An Siarach

Sources for Goidelic in Argyll and elsewhere
An Siarach requested a source for these. For the "elsewhere", the only thing I am aware of is Alan Bruford's What happened to the Caledonians ? (in Cowan & McDonald's Alba), where he argues for Q-Celtic in Atholl. I am not an expert, but the premise of the paper seems rather fantastical to me (that it relies on dsA and needs the Caledones to be the northern Picts and the Verturiones the southern ones doesn't help).

That said, Goidelic in Argyll is easier (likewise Wales, parts of sw Scotland and sw England). Specifically for Argyll, Cummins' The Age of the Picts and Campbells Were the Scots Irish ? (Antiquity 75, pp285-292) and Saints and Sea-kings advance the argument. Campbell's Antiquity stuff would be a likely place to start, but I haven't seen it. Forsyth says (Oxford Companion to Scottish History, p378, this published in 2001) that "[t]he origin of the Goidelic/Q-Celtic language is disputed" and proceeds to give the two versions. Price's Languages in Britain & Ireland (2000 ed) gives the invasionist version for Argyll. Magnus Magnusson's history (published 2003) is anti-invasionist and refers to Campbell. Forsyth's chapter of Wormald's Scotland: A History takes the same undecided position as her earlier piece.

I have changed it to Argyll only, mentioned that it is disputed, and removed the ref request.

Angus McLellan 19:16, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

On Scottish vs. Irish Gaelic
(I have copied this discussion here, as it is probably best located on the Gaelic talk page...)

As per our conversations about the point at which Scottish Gaelic shows divergences from Irish, see for example Breandan O'Buachalla, "Common Gaelic Revisited", in Rannsachadh na Gaidhlig 2000, (eds.) Colm O'Baoill and Nancy McGuire, 2002, Celtic Dept of Aberdeen University. Gaelicmichael 14:12, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for that reference; I'll see if I can find it in the library. However, I don't think that one person's paper should outweigh decades of scholarly consensus. By all means add a statement saying "Ó Buachalla (2002) has argued that..." or the like, but the article shouldn't be written in such a way as to suggest that Ó Buachalla's findings have been universally accepted. Angr (talk • contribs) 14:19, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Part of his article is to show that there has never been a consensus on this!! It's more that the domineering personality of Kenneth Jackson created a false sense of agreement. I know about it exactly because everybody in Scotland was talking about it when I was doing post-graduate work in Celtic Studies in Scotland, and that was 6 years ago!  There are other articles covering different aspects of these divergences, but O'Buachalla's is one of the most comprehensive articles to date, and it was close at hand.  But there is no doubt more like this.   Another problem is that because Ireland has had a disproportionately larger and longer influence in the development of Gaelic Studies, it is inherently Hibernocentric and the Scottish element has been underplayed.  But things are starting to change.  Gaelicmichael 20:16, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
 * One thing I'll add is that the Gaelic of eastern Scotland is extinct and has been for about 5 centuries, and almost nothing of it survives; the surviving Gaelic dialects are mostly those which have been subject to continuing Irish influence up until early modern era, so our basis for concluding anything about Scoto-Irish diversion is shaky at best. And Michael, you're absolutely correct, Gaelic studies are horribly Hiberno-centric. For much of the 20th century, the only places you could properly learn Old Irish were Ireland and Germany, and unfortunately the former was going through a period of extreme intellectual nationalism at the time. This has left the field with decades, if not centuries, of rebalancng to do. It's interesting that in the 18th century, many Scottish Gaelic intellectuals thought (and took for granted that) Scotland the source of the Scottish Gaelic language; but in Scotland, intellectual trends were affected by the opposite forces, and scholarship was seriously disabled by anti-Irish, anti-Gaelic, anti-Catholic, anti-Jacobite, (British) imperialist and Germanicist ideology which sought to make Scotland's past as Germanic as possible, and quite happy to discard all Celticness as a horrible Irish import; remember, these people invented the idea (and many high profile scholars genuinely believed) that the Picts were a Gothic tribe which gave birth to Lowland Scots, and that the "Scots" were a temporary imposter race of inferior stock who almost miraculously got control of the country for half a millenium and left their racial dregs in the Highland zone that passed into the 18th and 19th centuries. This has affected the course of studies; e.g. virtually all anthologies of "Scottish" literature before Clancy's Triumph Tree begin in the later middle ages, discarding previous Celtic or Romance literature, and scholars have been trapped with the terms "Old Irish" and "Middle Irish". You're certainly correct that this is changing; Scottish historians tend to use the terms "Old Gaelic" and "Middle Gaelic"; and Bede, with the few tenth century + documents - highly problematic as they are (i.e. a few genealogies, a few poems and a heavily interpolated Dalriadic "survey") - which trace the Scoto-Pictish kings to Ireland (not the people!), used as the basis that Gaelic originates in Ireland, are beginning to pale into insignificance compared with the contemporary Roman sources, archaeological data and placename evidence which contradicts this. Time will only tell though. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 21:32, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I have been drawn to this intriguing discussion. As Wikipedia must be easily understandable to the average reader, two very simple points arise. Was not the name given by the Romans to the people of Ireland the Scotti, and secondly, the Gaels were the inhabitants of Ireland. And of course the Picts were of old Scotland. Does that not make the word Gaelic and the word Irish interchangeable? River run 22:33, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
 * That's a case of inverted class logic: all cats are mammals, therefore all mammals are cats. The Latin word for Irishman is Hibernus, the Latin word for Gael is Scotus. There is no point in history when one can say that the Gaels were confined to Ireland; they're in Argyll as soon as we know anything about Argyll. And if you just had late antique Latin sources, you'd assume the Scoti existed only in Britain, e.g. Ammianus Marcellinus, writing for the year 360 AD: "... In Britain, during Constantius' tenth and Julian's third consulship, the wild tribes of the Scoti and Picti broke their undertaking to keep the peace, laid waste the country near the frontier, and caused alarm among the provincials, who were exhausted by the repeated disasters". (AM 20.1) Britain had only one frontier at this time, Hadrian's Wall. For Ammianus and 4th century Romans, the Scoti were a people who lived to the north of the province, not across the water in Hibernia. That does not mean Gaels come from Scotland, but its reminds us that if you want to make the Gaels originate in Ireland, you basically have to rely on much later, unverifiable sources, and use your imagination. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 22:53, 4 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, the Scoti were raiders from old Ireland, they wouldn't be called Scoti until they had in fact raided, and the object of their raids was of course Britain. The Gaels originally came from old Ireland as did the Gaelic language. The two languages, Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic are too closely linguistically related to have broken apart in the distant past. River run 23:24, 4 April 2006 (UTC)


 * You are reading more than can be read into the word "Scot/i". The fact that there were raiders from Ireland does not mean that "Scot" means "raider" by definition. We in fact do not know exactly what it meant or where it came from. Let me quote from Alex Woolf, 'The "When, Why & Wherefore" of Scotland", History Scotland 2.2 (March/April 2002), which has a discussion of the word and how it came to be used: 'Whatever the origin of the word Scoti meaning 'raiders from Ireland', the term had before long taken on a much wider meaning, and for much of the next six or seven hundred years modern historians translate the Latin word Scotus as 'Irishman'. Once again, it is not as simple as that...  This means that those old confusing stories that 'Scot' used to mean 'Irishman' and 'Scotia' used to mean 'Ireland' are probably wrong and it is far better to think of an early medieval 'Scot' as being a Gael and 'Scotia' being neither Ireland nor Scotland but 'Gaeldom'. This use of 'Scot' to mean Gael continued into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries...'  As to the statement that 'Gaels originally came from old Ireland as did the Gaelic language' - that is an old assumption that is being re-examined, as it ought to. It is certainly accepted that Goidelic is more conservative than Brythonic, so why couldn't have Goidelic been able to be in Scotland before being "imported" from Ireland?  Read more on recent research on how the veneer of standard orthographic/linguistic conventions at an elite level hide the dialectical divergences that were already appearing in the Old Gaelic period. And what do you mean by "Eastern Scottish Gaelic" being dead for centuries??  Gaelic in Aberdeenshire and Eastern Perthshire survived into the 1980s!!  Gaelicmichael 03:04, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I take it the last question was addressed to me. Well, Perthshire and western Aberdeenshire Gaelic may be like the old Gaelic of the actual east coast (excluding Ross, Sutherland, etc), Fife, eastern Aberdeenshire, Angus, Mearns, etc, but we'll never know; if we had these Gaelic dialects from the High Middle Ages, we would definitely be in a better position to comment of diversion. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 13:16, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

On the topic of 'Scoti' and the origin of the name one theory ive read is that it comes from the word 'Sgaothaich' which was (apparently) the native name of the Scoti for themselves. The only place ive found this word used or the theory put forward was in 'Eachdraidh na h-Alba', a book on the history of Scotland from the mid 19th century by an Aonghas Mac Coinnich/Angus MacKenneth. He postulates that Scoti was simply a Latinized rendition of the word 'Sgaothaich' adapted to Latin phonetics. Now as ive said ive not seen this word or the idea behind it put forward anywhere else (and so its fairly safe to assume its not valid) but i am curious as to whether or not any of you have come across this or something similar. An Siarach


 * Please read the article by Woolf referenced above for this!Gaelicmichael 12:54, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I seriously do think it's more about national pride. The Picts left us very little or nothing and all we have really is Gaelic. The English dominated us for a long long time, so we have to claim something of our own. What else do we really have? 216.86.153.120 15:14, 5 April 2006 (UTC)


 * This is a very important link, and should be preserved. Can't see what the problem is. River run 22:21, 5 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree. The link is entirely pertinent, very important and should be maintained regardless of how one feels regarding the common classification of 'Old Gaelic' as 'Old Irish'. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by An Siarach (talk • contribs) 10:33, 6 April 2006  (UTC)

What Scottish Gaelic descends from
Michael, it is uncontroversial that Scottish Gaelic descends from the language commonly referred to as Old Irish. If that name strikes you as being "Hibernocentric", it doesn't change the facts. Perhaps "Old Goidelic" or "Old Gaelic" would have been a better name for the language, but those names are not the ones in common use. It's exactly parallel to saying that Scots is derived from Old English -- maybe that name seems to "give unwarranted geographic primacy to England" to you, but the fact remains "Old English" is what the language is called nowadays. Angr (talk • contribs) 14:35, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Im also of the mindset that the naming of Old Gaelic as Old Irish is hibernocentric and ideally the former would be the more common term used but as Angr points out Old Irish is the term most commonly used and thats that. I do disagree with the parallel drawn between the situation with Old English though. Old English was spoken by the English people - whether they lived in England or Scotland that is what they were and how they classed themselves and English ( or whatever equivalent spelling they had at the time) is what they called their language. The term 'Old English' is just as accurate and neutral as 'Old Gaelic' would be and both are more accurate terms respectively than 'Old Irish' which is essentially misleading and based upon an exonymic term never used by speakers of that language to refer to themselves or to their language. An Siarach

It is important to avoid using Irish when referring to the Gaelic language and culture in Scotland. Irish implies something foreign which is an anathema to the true inheritors of Caledonia. 84.135.220.237 18:49, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Let me reiterate two points: (1) It is already stated in the wiki entry that "Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic are all members of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages." That is as concise as we need to be, and about as much consensus as exists in the field of scholarship about relationships. To state further that they all derive directly from Old Gaelic/Irish cannot be sustained without debate. (2) The genetic model of direct derivation from Old Gaelic/Irish is oversimplified; not only do we see dialectal differences by the Old Gaelic/Irish period, but there are also features in Northern Gaelic that closely resemble Brythonic. Whether this is due to substratum interference or to independent dialectical divergences is not yet clear. But again, to claim that Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic derive directly from Old Gaelic/Irish ignores significant complications such as this. I thus stand by my position that the statement ought to be removed, not merely on the grounds of geo-politics or identity politics, but because the history of the language really is more complicated than the labels let on. Gaelicmichael 13:25, 6 April 2006 (UTC)


 * It's a pretty bewildering idea that Gaelic in Ireland and Gaelic in Scotland developed separately into a convergent language, it would fit quite nicely into the theory of parallel universes. From my studies, during the times of no books, no newspapers, no TV ect languages diverged pretty rapidly. Just take English as a simple example and how it has changed this last 1000 years. I really think that you are into pseudo history to dismiss the common roots of the language. River run 13:50, 6 April 2006 (UTC)


 * There are sound changes like /θ/ > /h/ and /ð/ > that (1) are present in all modern Goidelic languages, (2) could not have happened earlier than Middle Irish, and (3) are phonologically too peculiar to have happened in separate languages independently. To me this basically proves that Scots Gaelic, Manx, and Irish did not diverge significantly from each other until after this sound change, which can have been no earlier than about the eleventh century. Angr (talk • contribs) 14:14, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

River run and Angr, could you two please stop letting facts get in the way of a good article. 84.135.221.253 15:04, 6 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Good point there! This situation not to allow the phrase Old Irish or Middle Irish onto the Scottish pages really is more akin to POV and it's setting a new standard which I hope others wont follow. Very very disappointing!  The conclusion of this logic is that the likes of User:Calgacus should not be editing Old Irish or Middle Irish pages.  Not a healthy development! -- River run 23:26, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

All the different POVs should be most welcome, and then a consensus reached. Bel air 00:16, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Don't let the similarities between Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic lull you into concluding that they probably have a common ancestor. The fact is that after man started building the Tower of Babel God prevented this project from succeeding by confusing man's languages so that each spoke a different language and then scattered the builders to different parts of Earth. Those speaking Irish ended up in Ireland and those speaking Scottish Gaelic ended up in Scotland.
 * The similarities in the Swadesh list and the use of a form of Middle Irish, known as  'Classical Gaelic', as a literary language in Ireland until the 17th century and in Scotland until the 18th century are just pure coincidence.
 * There is no reason why User:Calgacus shouldn't edit Old Irish or Middle Irish pages if knowledge of the subject is at him.
 * 84.135.255.115 12:23, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * QuoteThere is no reason why User:Calgacus shouldn't edit Old Irish or Middle Irish pages if knowledge of the subject is at him. Unquote Yes I totally and absolutely agree with you. But if User:Calgacus believes that Old Irish and Middle Irish have no connection with Gaelic spoken in Scotland and User:Calgacus has never studied Irish, Old Irish or Middle Irish then that would be very debatable! I see that User:Calgacus does in fact edit Old Irish or/and Middle Irish pages. This is all based on User:Gaelicmichael and User:Calgacus not connection theory, of course! River run 13:41, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I do not argue nor even do I believe that Gaelic does not come from Ireland, neither do I object to the terms "Old Irish" and "Middle Irish". You are totally misrepresenting me; I'm merely pointing out that the reasons for believing this are highly dubious, and that the terms Old Irish and Middle Irish are the modern inventions of hibernocentric scholars. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 16:26, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Hibernocentric, it was that word that led my interest to this subject in the first instance. It's a word I had never heard of before, and that was part of my fascination with this subject. Some interesting questions arise about this word and it's use. Is it pejorative? Is it a word used to marginalise others? Is it a blame word? Is it an excuse word? Is it cover all our explanitions word? Not sure if I like this word, it doesn't explain anything and yet seems to get used where there seems to be lack of substance. Interesting word is hibernocentric. Slainte River run 22:26, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree with the above sentiment. Hibernocentric is usually used in a pejorative fashion to dismiss certain aspects of Gaelic language history. Actually it more often reveals more about the user of the word and 'generally' it shouldn't be used in any serious study.  It's somewhat akin to complaining that the history of the origins of French is a bit too much Francocentered, or of Latin, Romacentered. Best done without. - MacPhersonAndy 12:13, 8 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Hibernocentric is just an anglo-latin compound that means "Ireland centered"; as Gaelic has always been spoken in both Scotland and Ireland since records began, and as "Irish" was never the word used by speakers of Goidelic languages to refer to their language (it's interesting that early Gaelic speakers borrowed a Brythonic word rather than their own word for "Irish"), the terms "Old Irish" and "Middle Irish" are by definition Hibernocentric. No-one denies that Irish Gaelic is the ancient language of Ireland, and all the ancient Irish, but that doesn't mean Gaelic speakers in Scotland are "Irish" too. Even Irish historians, such as Seán Duffy, admit early 20th century Gaelic studies are Ireland-centric to the detriment of Scottish Gaelic studies, it's not really a controversial statement. It's only pejorative if the speaker is ravingly anti-Irish, or the listener is extremely paranoid or defensively POV. And BTW, almost no Scottish historian ever uses the word "Irish" to desribe the medieval Gaelic language. While some will call the language of, say, Áedan mac Gabráin, "Irish", no-one would ever call the language of King Máel Coluim II or Earl Ferchar of Ross "Irish" - it's simply Gaelic. So because "Old Irish" and "Middle Irish" are accepted linguistic terms for the languages as languages, it doesn't follow that one can go around medieval Scottish articles replacing "Gaelic" with "Irish". Editing articles like these and replacing Gaelic with Irish is just POV spam. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 12:34, 8 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Sorry, maybe I have lost the plot, or else the page has lost the plot. I thought this discussion was about getting the link to Old Irish back onto the Scottish Gaelic language page.  Probably a bit too Hibernocentric according to Gaelicmichael, whatever he means! The nub of the problem here is thus - is the the Scottish Gaelic language open to all contributors or does one have to pass the anti-Hibernocentric test first. - MacPhersonAndy 13:09, 8 April 2006 (UTC)


 * If that's what this discussion about, then I've lost track; I'm just dealing with the subissues which come up. Users can be as Hibernocentric as they like, it's Hibernocentric edits people might object to. I don't see anything wrong with the link to Old Irish being there (I myself have put Old Irish links in loads of Scottish articles), although GaelicMichael should be free to add a subclause stating the complications of the issue. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 15:00, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

People would do well to read more attentively. At no point does Calgacus question the connection between Old and Middle Irish and Gaelic in Scotland. The point, however, is that these terms are - despite having the weight of popular use behind them - misleading and less accurate than equivalent terms which designate the same language such as Old or Middle Gaelic. The nuances of history in the British Isles has left us with a situation where the older forms of Gaelic are referred to as 'Irish' which is somewhat akin to referring to all historical variants of the Romance languages as forms of Italian.An Siarach.


 * The same nuances of history in the British Isles has left us with a situation where the older forms of Lowland Scots are referred to as 'Middle English' and not Old Scots. Probably just the Anglo-centric nature of those who write about such things;-)
 * 84.135.242.177 18:15, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * To be frank, I'm not into this subject in a big way, and thought to tease out the arguments for and against. Interesting debate, learnt a lot! River run 14:15, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Neither do I deny a close connection between the various forms of Goidelic spoken throughout the British Isles. Please read a little more carefully what I've written, and look up the references provided. Similar phonetic developments do not necessarily mean that there was a single language throughout which the changes propagated; it could merely mean that there was a pan-Gaelic elite (or other similar social channels) through which certain changes came. Neither does this preclude the simultaneous existence and continued divergence of other linguistic features.  You can hardly study Scottish Gaelic and Munster Irish, for example, without being overwhelmed by the differences.  A quote, for example, from Roibeard O Maolalaigh, 'The Development of Eclipses in Gaelic', in Scottish Language 14/15 (1995/6): 'The present paper argues quite forcibly against the theory of Common Gaelic, as it implies a significant split between Gaelic dialects in the matter of eclipses at an early stage, presumably during the Old Irish period itself.'  An even more useful article (in its breadth) by the same author on this topic is 'Place-names as a Resource for the Historical Linguist' in (ed.) Simon Taylor, The Uses of Place-Names (1998). Gaelicmichael 22:44, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

The older forms of Lowland Scots are Middle English. As has been pointed out those who spoke it were English, referred to themselves as English and referred to their language as English. Lowland Scots 'became' Scots when its speakers started to refer to it as such(and themselves as such lets not forget) rather than as English and to retrospectively confer the status of 'Old Scots' on the forms of English whch preceded it makes no sense. The situation is not analoguous to that of Gaelic and its speakers where the most common term used to refer to its ancestral forms is misleading and innacurate ( and most importantly, based upon an exononym the speakers never used to refer to themselves or their language) - unlike the situation with Scots and its ancestral forms where they are referred to by a term which states perfectly accurately what they were and is based upon what they were called by those who spoke them. An Siarach


 * Fair point, so assumedly Lowland Scots first became Scots when its speakers started referring to it as such. Seems a bit disingenous, Scottish English would seem more accurate. Then again how could it be Scottish if its English? Intererestingly over in Ireland the Gaels there prefer that their Gaelic dialects, which they refer to as Gaeilge, are referred to by the exononym Irish because Gaelic suggests that the language is as distant and unrelated to modern Irish life whereas Irish indicates that it is and should be the proper national language of the Irish people. All very confusing. :-/
 * 84.135.242.146 12:02, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

TBH if you were to objectively name Lowland Scots it would be referred to as the 'Anglo-Scots' language/Old Scottish English or something similar to avoid any ambiguity or possible misinterpretation but Scots is what it has been named by its speakers. "How could it be Scottish if its English?" It is Scottish as it is of Scotland and unique to that country but it is not the Scottish language. Im aware of the situation in Ireland where people are quite likely to be offended if you were to refer to Gaeilge as Gaeilge rather than as 'Irish'. Indeed this nationalist feeling/backlash has led to the rather chauvinistic classing of all Gaelic languages and dialects as dialects of Irish - search on Amazon and youl find books dealing with dialects of Scottish Gaelic in places like Kintyre etc which are part of a series of books called "Irish language: Scottish dialects" - quite infuriating for those of us who are not Irish ; can you imagine the outroar if the Italians had the gall to class early, medieval or even modern Spanish/French/Portugese/Romanian as dialects of Italian? Given the pro-Irish/anti-English feeling which often surrounds the language and its support/propagation i do find it quite ironic that they base its promotion upon an exonym gifted by the very language/people they try to distance themselves from. An Siarach

An Siarach, some books have unfortunate names, I agree, and titles can be more infuriating than the contents! About exonym, when one is speaking Irish, ta siad ag labhairt as Gaeilge(they are speaking Irish), basically it's called Irish or less often Gaelic when one is speaking English and Gaeilge when one is speaking Irish. If one is speaking English then the Gaeilge is referred as Irish. You should try something similar in Scotland. (confused!) - Dia ár gcumhdach! An-gabhar 09:18, 10 April 2006 (UTC) Just to add something here, I believe here in Ireland Gaeilge is a translation of the word Irish and visa versa regardless of academic arguements of the origin of the word, as all words must have an origin somewhere, so it follows that any derivative of the word Gael..... in it's various forms would refer back to the original word. An-gabhar 12:11, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Oh come on. The Irish word for "Irish" is Éireannach, Gaeilge/Gaelach is "Gaelic" (e.g. Gaeilge na hAlban). My understanding is that the latter is almost certainly a borrowing from a medieval Welsh or Pictish word meaning "foreigner". "Irish" is firmly an exonym; in medieval Latin they maintained the same differentiation, Irish is Hibernus and Gaelic is Scotus; by the Anglo-Norman period, Scotus was still used to mean Gaelic (in Ireland as well as Scotland), but increasingly meant just Scottish Gaelic, so Lingua Hibernica became more common to describe Irish Gaelic than Lingua Scotica. But the actual Gaelic word(s) for the language(s) was the same then as now. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 12:22, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

That's why I said, I believe in Ireland, Scotland might differ on this one as scholars say language diverged circa 1000 years ago. An-gabhar 13:16, 10 April 2006 (UTC)


 * So, if Gaeilge really is a translation of "Irish", does Gaeltacht then mean Ireland? We would then have Gaeltachtaí meaning "Irelands". :) - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 13:39, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Rightly or wrongly, na Gaeil translate to the Irish in the Irish language, maybe that's what 1000 years of seperation does. My focus is that Scottish Gaelic should just be called Scottish, just like Spanish-Italian is called just Spanish, Portuguese-Italian simply called Portuguese etc, just like Irish Gaelic. Adding the the word Gaelic after the word Scottish should/maybe be taken as superflorous. An-gabhar 15:09, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

People simply would not accept popular reference to Gàidhlig as (the) Scottish in Scotland - centuries of lies, propaganda,pseudo-history and racism have seen to that and it would take decades of promoting Scottish history ( something our government is utterly loath to do ) to create the kind of knowledgeable atmosphere where the status of Gàidhlig might be accepted and even then many, if not most, would reject it. With regard to the use of Gaeilge/Irish in their respective languages in Ireland i can fully sympathise with the feeling behind this fear of having the status of the language eroded or taken away - no (historically aware) speaker of Scottish Gaelic could fail to sympathise as this erosion/disassocation of status is what happened to our language courtesy of the English speaking population of our country. An Siarach


 * I don't doubt the presence of "lies, propaganda, pseuo-history and racism" in this debate, but there are stronger reasons for why 'Scottish' would be an inappropriate name for Scottish Gaelic. Chief among these is that even if there were a period in which Gaelic was the majority language of what is now Scotland, it could only have been for a relatively short period in the history of the nation. As such, Gaelic has a very weak claim to being the national language, a claim that the use of the word 'Scottish' would confer.--Nmcmurdo 00:35, 19 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Whether or not Gaelic was the majority language for a single year or a thousand doesnt really have any bearing on its status and the tired old claim that this period of majority, which cannot reasonably be doubted as having occured, was for a very short period of time is tied in with a misunderstanding which accords far too great an importance to the language of the aristocracy in certain regions as inherently showing the language of the region as being the same and various other outdated historical views. Gaelic is the language of the original Scots, the language which defined them, and it was these same Scots who founded Scotland and for whom the north of Britain was named Scotland. Without the Scots/Gaelic speakers there would be no such thing as a Scotland or Scottish people. Gaelic has neither a 'strong' or a 'weak' claim to being the Scottish language anymore than English has a 'strong' claim or otherwise to being the English language ; it simply is the Scottish language and nothing can change this undeniable fact, regardles of how badly the adherants of various forms of English in Scotland might wish otherwise - the historical facts relevant to this question are not in doubt. siarach 11:47, 19 September 2006 (UTC)


 * These are very weak arguments. The same faulty reasoning would lead us to the “undeniable fact” that the West Germanic ‘Old Frankish’ is the national language of France. Scottish Gaelic is essentially regional language of the North-West that for a relatively short period of Scottish history had a more widespread geographic influence (particularly on placenames). Given the rich multilingual history of Scotland, I don’t think any language has a claim to the term ‘Scottish’.--Nmcmurdo 12:06, 19 September 2006 (UTC)


 * "Very weak" is an interesting way of describing a list of historical facts which are irrefutable. I am not familiar enough with the more intimate details of early French history to go into any elaborate discussion with regard to it but there i do know that the situation with regard to France is not the same as that regarding the Scots. Whether or not Scotland has a "rich multilingual history" or not ( find me a region which does not) is utterly irrelevant - does the existence of Old Welsh and Latin and the later introduction of Norman French and Danish in what would become England affect the status of English as the English language? Of course it doesnt. The language which is ancestral to the Scottish people, the language which defined them/which named them as such and the language of these same people who founded the Scottish nation is of course the Scottish language - there is absolutely no ambiguity over this progression of facts. You can dispute the status of Gaelic as the Scottish language or even the existence of any Scottish language but you cannot do so without rendering the very idea of any language holding any such status anywhere as something fairly ridiculous and ephemeral and ive yet to encounter any of anti-Gaelic (usually pro-English) antagonists who debate this issue who maintain the slightest consistency with regard to applying their rationale outwith the Scottish microcosm which is hardly surprising as their arguments rarely have a foot to stand on. Nations (in particular those with pre-modern era roots) are/were defined by a people, not the other way around. Scotland is no exception to this, as painful as this fact obviously is to many who wish to ignore the historical status of the Gaelic language..siarach 12:27, 19 September 2006 (UTC)


 * As you are well aware, the case for Scottish Gaelic to be renamed ‘Scottish’ cannot rest simply on a “list of historical facts”! I am not disputing the facts (those being that Scotland is named after the Scots; and that the Scots spoke Gaelic). I am instead saying that your case for Gaelic to be renamed ‘Scottish’ rests either upon an eccentric definition of ‘Scottish’, or that the argument is a non-sequitur.


 * Defining Scottish as ‘of the (Dalriada) Scots’, where Scots refers specifically to the original Goidelic settlers of Dalriada, has to be regarded as eccentric. Today most people use Scottish to mean ‘of (the country we now call) Scotland’ – certainly that is how the ascription of the term ‘Scottish’ to Gaelic would be regarded. To do so on the basis of the former definition would be thoroughly misleading.


 * But if we take Scottish to mean ‘of Scotland’ rather than ‘of the Scots’, your conclusion simply does not follow from its premises, unless we equate the history of the Scots with the history of Scotland, which is surely invalid. The country founded by Kenneth MacAlpin in 848 was very different territorially from what we now call Scotland (for example, most of today’s Scottish population do not live in that area). That these Gaelic-speaking people eventually gave their name to a country we would now recognise reflected that they were first to ‘unify’ the land. However, shortly after this unification, Gaelic declined in usage and importance for Scotland as a whole. Gaelic was thus the dominant language (it may even never have been spoken by the majority) of Scotland (as contrasted with the Scots) for a relatively short period of time.


 * Comparison with French and English is instructive. The Franks gave their name to France, but the national language is French, which owes much more to Latin than it does to Frankish. Similarly, whilst English has followed a complicated path, even Old English owed far more to the West Saxon influence (after the formation of Wessex) than it did to the Angles. If we were use your system of “undeniable facts” to establish the national languages of France and England, the former would still be called French but would be de facto ‘Old Frankish’, and the latter would be de facto what we now call English, but renamed ‘West Saxon’! --Nmcmurdo 17:33, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

An interesting set of "arguments" as every one falls into the traps or fallacies/bigotries i had previously described. The arguments i have put forward stand and i defy anyone to argue against them while maintaining a consistent stance with regard to the history and/or perception of any other nation of a similar nature to Scotland in the world. An Siarach 01:48, 25 September 2006 (UTC)


 * "So, if Gaeilge really is a translation of "Irish", does Gaeltacht then mean Ireland? We would then have Gaeltachtaí meaning "Irelands" (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ). Surely Gaeltacht is simply a word denoting an area where Irish is spoken. Gaeltachtaí meaning areas where Irish is spoken.
 * 84.135.215.60 15:01, 11 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Exactly. Just one of the problems with pretending that Gael and Irish are interchangable. Don't know either what Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington would have thought of being called collectively na Gaeil. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ)

Is it a problem though? A Gael would refer to an Irish-speaker. "Na Gaeil" would imply that the afore mentioned chaps were Irish-speakers. Irish generally means an Irish person, the use of Irish for the language is usually clear from context. 84.135.202.217 13:51, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

There is a serious difficulty with Scottish Gaelic studies, which I've at least alluded to in my wiki entries, a sociological problem. There has historically been a huge imbalance between the number of Irish speakers vs. Scottish Gaelic speakers, with that order of magnitude being reflected in the number of scholars engaged in linguistic and literary research. There is a paltry number of active Scottish Gaelic scholars, clearly few of them (who are severely overworked) have time to be engaged in WikiPedia entries.

Beyond that, with the severance of the pan-Gaelic world in the 17th century, each side (Scotland and Ireland) became more provencial and inward looking. The Irish nationalist movement, which had from its late-nineteenth century inception a notion of Gaelic Ireland, had out of necessity, to take an "integral island" approach, which further estranged itself from the pan-Gaelic perspective.

With Ireland free and Celtic Studies there really reaching maturity, scholars are doing great work re-examining old assumptions, but Scotland is hardly a priority. Fortunately, since the 1990s Scotland is also seeing a renaissance in historical and linguistic scholarship, but it is still quite small in scale and inadequately funded. Those who are engaged are quite overworked, and the general public in Scotland is quite mixed in its reception to the notion of Celts and the Gaelic language throughout Scotland -- which is not surprising given centuries of anti-Gaelic propaganda. It will take years yet for the state of the art research to reach print and trickle down.

I do not, nor have I ever, claimed that there is no close historical connection between Gaelic Scotland and Ireland. Indeed, such sea-linked cultural exchanges (esp during the Lordship of the Isles) were crucial in keeping Gaelic culture vibrant and sustainable over centuries in all the islands. The problem that I have is in the assertion that all Scottish Gaelic culture or language is directly derived from any one form of Irish. While the majority of documentary material that survives is from the elite, where the Hibernocentric perspective is strongest, there is plenty of evidence of independent cultural production in Gaelic Scotland -- Fenian ballads composed in Scotland that travelled to Ireland, for example.

For more on the nuances of and problems with the pan-Gaelic approach in the medieval period, see Wilson McLeod, 2004, Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland 1200-1650, Oxford University Press. I've given references galore to current research, done by the few authorities actually doing the work about the evolution of Goidelic languages and cultures, so if you're not current enough on this work to maintain a reasonable discussion about it, you can get off your duff and learn something new. Gaelicmichael 13:40, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Added IPA to phrases
Just to let everyone know that I replaced the horrid pseudo-English "phonetics" in the phrases section with IPA. I;m not an IPA expert, but I transcribed the way I pronounce those phrases as best I could. Of course there are other ways of pronouncing them ([laʰt̪] instead of [lɛʰt̪], [ʃiv] instead of [ʃu], etc.) so if anyone has strong feeling for or against a certain pronunciation I don't mind edits.

I intend, during the course of the coming weeks, to rework the pronunciation and orthography sections, which could IMO be much improved. I also want to put up a much more detailed grammar section, but I am thinking that as the article is so long already, it would be better to create a new main article "Scottish Gaelic Grammar". Hopefully there are no objections to that. Callanish 14:41, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I like the idea of splitting the article/creating a seperate one for Grammer. An Siarach
 * Good job on the IPA! I kept telling myself I was going to get around to that someday, but I never did. A separate article on grammar would be okay, maybe even better would be two separate articles, one on Scottish Gaelic morphology and one on Scottish Gaelic syntax. (For a parallel case, see Irish morphology and Irish syntax; there's also Welsh morphology but no Welsh syntax article yet.) Angr (talk • contribs) 14:53, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Various questions/responses
Please forgive the creation of a new thread for what properly belongs under other threads above, but I'm new to Wikipedia and I can only see an "add new" tab; I can't figure out how to add to an existing thread. If anyone could tell me how I'd be grateful.

Re: Old Irish: I agree that Gaelic studies in general have been, and remain, very Hibernocentric, and that Old Gaelic (and Middle Gaelic, Early Modern Gaelic, etc.) is a better name for the earlier stages of the language than Old Irish, etc.; indeed the former was the preferred term used in the Celtic department at my university (Univ. of Aberdeen) when I was doing my Gaelic Studies degree. However, having said that, regardless of one's *personal* academic or political opinion, the fact is that the terms Old Irish, etc. are currently more widely used and more widely recognised. I think the best thing to do is to say Old Irish (or Middle Irish, whatever period is being referred to) and add a remark somewhere (following, or in the Old Irish article to which it links, perhaps) that some scholars, primarily Scottish Gaelic scholars, prefer the names Old Gaelic, etc., perhaps explaining why it is preferable, and leave it at that.

Likewise, regarding the history of Gaelic, as far as am aware, the following remain the generally accepted theories, or as one user above put it, "decades of scholarly consensus": 1. Modern Scottish Gaelic is, like modern Irish and Manx, a direct descendant of Old Irish/Gaelic, through Middle Irish/Gaelic and Early Modern Irish/Gaelic. 2. Scottish Gaelic was brought to Scotland around the 5th century AD by settlers/invaders/etc. from northern Ireland, by way of Argyll and Dal Riata 3. Western Gaelic (Irish) split off developmentally from Eastern Gaelic (Scottish and Manx) circa the 13th century, and Scottish Gaelic and Manx then split off from each other around the 15th century.

Now apparently there is recent research challenging some or all of these points. This is good. (I have Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig, so I'll look up the O'Buachalla article that gaelicmichael mentioned). However, these dissenting opinions are not yet in general acceptance as far as I can tell, and certainly not in general circulation (otherwise I'm pretty confident I would have heard about them before now). So I really think that we are bound in the interest of good scholarship to put forth the conventional, accepted theories first, and then say that "recent research has challenged this", "however, scholar X has put forth the theory that...", and so on, and provide note numbers and references in a bibliography section at the end of the article (the article currently has no bibliography at all!)

The whole history section of the article, and its edits, smacks strongly of political agendas being pushed, which is really inappropriate (but unfortunately easily done!) in a forum like Wikipedia.

I would also like to ask for bibliographical references in regard to the so-called "Lowland Gaelic" (as distinct from Highland Gaelic = Scottish Gaelic) mentioned in the final paragraph in the history section, as this language seems to have passed entirely unnoticed through four years of classes, reading and research in Gaelic Studies at university, and all subsequent "keep-up" reading I've done in the general area over the last 7-8 years. Callanish 15:25, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Callanish, the way to add a comment to the same thread is to click on the small word "edit" on the right side next to the heading of the thread you want to respond to. That opens up just that one thread. You can also click "edit this page" at the top and that will open the entire page to editing and you can add your comments wherever you like.
 * I agree with you that it's important to keep political agendas out of linguistics articles while still maintaining NPOV and being sure modern research isn't ignored. I don't have any sources for Lowland Gaelic, but there is an article Galwegian Gaelic which may take you further. Angr (talk • contribs) 15:45, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
 * PS. See also User:Calgacus/Archive I for a conversation between Calgacus and me regarding Galwegian Gaelic. Angr (talk • contribs) 15:51, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I too have never heard of the term "Lowland Gaelic" (I've never much encountered the term "Highland Gaelic" either); Gaelic dialects are classified according to country (e.g. Scottish, Irish and Manx) without much reference to comprehensibiity factors, and dialects of Scottish Gaelic which survived long enough to be recorded are classified according to region (e.g. Perthshire, Easter Ross, etc), not according to Highland-Lowland. The latter terminology would be useless in any case, as the concept of Highlands and Lowlands are constructs of the later middle ages and early modern period, and would have been meaningless to anyone before that date (they are irrelevant today too). In the case of Galwegian Gaelic, it is historically impossible to attribute its spread to either Dalriada, the Kingdoms of the Picts or the Kingdom of the Scots, since Galloway did not come under the control of Scotland until the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and must have been of direct Irish or Norse-Gaelic origin. Therefore, calling it a dialect of "Scottish Gaelic" is purely political. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 16:20, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Gaelic as a majority language in Scotland?
The text refers to Gaelic becoming the majority language of Scotland. This seems difficult to verify. Even if it were the case it seems likely that it could only have been for a short historical period - at most the two centuries following the late 11 century, but most probably much shorter given the continued presence of English / Scots in Lothian, and the administrative events following William's arrival in Scotland. Further, Old Norse would likely be prevalent in the North East and perhaps some of the Isles.--Nmcmurdo 00:03, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

The Government has wasted Millions of pounds in thirty plus years promoting this dead language. Every census shows that less and less people speak Gaelic and it has reduced to the level that more people go to an old firm game.

Holden 27

Well, expect a lot more money to be wasted if we're stupid enough to elect that bunch of reactionary farmers and their 18th century mentality next year! --Nmcmurdo 18:40, 17 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Gaelic was almost certainly the majority language of "Scotland" from the early middle ages until about 1500, roughly the beginning of the early modern era (though there is no way of proving that directly, you can't prove anything like that directly); ceasing to be the only language of the court after the accession of David I in 1124 does not mean it went into decline amongst the general population of the Lowlands (excluding Galloway and Carrick, not even 1/3rd of the Scottish landmass) outside Lothian; place-name and other evidence suggests that this did not begin to happen until at least the later 1200s). Regarding the other point, the money of course is not necessarily wasted; this is like saying hospitals are a waste of money because everyone is going to die anyway. Everything is a waste of money with that mindset. Regards. Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 21:14, 17 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I think we need to judge the penetration of a language by the number of speakers, rather than coverage of "landmass"! (unless perhaps sheep and bracken were fluent Gaelic speakers...) But frivolity aside, I'm interested in your view that Gaelic was the majority language in the early Middle Ages. What does research say about this? During much of this period 'Scotland' had at least four, possibly five (I understand we don't know much about 'Pictish'!), languages. The others must have been very small if Gaelic were really spoken by the majority. I don't doubt there was probably a period in the High Middle Ages when Gaelic was the majority language., although 1500 seems extraordinarily late.--Nmcmurdo 22:18, 17 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Well all of Scotland was sparsely populated in the middle ages; the idea that the highlands is empty is purely the result of modern population trends. Half of Scotland's population now lives within a few miles of Glasgow, but in the 18th century half of Scotland's population still lived north of the river Tay. Anyways, there's no direct way of assessing how much was spoken where and when. Most historians imply that Gaelic was prolly the majority language by 900; but to me it isn't that clear that the evidence allows us to tell what the difference between Gaelic and Pictish actually was; modern Scottish "Gaelic" words like Srath, Inbhir, Beinn as well as medieval "Scottish" words like aber, pett, mormaer, etc, do not exist in Irish and can only be explained by a "Pictish" inheritance. Whatever Pictish was, it was probably similar enough to Irish to converge into the "lingua scotica" (which we now styled "Gaelic") of the high and later middle ages. But there can be absolutely no doubt that in the mid-12th century languages other than Gaelic in "Scotland" are confined to far north-east (i.e. easter Caithness) and the far south-east. In David I's reign, there are a large number of landlords and priests settled in the English-speaking lands of "Lothian" (e.g. Midlothian, East Lothian, Peebles-shire, etc) - these guys disappear by the 13th century, but the "Gaelic" society of the Scottish Lowlands north of the Forth seems still to be fully in tact at the highest levels in the mid-13th century. With great earldoms like Fife, Strathearn and Mar in Gaelic hands way into the 14th century, with somewhere between a third and a quarter of the Scottish population behind the highland line even in the 18th century, adding the vastness of Galloway and Carrick into the equation, it's very difficult to argue that English could have become a majority language significantly before 1500, if even then. You could say that this is all speculation, but equally saying that English was the majority language before 1500 is also speculation and happens to be based on even less evidence. Regards, Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 22:57, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

School in Glasgow?
This article says in the Official recognition:


 * The first solely Gaelic medium secondary school will open in Glasgow in 2005 (several Gaelic medium primary schools and partially Gaelic medium secondary schools already exist).

2005 in over, does anyone know whether the school was indeed opened?--Amir E. Aharoni 07:38, 9 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Err im pretty sure it has been but dont quote me on that. An Siarach


 * I'm editing to include Sgoil Ghaidhlig Ghlaschu, hope it's right.--Amir E. Aharoni 14:36, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

Confirmed Sockpuppetry
It has been discovered on WP:RFCU that, , , ,  , , and  are all socks. has been engaging in sockpuppetry to further the wikipedian strength of his POV on this and other pages. All except Bluegold have been permanently blocked, and Bluegold himself has been blocked for 24 hours. Moreover, is a suspected sock, but may be just, if Bluegold was telling the truth on the investigation page, Bluegold's work colleague trying to help him out. - Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 20:05, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Unclear phrase
While editing I came across this phrase...

Using the spelling rule, it is sometimes unclear whether a vowel has been introduced for its own pronunciation or for its effect upon a consonant.

and this embedded comment (left by someone who presumably hadn't discovered talk pages):

''What was here didn't make any sense. Can someone provide an example of what's being talked about?''

I replaced the phrase with one which I hope is a bit clearer, and I think has the same meaning, but as the original phrase was rather unclear it's hard to be certain.

Where pairs of vowels occur in writing, it is sometimes unclear which vowel is to be pronounced and which vowel has been introduced to satisfy this spelling rule.

This is certainly my experience as someone who attempts to pronounce Gaelic names with very little knowledge of the language, whether or not it's what the original author meant! But an example and/or further rephrasing would still be welcome. Blisco 19:30, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Regional variations
One of the problems I have had in learning Gaelic is that different native speakers have such diverse pronunciations of basic phonemes, including wide differences in patterns of consonant dropping. This article gives quite a good introduction to the pronunciation of the language beginners ought to learn, but possibly suggests that there is a greater degree of standardisation than in fact pertains. At any rate, I have searched the web in vain for a good explanation of what pronunciation features are typical of which islands, and would be very grateful if someone could summarise the issue here. --Doric Loon 16:16, 20 May 2006 (UTC)


 * This probably complicates things rather than helps, but on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, the claim is that the Gaelic spoken near Christmas Island and Iona is 'Barra' Gaelic (after the island), whereas the Gaelic spoken near Mabou is 'Lochaber' Gaelic -- in each case the early Gaelic settlers were from the given area. I know that's true for some of my ancestors who lived in Mabou, but I'm not competent to say what the variations are.  Possibly sources would be the Gaelic College in St. Ann's or St. Francis Xavier U. in Antigonish, N.S.


 * Similarly, L with a broad vowel is often pronounced like English W (e.g., in a song from the mid-1800s, widely-know in Cape Breton, chi mi Ceap Breatuinn, mo luaidh); this is reportedly called the "Eigg cluck," says Scottish Gaelic in Canada. — OtherDave 15:34, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Current distribution in Scotland
The map seems to indicate a concentration of Gaelic speakers in the Borders in an area bordering on Dumfries and Galloway representig some 2 to 4 percent of the Borders' population. If this is taken to be 109,270 then at 2 percent there should be some 2185 Gaelic speakers in the area marked on the map. Is this because of some kind of New Age neo-Celtic commune in the area or a village of native speakers using an inherited community language? Similarly with the concentration in East Ayrshire, population 119,720, which at 2 percent would represent some 2394 Gaelic speakers and a small area in Moray, population 87,720 which at 2 percent would represent some 1754 Gaelic speakers. Or is the map just Banff and Macduff? 84.135.220.246 18:44, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't the map was done on that scale. It seems to have been done by council ward or unit of similar size. For the two southern areas in question, which aren't very densely populated, it may be nothing more than 50-100 people who put the Gaelic population above 2%. Calgacus (ΚΑΛΓΑΚΟΣ) 19:48, 26 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I see said the blind man who walked into the lampost. The coloured areas indicate that in those particular locations there are 2-4 percent Gaelic speakers present. It would still be interesting to know whether these assumed 50-100 people are a cluster of native speakers using an inherited community language, Gaelic speaking incomers or enthusiatic learners or a combination of all three. Perhaps it was simply an occurrence of the Jedi census phenomenon. 84.135.220.246 11:46, 27 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I made the map considering Civil Parishes, a concrete area type that allows the comparison of results all throughout the 20th Century (because the census has always considered it and results are always available for this area size). If you have any curiosity, this map is directly comparable to those published by Kenneth MacKinnon for the years 1891 and 1981 in http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/SESLL/STELLA/STARN/lang/GAELIC/figure47.htm. The reduction of Gaelic speakers throughout the years is sadly evident all throughout the land.
 * The map has been made considering all the data that the "General Register Office for Scotland" has published in the website www.scrol.gov.uk (Scottish Census Results online).
 * Taking this into account, there are three "special" civil parishes which, although are not in the traditional Gàidhealtachd area, are over the 2% threshold. The reason for this is that their population is very small. These civil parishes are:

- Kildrummy (Aberdeenshire): Total population over 3 years old 188; Gaelic speakers 4 (2,13%) - Barr (South Ayrshire): Total population over 3 years old 195; Gaelic speakers 4 (2,05%) - Ettrick (Borders): Total population over 3 years old 100; Gaelic speakers 2 (2,00%)
 * Apart from this I have received no comments on the map. Maybe somebody has any indication about how to improve it...

The map is somewhat hard to read, the many colours make it hard to grasp at one glance how the speakers of Gaelic are distributed. I suggest you use black for areas with more than 70% Gaelic speakers blue: between 50% and 70% red: between 30% and 50% yellow: between 10% and 30%. no colour (white): under 10%Unoffensive text or character 08:12, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I agree with the last proposal here - the map does use too many colours imo. siarach 09:02, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Why no mention of initial consonant mutations?
It's only mentioned in passing, but it's one of the distinctive traits of the Celtic languages. FilipeS 12:12, 18 September 2006 (UTC)


 * It's mentioned more than just in passing, I guess. The spelling and pronunciation are explained, it's mentioned for the past tense, it's mentioned for the relevant determiners, it's even indirectly there in the explanation of why people get named "Hamish"… That's relatively good (ignoring the fact that the entire grammar section could use a general clean-up). Do you mean why has nobody mentioned the initial consonant mutation article? That's easily fixed. Or why no one mentions the term "initial consonant mutation"? Maybe because Sc. Gaelic only has lenition, so we don't need a more general term?

I think that the reference to initial consonant mutations could be more fleshed out in the Grammar section. Compare with the articles on Welsh morphology, or Breton language, or Irish language. Regards. FilipeS 11:46, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

New stuff in Grammar section
I just added a bunch of tables to explain how the definite article works. Possibly in too much detail, feel free to cut down or add some kinder, gentler explanatory text. Please check the examples, some of my sources are 100 years old and there has surely been some paradigm levelling and other changes in the meantime. Let's definitely move the grammar section out of this long article (although I would vote for a single "grammar" article instead of separate "syntax" and "morphology" articles right away, as suggested before). CapnPrep 02:21, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

New UK passport - "Rìoghachd Aonaichte Bhreatainn is Éireann a Tuath"?
The new UK passport is said to use the translation "Rìoghachd Aonaichte Bhreatainn is Éireann a Tuath". That translation appears to be either a neologism (a Google search provides zero hits for the exact term) or a mistranscription (the guy that transcribed it was not even sure what language it was). Please see: --Mais oui! 11:53, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Talk:United_Kingdom

"Rìoghachd Aonaichte Bhreatainn is Éireann a' Tuath" this is Scottish Gaelic and literally translates into: "Kingdom United of Britain and Ireland of the North". You were near enough right, but your definate article "a" needed the apostrophe (') placed after it "a'". if you search for: Rìoghachd Aonaichte Bhreatainn is Éireann a' Tuath in Google you get 18 hits.

Page split
The article is too long, so following WP practice for other major languages, I have moved the grammar section into a separate article Scottish Gaelic grammar. I would suggest also creating Scottish Gaelic orthography and Scottish Gaelic phonology (I will leave it to someone who has contributed more to those sections).

I also moved the list of Gaelic place names into a new article List of Scottish Gaelic place names (this is an established WP category).

CapnPrep 05:49, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Minimal pairs
I have looked long and hard for a usable collection of Gaelic minimal pairs. These are very useful for phonological analysis, but are also extremely useful for language learners. As I am a not-so-advanced Gaelic learner I could benefit from these, but would not really have the competence to put them together without help. Is there anyone out there, perhaps someone who has worked on the phonology section of this article, who would like to join forces with me in creating such a thing. I think it should have a page of its own, but be closely linked with the phonology section of this page. Alternatively, if the phonology section IS going to become a page in its own right, this could be done there. But it might become a bit long. The idea is to take each pair of phonemes which are similar enough in their articulation that learners might confuse them or linguists might want to analyse the difference, and give three minimal pairs showing the distinction at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of a word (sometimes not all three will be possible). For each pair to be dealt with, we might have a heading, a short explanation and then a table something like this:

Does anyone else think this would be worth investing a little time on? --Doric Loon 10:42, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Beann/binn; inbhear; sruth
Halló ó hÉirinn! Bíonn na focail a scríobh tú anseo ag rith fós i nGaeilg!

The words you wrote here are still in use in modern Irish:

Beann/binn = point/apex/gable

inbhear =estuary

sruth =stream

159.134.221.79 02:16, 19 November 2006 (UTC)James; Éirinn agus Álbain abú!

Language Check and IPA
We could use an IPA pronunciation and Gaelic check over at Bean Nighe (and also a little bit at Banshee). Tapadh Leibh! --Kathryn NicDhàna ♫♦♫ 03:33, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Concise title
This article should be moved to Scottish Gaelic as per Naming conventions (languages). The disambiguator serves no purpose as far as I can see.

Peter Isotalo 01:03, 7 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Yup, this looks fairly obvious to me (in fact it's been annoying me for a while). I've raised it at Requested moves. --Blisco 18:36, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Related Articles that could use some work
An Comunn Gàidhealach and Comunn na Gàidhlig are stubs needing expansion. Also, ACG's website seems to be down. --Kathryn NicDhàna ♫ ♦ ♫ 09:06, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

Velarization/Palatalization
The article mentions this, even a mention of Palatalization works (albeit in Primitive Irish), but gets into no detail. Does it work like modern Irish, where a, o, and u make a consonant broad and e and i make a consonant slender, or does it work a different way? Nothing really specific on this point is mentioned in the article. --Lim e tom 11:11, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

POV in Official Recognition
I have flaged this section with regards POV. Please could someone tidy this. 194.200.145.5 15:33, 18 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I removed the POV tag. For one thing, it was placed in the Grammar section, not the "Official Recognition" section.  However, in reading the Official Recognition section, I see no hint of POV.  Before attempting to replace the tag, please be more specific (give examples) in your concerns, or better yet, forget the tag and just fix the language you believe to be POV.  Best wishes. --WilliamThweatt 15:47, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

I would prefer not to alter the text but I have a number of problems with the section. These consist POV but more importantly referencing. The section actually contains no references. The section to a lesser extent also has examples of original research and weasel words.

"After centuries of persecution, prejudice and neglect" These are extremly strong words, given with no explanation or references.

"People still living can recall being beaten for speaking Gaelic in school." A statement like this needs definetly needs to be referenced.

"In fact, this annoyance may be largely assumed" Without a reference is original research

Scottish/Irish Gaelic?
Right. I'm not a very good speaker, I can understand spoken Ulster gaelic(Donegal) and also Ulster scots(Antrim) but don't have either at all that well. Should not Gaelic, whether Irish or Scots be under the same title with sections? The Irish do not have a monopoly on Gaeldom. Should not Irish Language and this article be merged with definite seperate articles under the same name? Brendandh 20:45, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

diphthongs
The article seems to mix up digraphs (two letters written together) with diphthongs (two sounds tacked together as one sound). Plus in one case, an on-glide (in ceól (with grave)) is given as a diphthong too

Also, the consonant list ignores the slender set altogether

Slán libh!

159.134.221.58 22:51, 24 March 2007 (UTC)James

Translation request
I added the name of the British Isles in the official languages of the region to that article (as per other islands/places/regions). However, I could not find a Scottish Gaelic version of the name. I tried contacting a Scottish editor I know of but without success. Could someone here help me out? Thanks in advace. --sony-youth pléigh 08:58, 29 May 2007 (UTC)


 * It's "Eileanan Breatannach". See, for example. CapnPrep 12:19, 29 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Thank you. --sony-youth pléigh 12:22, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

I was wondering for the translation for the phrase "My name is..." for Irish Gaelic. In Scottish Gaelic the phrase is "Is mise..." in the page with sample phrase "De an t-ainm a th'ort?", we should at least post the statement to answer that question. Sonalchagi 17:53, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Gaelic Tag Quetions
Hi, I was just looking again at the article Tag question, which has kind of been one of my babies over the last year or so. It struck me that it needs to be expanded with something about Gaelic Question tags. Because, if I am correct, question tags in Gaelic are constructed from the main verb in a way analagous to English, but also analagous to the way Gaelic expresses "yes" and "no". But it would need a native Gaelic speaker to write that up into a paragraph. It would be very interesting and useful, though. Any volunteers? --Doric Loon 08:57, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, it's true that Gaelic question stucture is based on the verb in the sentence. If a person askes "Am faod mi...?" , then the answers would either be "Faodaidh"  or "Chan Fhaod" . The most common mistake in Gaelic is using the anwsers "Tha" and "Chan eil" in all occassions.  These are the positive and negative answers for the verb "to be".  But Gaelic has no real word for "yes" or "no". Unfortuntately, I am not a native speaker of Gaelic, and the only native speaker that I know of is 2 years old. (I'm living in Canada).  So I can give you that information, but I wouldn't say that I am qualified to write the article in question. Sorry. Sonalchagi 15:38, 25 July 2007 (UTC)