Re: Grammar (fwd)

[clevin@ripco.com (Craig Levin)]

Poster: clevin@ripco.com (Craig Levin)

> Poster: Tom Rettie <tom@his.com>
> 
> At 01:24 PM 3/17/97 -0600, Craig Levin wrote:
> 
> >The other dialects, such as Scots, survived as best they could as
> >second-raters compared to the London dialect-look at how
> >Boswell's English is treated by Johnson-and remained important in
> >the countrysides where they were native as the languages of daily
> >use. When newspapers, and then radio, came to the country, a
> >process of homogenization was put into motion that has been
> >eroding the old dialects. 
> 
> Good my lord and kind gentles,
> 
> One clarification I would add, Scots Gaelic is not a dialect of English --
> it is a member of the Goidelic family of languages (Scots and Irish Gaelic,
> Manx) and has entirely different roots.  I assume you were referring to
> those dialects of English that were spoken in the north, not the native
> Gaelic.  The Celtic languages didn't just languish as "second-rate," they
> were actively suppressed by law.  

I'm fairly aware of this. Catholic U.'s got a fine collection of
Gaelic manuscripts and books-which I can't read-and the complete
original series of the Scottish Text Society (a group that
specializes in pre-Stuart mss.)-which I can. For a variety of
reasons, Gaelic doesn't seem to have been a rich word-source for
English; I seem to recall that the various American Indian
languages have been far more generous, despite the fact that
Gaelic speakers have been neighbors of English speakers for far
longer.

-- 
http://pages.ripco.com:8080/~clevin/index.html 
clevin@ripco.com
Craig Levin
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