Apples and Pears

Everybody knows the Celtic languages exist out there in some hidden place, mountainous or seaside, not really part of the ordinary world. Same with the people who speak them” both are really part of some romantic, mystical other realm. Or something like that.

That is maybe accurate in 2026, in an odd way, but also obviously inaccurate and silly,

Most of the Celtic languages are/were old-fashioned and rooted in the earth because they were spoken in places that are/were “out there” on geographical or social margins until recently. They are ordinary languages for all that, and the people who speak/spoke them are/were ordinary people trying to get along in an often difficult world. The languages are about to die not because they are too fine or mystical for this crass time, but because the modern world (post maybe 1540?) has ground them out, like it has ground out many other things.

People in absolutely boring unmystical, unromantic but definitely Irish county Offaly only stopped speaking Irish in the 1830s, most often because they had been incorporated in an English-owned and administered estate and big farm system that had no place for Irish or for anything old or in the way. The Famine removed probably a million Irish-speaking people from the island in the 1840s in a five-year-long living Hell. but a lot of southern and western Ireland spoke Irish until the 1880s. (For more details, see the post Irish, the Inside Story on the blog Irish Love Songs, Irish Language, (on Blogger).

Most of the geographic Scottish Highlands spoke Gaelic until the 1880s/1890s, but only parts of the western seaboard, and the Outer Hebrides had large enough concentrations of people still to make it a viable language there and to outweigh the fact that Highland communities also existed within an estate system that offered very limited opportunities for making a living: a system that despised Gaelic. (The Clearances of the late 18th and then 19th centuries had already removed the majority of people from everywhere else and sent them to Glasgow or Canada etc.) See Scottish Gaelic, the Inside Story on Irish Love Songs, Irish Language for details.

All Wales (except Gower south Pembroke (English-settled): far east Gwent: a border strip of Brecknock and Montgomeryshire: and Maelor Saesneg) spoke Welsh until the 1930s when the effects of the English-language industrial system in the heavily-populated Valleys combined with English and Irish in-migration there and the Depression broke apart communities in the Valleys and removed the basis of a separate Welsh national society. English society absorbed increasing areas on the borders, and then in the 1950s , with increasing economic, educational and media integration with England, areas of the rural south and touristy north east coast turned to English. (There is a Welsh, and also Breton Inside Story on Blogger too.)

There were parts of central and eastern Brittany that were mixed Breton and French (Breton mostly in the nobility?) until the Middle Ages, then monoglot French, but after this, the Breton/French border was stable for many hundred of years after until really the 1950s, when greatly increased economic and media integration with France, combined with many years of French-only schooling, and then the post-WWII Patriotic French orgy and casting out of all things not patriotic French, and the destruction of peasant agriculture and shift to Big Farming, meant that parents in many places started speaking French to their children.

Manx lost ground for similar reasons to Scottish Gaelic in the late 19th century. Cornish…Well, Cornish is really the only Celtic language that fits the Mystical Celtic model, and only then because the language was lost in the 16th and 17th centuries when nobody much was paying attention, so not a lot is known about anything.

Today, things are bleak. The 1950s, then again the late 1970s, saw most remaining Celtic-speaking communities turn to English, often because of closer and closer integration into larger societies, the end of old ways of life and because of TV and radio.

What’s left? Where are Celtic languages spoken as community languages?

In Ireland, it’s mostly Tory Island and a small strip of mainland opposite (though a lot of that is summer houses now), maybe Inis Meain (though that is losing its native Irish-speaking population), maybe a small area around Screeb etc.

In the Highlands, it’s Grimsay island with less than 200 people, and that will go eventually.

In Wales, it’s the area west of Caernarfon town (Eifionydd, Lleyn, etc.), plus bits of Meirionydd, maybe Llanbrynmair, maybe a few tiny bits of Cardiganshire: the upper Gwaun valley in Pembrokeshire, and the semi-industrial highland area on the borders of Carmarthenshire and Glamorgan.

In Brittany, it’s the village of Plounevez-Moedac and to a much lesser extent, Sein island.

In Ireland in former Gaeltacht, there are small networks of families that still speak Irish to each other. There are people in lots of places like Belfast, Rennes, Cardiff and Glasgow who have learned the language, but they often speak an impoverished version that is really based on English.

Wait…So am I just some elitist yearning for some distant, idealized past, and dumping on the vigorous living language of the people who are actually doing the work?

One of the things about the Celtic languages, besides the old stuff, is the fact that they are/were very rich and earthy languages that reflected two thousand years of human and natural interaction. Someone described them as “Medieval.” Given the contemporary associations of that word, that is neither accurate or useful, but the languages do rise from another world.

On the other hand, modern English and French are pretty much Standard Official and Media languages that reflect…something else.

People who’ve learnt a Celtic language in classes or books or online usually do not have access to the traditional language and are often not even aware of it, or even care that there is such a thing. They often speak a Celtic language that is a translation of their English or French, and I’m not referring to word order

Last week, an online discussion of an Irish grammatical feature produced some sample sentences (“an duine ab eagraithe etc.) that while not formally incorrect, struck me as awkward. In the end, I think that the problem is not that the grammatical structures are “wrong”, but that an Irish speaker would not use that construction to express the thought. She would not even start from that same place.

She could say , for example, something like “an duine ab fhearr” (the best person), but might also come at that from an entirely different direction. And just because in English you use the same approach and thus construction to say “the best person” and “the most organized person” (“an duine ab eagraithe”) doesn’t mean that this is how you do it in Irish.

I think that a traditional Irish speaker would approach the utterance differently, using other structures that reflect other ways of looking at people and experience: other ways of categorizing, organizing and expressing experience: structures that reflect maybe older, less “theoretical” analyses of experience: structures that arise from thousands of years of face-to-face experience.

That is very vague, isn’t it, and it doesn’t really make sense. Hadn’t I better approach this in a more logical, precise way?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kJ6e3bhgvY

Let me try.

Irish would not start with a concept of “organized” that is good across all types of experience. Books might be “curtha i dtoll a chéile.” Another group of objects (with moving parts etc.)might be “ar inneall”, or “i ngleas, as might metaphorically, a person. A person might be said to “have everything (needed) “under his hand”, and so on. The word “eagar” suggests “things in a row or arrangement” (according to Dineen’s (old) dictionary.

So Irish acknowledges that different situations and types of objects arise out of different contexts. They have different trajectories and natures, and the language acknowledges that in conceptualizing how they might be made ready to be used or put in “order”, you don’t start from the same place. The specifics must be seen, and they cannot cannot be subsumed in one abstract concept of order that is good no matter if you’re referring to tools or houses or cows or people or businesses.

Irish and the other languages acknowledge the way the physical world actually is. It perceives more truly and accurately in this way. The languages are “softer” ad more “human” and I would argue that they offer people in our abstract, machine-driven, space capsule life something valuable. They offer a wild apple with, each one, its own indescribable complex taste that tells about time and place and circumstance: and this in place of the modern standard “fizzy soda” apple.

You can hear (very near) Plounevez Breton on Youtube by looking for Maurice Prigent or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdi54Zhl-4A . Probably better if you don’t understand him. It’s a little, um, risque.

You can hear a whole hour of a Grimsay storyteller if you buy Peter Morrison’s recording from The School of Scottish Studies or look for him on Tobar a’ Dualchais. Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGgk70mtyew#ddg-play

I don’t know where you can hear Tory Island Irish, but probably Youtube somewhere. Well, here, but the people the film maker chose of course don’t have teeth… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCkl1jxheGs Or at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcuxN8_dbks These people, when the narrator, shuts up, do have teeth.

You can hear far northwestern Welsh (Caernarfon town, then near Swansea in the south) at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFyLcEuYqvU#ddg-play

East Carmarthen/west Glamorgan Welsh (as mentioned above) is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2hPg-SkVcE.

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