6th Annual Conference of the North American
Association for Celtic Language Teachers
The Information Age, Celtic Languages and the
New Millenium
Editors
Richard F. E. Sutcliffe
Gearóid Ó Néill
Contents
| Preface | v | |
| Conference Committees | vii | |
| Gaelic and Computing: What is Happening and What Needs Doing - A Personal View
Caoimhín Ó Donnaile | 1 | |
| Bilingual Spoken Dictionary Based on Speech Synthesis in Breton
Nicolas Auclerc, Alexandre Bramoullé, Francis Favereau, Hervé Gourmelon, Pierre Lavanant, François Louis, Guy Mercier & Jacques Siroux, Skol Vreizh, ENSSAT Lannion & TES | 11 | |
| Journal Writing Revisited: A Follow-up Study in an Irish Language Class
Roslyn Blyn-LaDrew, University of Pennsylvania | 19 | |
| The Breton Language : From Taboo to Recognition
Ronan Le Coadic, IUFM, Bretagne | 23 | |
| To Secure an Anchor for Our Celtic Souls: An Integrated Development
Programme for Manx Gaelic Philip Gawne, Manx National Heritage, Isle of Man | 29 | |
| On Simplifying the Lexical Tagging of Cornish Texts
Ken George, Seaton, Cornwall | 35 | |
| Welsh Intensive Language Learning Centres
Geraint Wyn Jones, University of Wales, Bangor | 41 | |
| Developing a Welsh Terminology Dictionary
J. P. M. Jones, University of Wales, Bangor | 49 | |
| Manx Gaelic: Chengey-ny-Mayrey Ellan Vannin - A Language on
the Edge Phil Kelly, Rheynn Cullyn, Isle of Man | 57 | |
| Imagination in the Teaching of Cornish
Neil Kennedy, Falmouth College of Arts, Cornwall | 63 | |
| The ISOS Project - A Digital Library of Irish Scripts on Screen
Criostaí Mac Íomhaire, Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha, Pádraig Ó Macháin & Alan F. Smeaton, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies & Dublin City University | 71 | |
| Teaching Scottish Gaelic to Irish Speakers
Michelle Macleod, National University of Ireland, Galway | 77 | |
| Waiting for TV-Breizh?
Stefan Moal, Douarnenez, Brittany | 83 | |
| Living Celtic Speech: Celtic Sound Archives in North America
Ken Nilsen, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia | 89 |
| Search and Retrieval Options within the Database of the Corpus of Electronic Texts - CELT Project
Donnchadh Ó Corráin & Beatrix Färber, University College Cork | 95 | |
| Teaching the Initial Mutations in Modern Irish
Séamas Ó Direáin, University College, Cork | 103 | |
| The Effect of Bilingualism on Learners' Self-Awareness - A Case Study
Muiris Ó Laoire, Institute of Technology, Tralee | 111 | |
| The Role of Language Models in Culture Maintenance: The Challenge of Teaching Gaelic in Nova Scotia
Catriona NicIomhair Parsons, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia | 117 | |
| E-Celtic Language Tools: The Latest Developments from Wales
Delyth Prys & Menna Morgan, University of Wales, Bangor | 123 | |
| Welsh Number Talk
Gareth Roberts, University of Wales, Bangor | 129 | |
| If We Drill Them, Will They Learn Them?
Sheila Scott & Harold Kenny, University of Ottawa & Royal Military College of Canada | 133 | |
| Manx Gaelic in the Year 2000
Brian Stowell, Scrudeyr ny Sheshaght Ghailckagh, Isle of Man | 141 | |
| Language Ideologies in Brittany, with Implications for Breton Language Maintenance and Pedagogy
Lenora A. Timm, University of California | 147 | |
| Welsh Medium and Bilingual Teaching in the Further Education Sector
Cen Williams, University of Wales, Bangor | 155 |
Preface
Celtic languages form a branch of the Indo-European family and
include Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh.
The North American Association for Celtic Language Teachers exists
to permit instructors to exchange ideas and research through meetings
and an annual publication, to increase links of Celtic language
teachers with those of other languages and other umbrella organizations,
and to increase opportunities for Celtic language teachers.
NAACLT has held a highly successful annual conference in North
America since 1995. Previous events took place in Glendale Community
College, California, University of Pennsylvania, St. Francis Xavier
University, University of Minnesota and University of Ottawa.
This year the conference comes to Europe for the first time, presenting
an ideal opportunity for Celtic language speakers, teachers and
related researchers in the US to renew their links with colleagues
in European areas such as Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, Isle of
Man, Scotland and Wales.
This volume contains the papers presented at NAACLT2000. They
include reports regarding new techniques for teaching, descriptions
of recently developed electronic resources and discussions of
strategic and planning issues. All the Celtic languages are represented
as are many current trends in language teaching and related research.
We hope you find these papers interesting and a source of ideas
for your own work.
Finally, we would like to express our thanks to Bord na Gaeilge
and University of Limerick for sponsoring the conference and to
Pat Cox MEP who has kindly agreed to perform the official opening.
Richard F. E. Sutcliffe
Gearóid Ó Néill
Gearóid Ó Néill, University of Limerick
Caoimhín Ó Donnaile, University of the Highlands
and Islands
Paul Birt, University of Ottawa
Emyr Davies, Coleg y Drindod Caerfyrddin
Ken George, Cornish Language Board
Phil Kelly, Rheynn Ynsee, Ellan Vannin
Teresa O'Doherty, University of Limerick
Francis Favereau, Université de Bretagne
Marion MacDonald, Córais Teileamaitic Scairbhe, Gaillimh
Annie Macsween, Lews Castle College, Stornoway
Annette McElligott, University of Limerick
Úna Nic Éinrí, Coláiste Mhuire Gan Smál, Luimneach
Josette Gwegenn, Kelenn, Kemper
Ken Nilsen, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish
Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin, Ollscoil Luimnigh
Muiris Ó Laoire, Institute of Technology at Tralee
Helen Ó Murchú, Comhar na Múinteoirí Gaeilge
Gearóid Ó Néill, University of Limerick
Catriona Parsons, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish
A G Boyd Robertson, University of Strathclyde
Nancy Stenson, University of Minnesota
Marta Weingartner Diaz, Indiana University
Cen Williams, Prifysgol Cymru Bangor
Rita Gallagher
Annette McElligott
Teresa O'Doherty
Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin
Gearóid Ó Néill
Gemma Ryan
Dermot Shinners-Kennedy
Richard Sutcliffe
This paper discusses the current health of Scottish
Gaelic; the growth of Sabhal Mór Ostaig over the past ten
years, the mix of students, new opportunities via the University
of the Highlands and Islands project, the computing facilities
and projects currently underway there. It describes the need for
a Gaelic lexical database as a foundation for spell checking,
the possibility of a Celtic cognates database, and the aim of
Tobar an Dualchais to preserve for posterity 18,000 hours of spoken
Gaelic archives.
I am going to attempt in this paper to take a wide-ranging view.
However, I am very conscious of the fact that no one person can
know any more than part of it in any depth - hence the word "personal"
in the title. What I'll do is to take a quick tour of topics which
I am familiar with and which I think will be of interest to attendees
of the conference: a quick look at the "health" of Scottish
Gaelic; developments at Sabhal Mór Ostaig; the University
of the Highlands and Islands project; and then turning to computing
and the Internet.
Although I am of Irish extraction and started learning Irish Gaelic
before Scottish Gaelic, I have for the past nine years been working
at Sabhal Mór Ostaig, the Gaelic-medium further education
college, or "community college" as you would say in
America, on the island of Skye. I teach computing full-time, and
have quite a few other hats besides - webmaster of an extensive
web-site, and head of information technology.
Is Scottish Gaelic in decline as some say, or is there a revival
as others say? The answer is that there is a great decline and
also a great revival, both happening rather quickly at the same
time, and the next five to ten years will be critical as to whether
Gaelic ultimately survives as a community language and how much
of its riches are preserved.
I'll use Sleat, where I live and work in the south of Skye, as
an illustration. The decline started earlier here than in the
western isles. There is also very strong pressure from incomers
and population increase. But on the other hand, Sleat has benefited
in recent years first from the support of Sir Iain Noble, the
pro-Gaelic landowner, and latterly from the development and growth
of his brainchild, Sabhal Mór Ostaig.
Anyone native to Sleat and over the age of about 50 speaks excellent
Gaelic. My guess is that that is a reflection of the date when
Gaelic stopped being the language of the school playground. Often
the age cutoff can be seen within children of a single family.
People in the generation after that can understand Gaelic but
generally aren't comfortable speaking it. People in their twenties
are generally interested in Gaelic but can't understand it.
After that the benefits of the revival and the setting up of a
Gaelic medium unit in the local primary school [1] start to be
seen. A few of the teenagers are fluent and comfortable speaking
Gaelic, although without the richness of expression of the older
generation. After that the numbers increase. Families raising
children with Gaelic are finding that instead of the children
turning to English when they reach school-age, as used to happen,
the neighbours' children are turning to speaking Gaelic. The children
are proud to be able to speak Gaelic as well as English. I know
of several examples of young children who came to the area knowing
no Gaelic and within a year are chatting to their friends outside
school in Gaelic. Gaelic-medium education has been very successful
in Sleat, as elsewhere in Scotland. Studies show that the children
do well in all subjects. The Gaelic unit in Sleat now has a higher
intake than the English unit, and I am told that the children
in the Gaelic unit are ahead even in their English reading.
The numbers are small, though [2] - much smaller than the numbers
in Gaelic-medium education in Ireland, and are not nearly enough
to match the number of older Gaelic speakers who are dying off.
Only recently did the first all-Gaelic primary school open in
Glasgow. There is still no such thing as a Gaelic-medium unit
in a secondary school (or "high school") - only a few
subjects taught in a few schools [3]. A report by Her Majesty's
Inspectors of Schools seven years ago stated that secondary schooling
through Gaelic was "neither feasible nor desirable"
- due to lack of resources.
Some steps have been taken in recent years to begin to remedy
this lack of resources. The Scottish Education Department has
set up the "Stòrlann Nàiseanta na Gàidhlig",
based in Lewis, to commission materials for use in Gaelic medium
teaching. For example, it has just produced "Dòigh
eile air a Ràdh", a small Gaelic thesaurus for use
in primary schools.
The "Stòrdàta Fiosrachaidh Gàidhlig"
(Gaelic Resources Database) [4] produced and maintained by the
Education Department of Comhairle nan Eilean [5] has for several
years now been available on WWW. It is a database listing the
title, location and other information on anything which might
be of use to teachers - books, articles in journals, songs in
books, cassettes and CDs. It is something which could usefully
be imitated for other Celtic languages.
Sabhal Mór Ostaig is one of the highlights of the Gaelic
revival [6]. When I joined the college in 1991 there were only
18 students. The only building was a renovated farm building built
in 1810 [7]. A van took the students home after classes each day
and the college was dead after 5pm. Other than the full-time courses
- business studies through the medium of Gaelic - the "Stòrdàta
Briathrachais" (Gaelic terminology database), and the summer
short courses, there was nothing much else happening.
A new building was added in 1993, tripling the size of the college
and providing residential accommodation for the first time, so
that the students were not scattered far and wide and had access
to computing and library facilities in the evenings [8]. The commercial
offshoot of the college, Cànan, was started, producing
Gaelic educational materials and subtitles for TV programmes [9].
The Lèirsinn research unit was started. A Gaelic Television
course started.
The Arainn Chaluim Chille campus was added in 1998-99, again tripling
the size of the college [10]. The college is now home to a whole
host of activities and offshoot units - The Tosg Gaelic Theatre
company; Iomairt Chaluim Chille which unites Gaels in Scotland
and Ireland both North and South [11]; Tobar an Dualchais [12];
European projects such as Digital Democracy [13] and Titan [14].
The number of full time staff stands at about 50, and the college
is the major employer in the south of Skye.
The number of full-time students has remained at about 70 for
the last two years - something which we hope to remedy. The quality
is excellent. There is a very healthy mix of ages, origins and
backgrounds. Starting first with students from abroad, we have
at the moment three students from the US, three from Cape Breton,
one from Russia, and one from Denmark. All of them have very fluent
Gaelic. We have a student from Wales who is fluent in Welsh and
a student from Gaoth Dobhair who is fluent in Irish Gaelic. We
have students from England and from all over Scotland. However,
a large proportion of the students, as you would expect, come
from the Gaelic speaking western isles. In the last few years,
for the first time, we have quite a number of students from local
Gaelic-speaking families in Sleat, as well as from farther afield
in Skye - a sign of the confidence the local Gaelic-speaking
community has in the college.
Students who already have degrees and who want to improve their
Gaelic, mature students with a wide range of skills and experience,
even a few retirees, mix with 17-year old school leavers from
the islands who want to get some qualifications. This produces
a mixture which is good for all concerned.
Since all the teaching at SMO is through Gaelic, a basic level
of conversational ability in Gaelic is necessary before a student
can begin study at the college. One way of obtaining this is by
attending summer short courses at SMO [15]. Another is by attending
the NC level courses offered elsewhere in the University of the
Highlands and Islands partnership, for example at Inverness College.
Another method will open up shortly since the college is currently
developing an intensive 16-hour per week "Access Course",
for delivery by distance learning, designed to bring complete
beginners up to SMO entrance level within a year [16]. This will
start as a pilot project this September. The intention was focus
this on local centres round Scotland, with a few hours per week
contact with local tutors being used to supplement distance-learning
materials. However, it is becoming clear that there is a demand
from students outside Scotland too for a course like this. This
may be possible in the future, since the intention is to place
some of the course materials on WWW, and to provide Email support
facilities and so on.
The computing facilities at Sabhal Mór Ostaig are now excellent.
The college has always been advanced for its size in the use of
ICT facilities. We had Internet Email - "smo.ac.uk"
in use by dialup in 1991 - possibly the first Further Education
college in Britain. We had an intranet running in 1992. We had
a WWW server running internally in August 1993. In December 1993
got a permanent 64 kbit/s connection to the Internet, thanks to
the University of the Highlands and Islands project, and we became
"smo.uhi.ac.uk". Last November we got a 700-fold boost
in speed to 45 Mbit/s. There is a switched network delivering
100 Mbit/s to the desktop on structured wiring throughout the
college. The college is well equipped with fast new workstations,
Novell servers from the UHI project and Unix servers of our own.
The television course is now doing a lot of multimedia work on
computer workstations.
We have an extensive website with many thousands of pages [6].
Despite this being nearly all in Gaelic, it is currently getting
about 22,000 requests per day in raw terms, although the number
of actual clicks per day by users outside the college would be
more like 10,000. We have in the past hosted websites and domains
for other organisations and are happy to continue doing this on
a voluntary basis for Gaelic organisations. The college recently
won a bid to provide WWW engineering services to the entire UHI
network, and we are involved in a collaborative project to translate
the Opera WWW browser into various languages including Gaelic.
Up to about five or six years ago, the UHI project [17] was mostly
talk. However, it is now a reality, uniting about 14 colleges
and institutes over a huge area into a partnership with is gathering
strength each year. Sabhal Mór Ostaig played a significant
part in winning people over to the UHI idea, since the college
has always been very advanced for its size. In turn, we have benefited
greatly in equipment, new buildings, and new course opportunities.
UHI is not yet a university - this will require several more
years of development. However, it is already able to offer degree
courses if these are validated and approved by other bodies, such
as the UK's Open University. Within the next few months, all being
well, about eight students will graduate at SMO with a BA degree,
some with "BA Gaelic Language and Culture" [18], others
with "BA Gaelic with North Atlantic Studies" [19]. They
will have completed all three years of study entirely at SMO,
so it will be a historic event. The college also has several research
students attached to it, undertaking PhD's under the University
of the Highlands and Islands project and supervised by SMO staff.
UHI degrees have a modular structure, which allows a great deal
of flexibility in developing courses. Students can leave after
a year with a certificate, and return later for a second or third
year to obtain a higher level diploma or a full degree, or they
can, for example begin their study with a year at Inverness College
and continue it at SMO. Increasingly, individual modules will
be delivered by different colleges, using networked delivery.
The University of the Highlands and Islands project, although
we call it in Gaelic "Oilthigh na Gaidhealtachd", is
not itself a particularly Gaelic institution. Within the UHI framework,
however, there is an increasing amount of cooperation between
Gaelic teaching staff at centres such as Lews Castle College in
Stornoway, SMO, and Inverness College. There is an increasing
emphasis on "outreach centres", generally with ISDN
links. Lews Castle College has established outreach centres in
Barra, South Uist, Benbecula and Ness. Sabhal Mór Ostaig
is developing a new centre, "Ionad Chaluim Chille" on
the island of Islay. A new NC course in Gaelic Language and Music
is about to begin in Benbecula College in September.
The UHI project, as well as having a fast communications network
between the colleges, has a network of video-conferencing centres
which now utilise this wide-area network. These are very heavily
used, with the video-conferencing bridge in Inverness being the
most heavily used bridge in the UK academic world. Seminars in
Gaelic are delivered very effectively with the active participation
of an audience in several centres. So far, video-conferencing
has been used less extensively for general teaching, due mainly
to difficulties in scheduling with any regularity classes and
video-conferencing facilities in different centres. However, its
use is increasing, and the imminent introduction of computer-based
video-conferencing over IP will offer new possibilities, as will
improved scheduling and booking facilities.
The Internet is a truly marvelous resource. It is a godsend to
minority languages because it cuts out the cost of cost of printing
and distribution. One of the best ways which language agencies
can promote the language is to get more materials such as dictionaries
made freely available on the Internet, buying up the copyright
if necessary.
Copyright is a problem. In my opinion, the duration of copyright
- 70 years after the death of the author - is totally ridiculous.
But we have to live with it. The recent extension from 50 years
to 70 years poses interesting problems. To take Dwelly's dictionary,
for example, Edward Dwelly died in 1939, about 60 years ago. However,
according to my reading of the copyright law pages, his famous
dictionary is certainly out of copyright in the US, if not also
in Europe, because once a work is out of copyright it cannot in
any circumstances go back into copyright. Of course, apart from
the law of copyright there are also rules of etiquette, and other
people's work should not simply be plagiarised without acknowledgment.
There is a need to simply get on with typing in out-of-copyright
materials - and typing is still often the best method despite
the advent of optical character recognition. I would like to see
Gaelic funding bodies provide funds for such work, perhaps as
part-time work for students. We need something akin to Ciarán
Ó Duibhín's million word "Gaeldict" for
all the Celtic languages, not just Donegal Gaelic!
There is a great need for online dictionaries. The "Stòrdàta
Briathrachais" [20], the Gaelic terminology database developed
at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig since the late 1980s, and with now
over 100,000 entries, has been tremendously popular and it is
certainly our intention to continue expanding and developing it.
The WWW interface [21] has been very popular, and I know that
many people outside SMO have it permanently open on their computers
as they write. I believe that the WWW interface to the Foclóir
Beag [22] developed by University of Limerick is similarly popular.
There is a need for a "Stòrdàta Briathrachais"
for Irish Gaelic and a "Fócloir Beag" for Scottish
Gaelic.
It would be tremendously useful to have a dictionary-lookup facility
available on WWW browsers - so that you could click on any Gaelic
word, without any need for special markup on the page, the browser
would be programmed to detect the word under the cursor, lemmatise
it and set another window to point to the appropriate place in
a Gaelic-English dictionary. This would make Gaelic-language pages,
available to a wider audience without the need to provide English
versions of every single page. I feel that a facility like this
ought to be do-able by now using Javascript or some such, but
I don't know enough to know how.
It is ridiculous that there is no spell-checker yet for Scottish
or Irish Gaelic. This is one of the most useful facilities to
learners which computers could provide, and it is not difficult
to produce. I had very-useful Gaelic spell-checking going on Edinburgh
University computers in 1988, and we had primitive but popular
Gaelic spell-checking in WordPerfect at Sabhal Mór Ostaig
in 1992. You can feed a list of Gaelic words - wordforms rather
than just dictionary headwords - into just about any spellchecker
in place of the English words, and you get an acceptable Gaelic
spellchecker. The reason we have never got round to doing it at
SMO is that we moved to MS-Word, and MS-Word, unlike WordPerfect,
did not allow the user to replace the English lexicon by one of
their own. Perhaps there are ways round this by now.
We need not just one spell-checker but lots of them! We need spell-checking
in word-processors, Web authoring tools, Email, and optical character
recognition. We need spell-checking according to strict "GOC"
rules for schools and we need spell-checking according to different
rules for optical character recognition of out-of-copyright materials.
We need spell checking for both advanced users and primary school-children.
To support all this - the generation of different wordform lists
for different purposes and the addition of new terms over time
- we need a lexical database. I am thinking of the kind of relational
database which Ken George describes for Cornish in his paper,
or the Celex database developed in the Netherlands for Dutch,
German and English in the 1980s. There would be two main tables
- a table of dictionary "headwords" and a table of wordforms,
with the wordforms being linked back to their headwords. Frequency
data from a corpus of texts would be an important field - a lesson
from the Celex database. A corpus of Gaelic texts would provide
a crosscheck that the wordforms in the lexical database were correct,
that they were being properly generated by rule from the headwords.
In turn the lexical database would help to spellcheck and standardise
the texts in the corpus - the kind of iterative process which
Ken George describes. A lot of the work can be done these days
with tools such as Excel, without the need for much special programming.
In these days of multimedia programming, the pronunciation information
would be available for each word as a soundbite. We currently
have all the headwords from Macfarlane's dictionary recorded into
soundfiles at SMO and hope to edit these soon and make them available
on WWW as a "speaking dictionary". The intention is
to do the same for various dialects.
Cutting across the Celtic languages now, we have recently started
work at SMO on an experimental basis on a "Celtic Cognates"
relational database [23]. So this going beyond the idea expressed
by Phil Kelly in his paper of a "Triglot Gaelic database".
We currently have about 1000 records, although most of these only
have field entries for a few languages. It links with Macfarlane's
and MacBain's dictionaries, in database format. Linking these
with an Irish Gaelic dictionary and applying some simple rules
such as "change all Scottish Gaelic graves to acutes",
and "change 'sg' in Scottish Gaelic to 'sc' in Irish Gaelic",
would immediately give several thousand new "Celtic cognates".
The Celtic cognates database has several possible uses. It might,
as Phil Kelly suggests, serve as the basis of a "translation"
facility among the Q-Celtic languages. It should be useful to
speakers of one Celtic language who are learning another. It provides
a means of translating into other Celtic languages lists of Gaelic-English
cognates which are so useful to the learner, like those which
are used to such good effect in the George McLennan's little book,
"Scots Gaelic: a brief introduction". When linked to
speaking dictionaries in different languages, it frees etymological
study from the bounds of differing spelling conventions. There
are many questions, though, which need answering. One question
is whether it would be better to have separate triglot Q-Celtic
database and P-Celtic databases, which could be quite strict in
their matching of words and parts of speech, and which could then
be linked together using a looser matching.
Projects such as this are ideally suited to cooperation between
different institutes. Not only can files be easily passed from
site to site over the Internet, and web pages linked together,
but databases in different sites, if they act as SQL servers,
can be combined into a single distributed database. We aim to
develop work like this at Sabhal Mór Ostaig, particularly
since it fits in well with our remit to provide WWW engineering
services for UHI. As Delyth Prys and Menna Morgan point out in
their paper, the aim should be pool resources and use and reuse
information to create new products. Computing is all about sharing
and reuse.
A feature of computing over the next few years is going to be
the integration of the Unicode character encoding into all computer
systems. Unicode is a character encoding which encompasses all
of the world's languages and scripts - Polish, Russian, Chinese,
Japanese - even Welsh. The other five Celtic languages have been
very lucky in that they have been in with the "wealthy"
languages; they and all other western European languages except
Welsh and are covered by the "Latin-1" character set.
Welsh, with its accents on 'w' and 'y', was by mistake, and maybe
negligence on the part of the British Standards Institute, omitted
completely from the ISO 8859 series of standards when they were
first developed. Another benefit of Unicode is that it will make
it easy to encode Irish Gaelic texts with the "punc séibhithe".
Overall it will lead to a great simplification once it is fully
established.
I'll turn now from databases and "linguistic computing"
to other materials. There is a demonstrated demand for simple
language lessons on the Internet. Our WWW server statistics and
messages from users show that our online Gaelic lessons, poor
and all as they are, are some of the most popular pages on our
website. We hope to improve on them when we put some of the new
Access Course materials onto the Internet. Javascript gives scope
for interactive pages with exercises for learners and automatic
correction - There are some good materials like this available
for Irish Gaelic. A bonus would be a login system which would
keep track of which lesson a user had reached in their previous
session, and which compared their score in tests with what they
had achieved previously. Although I have not explored to the full,
perhaps the nicest online lessons I have found are those for Breton
on the Kervarker site. It would be good if lessons of this quality
could be made available for all the Celtic languages.
I said at the beginning of this paper that while there is a great
revival taking place in Scottish Gaelic, the older native speakers
with the richest Gaelic are dying off. So in the future there
will have to be more reliance on archive materials if the riches
are not going to be lost. SMO is involved in the Tobar an Dualchais
project [12] which aims to preserve 18,000 hours of spoken Gaelic
from the archives of the BBC [24] , School of Scottish Studies
[25] and elsewhere, converting it to digital format so that it
does not decay; cataloging it and transcribing portions of it
while there are still informants who can identify the speakers
and the dialects; and making it as widely available as possible
so that it can be used for education, in particular in the areas
where it was first collected. A foretaste of this can be seen
in Proiseact Thiriodh [26].
There is much exciting work to be done in the coming years in
bringing the benefits of the computer age to the Celtic languages:
developing linguistic tools such as lexical databases; creating
interactive online lessons with text and sound; and ultimately
the most important of all, making the riches of old archive materials
easily accessible to a new generation.
1. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~bunsgoil/
2. http://www.cnag.org.uk/beurla/stats/
3. http://www.cnag.org.uk/beurla/stats/gmes9900.htm
4. http://db.svtc.org.uk/grdb/grdmain.htm
5. http://www.cne-siar.gov.uk/
6. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/
7. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/dealbhan/arainn/ostaig/sean/tog.2.jpg
8. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/dealbhan/arainn/ostaig/ur/tog.2.jpg
9. http://www.canan.co.uk/
10. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~martainn/Togalach.htm
11. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/tosg/
12. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/dualchas/
13. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/d3/
14. http://www.fjordinfo.no/titan_sf/
15. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/smo/c_goirid/
16. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/smo/roi-shealladh/english/
17. http://www.uhi.ac.uk/
18. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/smo/roi-shealladh/english/culture.shtml
19. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/smo/roi-shealladh/english/atlantic.shtml
20. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/sbg/
21. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/cgi-bin/sbg
22. http://www.csis.ul.ie/focloir/
23. http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/cognates/
24. http:///www.bbc.co.uk/alba/
25. http://www.pearl.arts.ed.ac.uk/SoSS/
26. http://www.tiriodh.ed.ac.uk/
In this paper, research activities on Speech Synthesis
in Breton and teaching tools based upon speech and software technology
are described. The Text-To-Speech synthesis (T.T.S.) system is
composed of two main modules: a linguistic processor and an acoustic
processor using diphone concatenation; The bilingual (Breton /
French) spoken dictionary is composed of indexes allowing the
use of various word searching techniques. Pronunciation of words
and sentences is obtained through Speech Synthesis. It is possible
to type a text within another application, to access the word
meaning and to run a spell-check.
In 1994, T.E.S. (Ti Embann ar Skolioù brezhonek, editor
for Breton schools), I.R.I.S.A. (Institute of Research on Software
Engineering and Random Systems), the universities of Rennes I
and II and Skol Vreizh decided to work together to develop educational
tools based on computer and speech technology. Since there was
a lack of technical and linguistic resources, it was decided to
go ahead step by step with limited but realistic objectives
having the objective of producing simple educational tools within
a reasonable period of time, in mind. The project presented here
consists of:
The T.T.S. system is made up of two main components: a linguistic
processor and an acoustic one.
The aim of this module is to convert the input text into a sequence
of phones and to specify the prosodic information automatically.
Pre-requisite linguistic studies
In order to perform such a task, a number of linguistic studies
had to be carried out. The first step, concerning the text-to-phoneme
translation, was done by Paskal An Intañv [1]. However,
we had major difficulty trying to establish a realistic prosody
model for the Breton language. No accurate linguistic study has
been carried on that field to our knowledge. Therefore, we had
to build a generic model based on statistic measurements on a
small corpus of isolated words first, then phrases and sentences.
This study also enabled the development team to determine typical
durations for each of the phonemes of the vocal database, along
with the typical fundamental frequency F0 suitable for the synthesis.
Letter - to - sound rules
About 400 letter - to - sound rules have been written for converting
any Breton text into a sequence of phones [1]; these rules take
each left and right orthographic context into account. Examples
of rules are given here:
a ã / + gn, n, ñ, m;
this rule means that the letter "a " has to be pronounced as ã (a nasal vowel) when it is followed by one of the following letters: gn, n, ñ or m.
anv ã n o / + ioù, _; (the graphemic sequence "anv" is uttered like /ãno/ at the end of a word or when followed by the orthographic chain "ioù")
ai a i / + g, goù;
ai a j;
These rules are used in the spoken dictionary to obtain the phonetic
transcription of any sentence related to the meanings of a given
word. They are not applied to the dictionary entries.
Prosodic processing
This important part of a speech synthesis system involves the
prediction of the duration of each phone of the phonetic sequence
and, if relevant, the pitch specifications: locations and F0 values.
The breton prosodic module is composed of three main components:
The objective of this acoustic processing is to create a speech
signal from the prosodic - phonetic sequence as defined in the
preceding section.
The Speech signal is generated by means of the diphone concatenation
technique with the MBROLA (Multi Band Re-synthesis OverLap Add)
synthesis system from the University of Mons [2]. Like with the
TD - PSOLA technique (Time Domain Pitch Synchronous Overlap and
Add [4]) the speech signal is built up by adding overlapping speech
frames directly in the time domain. MBROLA is able to smooth spectral
discontinuities arising at diphone junction points.
The diphone data base was built up after creating a text corpus,
recording it and segmenting the corresponding speech signals.
The first step was to establish a list of phones derived from
the standard Breton phonemes inventory: it is composed of 11 oral
vowels, 8 nasal vowels, 3 semi-vowels and 22 consonants; it is
necessary to add 15 diphtongs to this set; that is a total of
60 phonemes; short vowels were distinguished from long vowels
and the final set is composed of 80 phones; the corresponding
list of Breton diphones was then obtained and a corpus of 3200
logatomes (meaningless artificial words) covering the 3200 Breton
diphones was created. A set composed of the most frequent words
and of short sentences was added to this corpus for further linguistic
and prosodic studies. A female native speaker of central Brittany
was recorded, uttering the items of this corpus.
The SNORRI software package [5] was used to segment and to label
this speech data base and to extract the diphones; each diphone
is characterised by its name, its duration (beginning, middle
and end points) and by the related waveforms. This database was
then sent to the University of Mons where it was re-synthesised
and transformed in order to be used by the MBROLA synthesiser.
The first application is a spoken Breton / French dictionary available
on CDROM freely distributed to class-rooms and sold to other users.
This dictionary contains about 35000 definitions on both sections
and gives ability to navigate on both Breton and French lexical
entries; it allows us to listen to diverse pronunciation variants
of Breton words.
The original data was taken from a dictionary paper book [5],
available on electronic form (MS Word files); they were
translated into the R.T.F. (Rich Text Format) format and then
to HTML (Hyper Text Mark up Language) and parsed to obtain a lexical
data base with logical distinction of both word definitions and
elements within definitions. For each part (French or Breton)
of the dictionary, an index of words was built up automatically
by using scripts. Orthographic as well as phonetic variants found
within the word definitions are included in this index; for instance
two different lexical words EMGANNER and EMGANNOUR are extracted
from the following concise entry:
EMGANNER, -OUR […] […] g. -ion b.1 batailleur,
-se
Some abbreviations are related to phonetic variants like in the
following example:
FUMañ,-iñ ['fymã, [-], [fymi]
vb., s'irriter.
In this case, the phoneme [ã]
of the first phonetic transcription must be replaced by the dialectal
variant [ã]; but it is not easy to know to what
part of the original pronunciation the phonetic variant must be
linked. The typographic conventions commonly used in dictionary
printing give us the ability to split definitions between several
fields: Key field (the word itself), Grammatical Category, Phonetic
of common pronunciations, French translation and unstructured
text of definition.
The searching of a word in the dictionary was formerly based on
grep-style research involving regular expressions; finally that
procedure was abandoned, due to the lack of efficiency of the
algorithm. The look-up system is now based on a much more efficient
tree research applied to a tree-like index built from the entries
of the dictionary and their orthographic variations (mutations,
plurals, and so on); it is characterised by the following properties:
This component has been implemented as an OCX component, which
means that it may be used by other applications.
When a word is found in the index, its definition is displayed
and its usual phonetic variants and stress marks are shown; they
are displayed using the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)
symbols. Each dialectal pronunciation can be heard by clicking
on its phonetic transcription. For instance three dialectal phonetic
variants are given for the word "kenavo" which means
"good bye":
KENAVO+
var. KENAVEZO [kna'vo]
, [cnvo], [ cn'vu] ... K-L
estl. au revoir, parfois. Adieu
The speech signal is generated by synthesising this phonetic sequence.
The prosody generator used in the dictionary works differently
from the general sentence synthesiser, however: it does not use
the letter-to-sound rules, but it directly uses the IPA phonetic
description instead. Besides, it is not made up of three separate
modules, but of only one module which splits the words into syllables
and computes the durations and frequencies on the fly.
The major advantage with this approach is that the synthesiser
does not rely on letter-to-phoneme rules, nor on other rules to
determine the stress and intonation on the word: it directly uses
the exact phonetic description given by the dictionary, including
the stress marks. The major drawback is the impossibility of enhancing
the prosody model in a simple way: the source code has to be modified,
which may be a difficult task given the lack of modularity of
the prosody generator.
This word pronunciation has been completed by the sentence pronunciation
module. Sentences showing words in use are displayed on the interface
within a specific frame and can be selected. In this case, the
Text-to-Speech Synthesiser is set in motion to generate the speech
signal of the selected text.
Since this vocal dictionary has been designed to be used mainly
by children, the interface is as friendly as possible. Very simple
graphic illustrations and animated video have been incorporated
into the system; help facilities and several buttons allow the
user to be familiarised with this tool very quickly, to deal with
the abbreviations, to listen to specific sounds, to modify the
duration of the synthesised speech, etc.
A first evaluation of the beta test product took place in 1998;
a dozen teachers tested this version; the interface was modified
and new functions were added like the possibility of typing in
a French word and directly accessing its Breton translation, phonetic
transcription and pronunciation. This is very helpful to people
not familiar with the Breton language. The possibility of displaying
the dialectal origin of each variant of pronunciation is another
functionality to be integrated. The speech synthesis must also
be improved at both level (segmental and supra-segmental).
This dictionary has been reorganised like a Data Base in order
to use specific tools related to Access:
An automatic procedure allows the new structure to be created
and the HTML definitions to be exported towards the data base.
For each section of the dictionary the word management is composed
of two parts: spellings and definitions, each of them with a specific
indexing approach.
The indexing of definitions is made up of 5 items: word name,
list of relevant spelling forms, preceding definition number based
on the alphabetical order, following definition number, personalization
flag.
The index of the spelling variants is a tree-structured one with
each node corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. With this
kind of structure, the word search is very fast. In order to deal
with the lack of accents, non relevant orthographic forms have
been added. The searching of a word is characterised by the following
possibilities: exact search, search with wildcards and approximate
search.
The user can customise the dictionary by adding new words, deleting
added words, modifying existing words. Each new word can be edited
and given a definition and spelling or phonetic variants can be
added. For existing words, it is possible to modify their definition,
to add new examples of use and to modify spelling and phonetic
forms. This is done in a customised file and the original one
is not altered by these modifications.
The newly created lookup system of the dictionary was implemented
in an OCX component, easily re-useable in lots of Windows-based
applications, and particularly in word processors. The idea is
to use this research facility in the dictionary in order to read
a text, and look up every word of the text in the dictionary,
suggesting replacement words based on the list of the relevant
spelling forms, when the searched entry is not found. It only
takes a few hours to create a macro which performs this kind of
process on a selected text in Microsoft Word97, for example, using
Visual Basic for Applications.
There are two phonetic/prosody synthesis systems working in parallel
in the current dictionary application; one is purely based on
text-to-speech rules, the other is based on the IPA phonetic descriptions
listed in the dictionary. Our final goal is to merge both systems
into one, using rules for the synthesis of sentences, but also
using the phonetic descriptions of individual words, contained
in the dictionary, as much as possible since rules always have
exceptions. Considering the fact that these rules are not clearly
defined in any detailed linguistic study, we also think that it
might be interesting for a final user to add his/her own rules,
depending on the targeted dialect; this would enable the research
team to get the feedback from their users and to integrate new
sets of rules.
With the re-organisation of the dictionary database, it should
be easier to choose which fields of a record should be displayed
in the interface. Some users may wish to have only one phonetic
description corresponding to their dialect; other may not need
all the examples mentioned in the record, and so on. It should
be possible in the future to configure the interface so that only
the desired fields be displayed.
Another interesting point would be the possibility of customising
the dictionary, not only for the contents of the definitions,
but also for the multimedia objects (pictures, sound, movies)
to be associated with a given definition. Since it is difficult
for our work-team to associate such an object with all the entries,
we thought it interesting to leave it up to teachers, for instance,
and to the imagination of the end-users. A special feature will
be inserted into the editor to provide for this possibility.
[1] An Intanv P. (1994) War hent fonetikadur ar Brezhoneg /
Sur les chemins de la phonétisation du Breton, mémoire
de maîtrise, université de Rennes II.
[2] Dutoit T. (1997) An introduction to Text-To-Speech Synthesis,
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
[3] Favereau F. (1993) Geriadur ar Brezhoneg a-vremañ,
Brezhoneg / Galleg, Galleg / Brezhoneg, Skol Vreizh, Morlaix,
1993.
[4] Hamon C., Moulines E. & Charpentier F. (1989) A diphone
synthesis system based on time domain prosodic modifications of
speech, ICASSP, 1989: 248-251.
[5] Laprie Y. (1999) Snorri, a software for speech sciences, Method and Tool Innovation for Speech Science Education, UCL, London, 1999.
This article analyses the results of journal-writing
in Irish language classes in a university setting. Advantages
and disadvantages of the project are weighed, concluding that
it is an effective and stimulating supplement to other teaching
methods but that it involves much extra commitment on the part
of the teacher and extra participation on the part of the student.
The article also discusses recent changes made from the original
project as first assigned in 1994-95 to streamline its administration
and assessment.
From puppet shows to harp demonstrations to robot dogs, from translations
of haiku to translations of the sayings of the Delphic oracle,
I would never have imagined the creative outpouring which has
resulted from the journal writing segment of my first- and second-year
Irish language classes at the University of Pennsylvania. While
I expected brief prose passages about Thanksgiving dinners and
summer vacations, with perhaps an occasional poem or dialogue,
the multidimensional, artistic and thought-provoking projects
inspired me to start videotaping them and these videotapes provide
the material for this analysis.
A preliminary report on this was presented at NAACLT in 1995 and
published in the first volume of the Journal of Celtic Language
Learning as "Journal Writing as a Method of Student Motivation
in Irish Language Class." Today's paper will discuss changes
I have made in the project since its earliest versions, other
class activities derived from it, and further thoughts on how
to make this activity an even more efficient and fun way of learning
and teaching.
The original assignment was to write about 50 words weekly, describing
scenes or activities or writing conversations, being sure to use
some of the most recently covered grammar and vocabulary. Students
could also use up to five new words per entry, to be listed below
the passage with categories such as gender or declension. Specific
suggestions were made on certain structures to avoid, those that
would lead the student down complex avenues of sentence structure
and word order. The last day of the semester would be devoted
to oral presentations of an entry the student selected. The weekly
written entries would be corrected, but not graded, and the oral
presentation would be graded more on preparation and delivery
than on unfamiliar grammar. Students were encouraged to experiment
in small ways, knowing that unpredictable grammar errors would
not count against them but that grammar already covered would
be graded.
In most aspects, the project is the same as when first assigned,
except for the following:
Advantages: The project presents both advantages and disadvantages
to students and to the instructor, but the advantages far outweigh
the disadvantages. Students seem to enjoy these projects very
much, relaxing, using the language in a meaningful way, and learning
both about Irish culture and about each other. After the first
session of oral presentations, the class becomes closer as a small
group, in the sociological sense as pioneered by Olmsted, and
works together, providing mutual assistance in the mastery of
difficult material and a very challenging language.
The journal presentations have also led to further similar projects
which likewise combine L2 writing and speaking practice, cultural
information, and an opportunity for students to somewhat personalise
the class material. Specifically these projects have included
a St. Bridget's Day presentation, a St. Patrick's Day presentation,
and the latest addition, the surprisingly popular "parts
of speech" presentation.
Students who may struggle with grammar, vocabulary retention,
and listening comprehension, blossom when given the opportunity
to say what they did on St. Patrick's Day or to describe the St.
Bridget's Bread their grandmother used to make. Many foreign language
teachers have observed that students often learn very well from
each other, and along these lines, having different students responsible
for defining and providing examples of prepositional phrases,
vocative case usage, plural endings, or verbs in the past tense
seems to make basic grammar, now considered almost taboo in language
pedagogy, appealing and conquerable. For this project, the students
prepare a handout with a definition of their topic, examples culled
from the textbook, and questions which they will ask the class
using the relevant features.
Disadvantages: The more freedom you give the students,
the less control you have, both of the overall cultural content
and message and in specifics (are grammar and vocabulary correctly
presented? genders? declensions? consistency in verb tense? confusion
with Scottish Gaelic or Hiberno-English?).
There are some logistical concerns. The one thing which I told
them not to bring in to the sessions at the audio-visual center
was any type of food or drink, since these were prohibited in
all parts of the lab. Prior to that, some of my classes had included
a soda bread competition, with a student vote and handmade award
certificate in Irish for best soda bread, and other miniature
feasts for which I had provided placards with the Irish names
of the foods. Food is certainly a sure-fire way to stimulate interest
in learning, but that was not an option here. One presentation
which I would never have predicted caused momentary panic, at
least for me as the instructor: the student brought in a brick
of dried peat and calmly proceeded to pull out a barbecue lighter
and lit the brick. The room quickly filled with the pungent peat
smell and the student started to describe his trip to Ireland
where he saw peat bogs and bought the souvenir. I immediately
realised this might set alarms off and asked him to extinguish
the brick, which he did. No alarms rang and we continued class
in a vaguely aromatic setting that in fact might put one nicely
in mind of sitting by a turf fire, hearing stories, conversation,
or "craic." I was glad ours was the last class of the
evening in that building.
I have been considering the idea of not having the students present
a written text to the class, just the vocabulary words on a handout,
but I am concerned that students would feel more limited in expression
or in how much their classmates comprehend. Instead, I am encouraging
students to write up their oral presentation earlier in the semester,
so it can be corrected before distribution. Another incentive
that I may introduce is to split apart the credit for this assignment
so part of the credit is for a revised follow-up written handout
that the student will distribute. For many students this is a
much higher motivation than the abstract concept that their handout
may contain errors.
Another way in which I think the projects could be made even more
effective is to require more interactivity following each the
presentation. Currently the students are required to ask each
class member a question about their project. They can write the
questions down but the questions are not supposed to be on the
handouts. One of the most difficult barriers to break is the reluctance
of the students in the audience to ask their own questions to
the speaker. So far, I haven't made this an official requirement,
but am considering it as a way to create more conversation and
have more practice.
Ultimately, the more minutia in grading, the more likely you are
to have all parts of a project completed and to have consistent
participation. Of course, the more such minutia, the more work
for the teacher, but it is certainly stimulating and rewarding
for all involved!
Blyn, R. 1995. "Journal Writing as a Method of Student Motivation
in Irish Language Class," Journal of Celtic Language Learning
1.
Connor, U., and R.B. Kaplan, eds. Writing Across Languages: Analysis
of L2 Text. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Elbow, P. 1973. Writing Without Teachers. NY: Oxford Univ. Press
Gedeon, É. 1993. "Using Dialogue Journals to Develop
Interactive Communicative Ability and Student-Teacher Rapport."
Paper presented at the Hungarian Language Seminar, Penn Language
Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. March.
Harlig, J. 1993. "Using Dialogue Journals as a Lexical and
Grammatical Diagnostic Tool." Paper presented at the Hungarian
Language Seminar, Penn Language Center, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, Pa. March.
Kramsch, C. 1993. "Proficiency Plus: The Next Step."
Penn Language News 7 (Spring): 1, 3, 13-18.
Krashen, S. 1985. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language
Learning. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Kroll, B., ed. 1990. Second Language Writing: Research Insights
for the Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (The
Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series).
Olmsted, M. S. 1959. The Small Group. NY: Random House.
Sullivan, N. and D. van Becker. 1982. Journal to Essay: A Sequential
Program in Composition. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt.
Zamel, V. 1983. "The Composing Processes of Advanced ESL Students: Six Case Studies." TESOL Quarterly 17: 165-87.
Chom a ra ur seurt tabou war ar brezhoneg c'hoazh.
'Benn lemel 'nezhañ penn-da-benn 'vefe ret kas ur "politikerezh
anavout" da benn : dav 'vefe d'ar Stad c'hall anaout
ar brezhoneg, evel just ; met dav 'vefe ivez d'ar vrezhonegerien
desket anavout ar vrezhonegerien a-vihanik. Etre an daou rummad
tud-se zo pontoù da sevel.
In 1993, while doing a study among students from the public high-school
of Landerneau (Finistère) on individual and family practice
of the Breton language, I observed the following reactions. When
I presented the theme of my study, many students could not help
laughing, others blushed and only a few of the "best"
students sitting in the front row remained calm, raising their
hand to ask for further technical details. This was exactly the
behavior that my junior high-school classmates and I had adopted
twenty years ago while attending a class on sexual education…
This awakened my curiosity. Might there be a link between the
repression of the Breton language and the repression of sexuality ?
Later in the 1990's, as I was carrying out semi-directive interviews
on Breton identity, this premonition seemed to be confirmed by
the lapsus or the embarrassment expressed by several of the adults
being questioned. Some of them seemed to harbor a secret and deep-seeded
discomfort regarding issues of language and identity. These questions
evoked something dirty and immoral, perhaps even dangerous, which
should be hidden at all cost. Was this not a taboo, or the remains
of a taboo ? This is the hypothesis I shall be presenting
here. As far as the Breton language is concerned, there remains
a taboo. A policy of recognition is needed for such a taboo to
be lifted once and for all.
"Taboo" is a Polynesian word meaning a prohibition system
of a sacred nature applied to something impure. If one admits
that we are indeed dealing with a taboo, then the "sacred"
might well be the French Republic "one and undivided",
which supposedly liberates individuals from community oppression
and gives them access to modernity and to universality. That which
is Breton would then be considered "impure", such as
"tradition", which inhibits individuals and binds them
to their social condition and to their ancestral territory. Finally
the prohibition system would be mainly, but not only, enforced
by the school system. During the entire first half of the century
schools did indeed punish children who spoke Breton, and went
so far as to set up a system encouraging them to tell on each
other, thus giving them a humiliating image of themselves. Yet
in the broader sense, the prohibition system is not limited only
to schools. From the 19th century until the second World War,
images of backward Bretons and of an insignificant and ridiculous
Brittany were spread across France by way of literature1,
popular writings, travel guides, comic books, songs, figurines,
etc. The comic-book character, Becassine, a good-for-all maid
"so stupid but so devoted"2, is a perfect
illustration of the widespread image of Brittany as folkloric
and ridiculous. As a result of all this, many generations of Bretons
have harbored feelings of shame, even perhaps of self-loathing,
leading them to repress their singularity - most notably the pleasure
of practicing their mother tongue - as if these were inadmissible
practices. Today this shame and self-hatred are far from having
disappeared. They are latent among many Bretons, and especially
present among those who felt particularly stigmatized for their
language or their accents. Such is the case of Aline (a farmer
born in 1960) who compares the Breton language to an infirmity.
Aline : When I was little in school it was almost
shameful to live in an environment like we had at home. I mean,
to have parents who always spoke to us in Breton (…) We felt
this to be a defect. And we had to hide it. So we considered it
a bit like an abscess that we shouldn't show. (…) In my opinion,
that's what it's like. Like someone who has a lump on his back.
It's a handicap3.
Helen, born in 1953 and married to a fisherman, describes how
her accent represents the trauma of her life.
Helen : I'm a bit embarrassed because of my Breton
accent. And ever since I was very small in school I was teased
because of it. And that stayed with me until today. (…) I
was embarrassed, really embarrassed, yes. (…) Even though
at home I was forbidden to speak Breton. My parents always spoke
Breton and forbade us to answer in Breton. Forbidden ! (…)
My teachers often told me… Teasing me a little. They said :
"But it's going to prevent you from finding work !"
(…) Sometimes I'd say to myself : "Oh, if I could
have lived somewhere else, if I could go away… " (…)
I even cried about it for a while. Really. I was really affected !
(…) So when someone came to the house, like now, the way
you just arrived, I would leave. I would go out of the house.
I would go down to the river, over there4.
Despite these terrible examples, it seems that today the taboo
is progressively being lifted.
The first sign that the taboo is being lifted is that for some
time now one has been hearing much talk about the Breton language,
especially in the press and in regional media. In fact so much
so that a reporter at Ouest-France5 wrote :
"As far as the Breton language is concerned, the less it
is spoken, the more it is talked about"… Indeed, the
rates of practice of the Breton language continue to decrease :
from 75 % at the beginning of the century, they have gone
down to 17 % in the 1990's (approximately 240 000 speakers).
The taboo is being lifted because the Breton language presently
poses much less of a threat to French unity. Nowadays there are
no more monolingual native speakers of Breton, and the rate of
practice is so low that the few remaining people who still consider
the language to be a threat to the Republic appear to be waging
an out of date battle. Presently, 88 % of those living in
lower-Brittany think it "necessary to preserve the Breton
language"6. The ambiguity lies in this notion
of "preservation". Do we want to preserve traces of
our linguistic heritage in the same way that we preserve totems
in museums ? Or do we want to lift the implicit prohibition
which still weighs upon many minds and encourage both popular
practice of the Breton language and its transmission through the
generations ?
Lifting the taboo would mean bringing Bretons to sincerely believe
that expressing oneself in Breton is not shameful, and consequently,
that they can pass on their language to their children. Today
we are still far from having reached such a point. While young
militants have struggled for recognition of the Breton language,
for visibility within French society, and for the language to
be taught in schools and used in the media, in practice they have
not been followed by native speakers of the language. Members
of the latter group (retired people, farmers, factory workers
and artisans), are mostly over fifty years old, relatively uneducated
and settled in rural areas. Their practice of the Breton language
is endogamous. In other words, they only speak Breton with people
who belong to the same milieu as themselves (family members, friends,
neighbors), or sometimes with individuals whose age, accent, demeanor
and behavior indicate that they belong to a similar social group.
When a young person speaks Breton it disturbs their image of the
world. Except perhaps in recent years, ever since media coverage
of the Diwan7 schools has made them so popular.
Nowadays, meeting a child who speaks Breton has entered the realm
of possibilities for native speakers, but they still regard it
as unreal and artificial. When this happens, the first thing they
do is ask the parents whether the child attends a Diwan
school. Then they attempt to exchange a few words in Breton with
the child. But very rapidly they prefer to switch to French, considering
that "they do not speak the same Breton" or that the
child speaks "real Breton". As long as native speakers
remain passive witnesses to the cultural revival, the rate of
transmission of the language will remain close to zero8.
For indeed, new speakers of Breton are too few to have any real
impact on overall statistics. What can be done to reverse the
tendency ? Here are a few suggestions.
First of all, it would be useful to admit that there is a taboo,
or rather that it existed in the past and has left wounds which
remain unhealed. In order to free native speakers from their embarrassment,
one must act positively. Diwan has done this by creating
a parallel school system. Any form of demand expressed through
negative actions (violence, vandalism, etc.) is likely to "recharge"
the taboo like a battery and to confront the native speakers once
again with their negative identity.
Secondly, a policy of recognition should be developed. As Charles
Taylor explains : "recognition is not simply a way of
being polite to people, it is a vital human need"9.
If such a policy is developed by the Republican State, which is
still considered in some ways as sacred, it will have immediate
effects. However, it is obvious that the State will enforce such
a policy only if it is firmly encouraged to do so. The Breton
militants have been expressing such encouragement for years now.
I wish however to point out that a policy of recognition should
not come only from the State, but it should begin with the promoters
of the Breton language themselves.
Recognition begins with humility. All those who have worked at
collecting idioms will agree to the following : each conversation
with a native speaker offers treasures of unknown expressions
and words, colorful images and wonderful proverbs to those who
know how to listen. The wealth of those born with the Breton language
is immeasurable. Yet it is not always easy for the young, urban,
well-educated militants, often working in the academic and intellectual
professions, to see that in the backwoods of the countryside,
the most humble speakers remain the true kings of the Breton language.
This, however, is the most important fact. Yet as long as native
speakers do not value it and do not pass it on to their children,
their wealth remains unproductive. This is why its value must
be recognized.
In order to do this, one must first of all heighten the neo-Breton
speakers' awareness of the fact that learning any language necessarily
entails immersing oneself among native speakers. Too often do
we forget this obvious fact. Yet the truth is that colloquial
Breton is made up of a variety of dialects found mainly in rural
areas. Moreover, as we mentioned earlier, it is not considered
"natural" in such an environment to be speaking in Breton
to a young person, especially if the youngster is from the city.
In order to communicate with native speakers, young neo-Breton
speakers will therefore have to overcome their elders' resistance.
With this objective in mind, they will have to become familiar
with those living in rural areas. This requires them to they learn
three lessons : first, some notions of dialectology ;
second, practical knowledge of a few of the social codes most
in use among those living in a rural environment ; third,
a capacity to reflect upon the meaning of their own practice and
upon the kind of language they wish to use and to transmit. Once
these basic lessons have been learned, different types of training
may be proposed.
The fact that throughout Brittany one finds approximately 240 000
native speakers should make it possible to set up an organized
network of internships among rural families, for the benefit of
those adults who wish to learn the language. The impact of such
a network would be great. It would improve the quality of the
language learned by adults, while at the same time having a psychological
impact upon the native speakers whose language would thus be given
more recognition. This might eventually bring them to develop
a desire to read and write in their language.
Indeed, almost all native speakers of Breton are illiterate in
their native language. Teaching them how to read and write should
be a priority. Yet, strangely enough, there are practically no
such training for those whose mother tongue is Breton, even though
when it is offered reactions are quite favorable.
In addition to this, a simple policy aimed at helping children
learn good quality Breton could be set up in schools. Each child
would be required to meet regularly with an "elderly friend"
living in his or her neighborhood. Elderly people would no doubt
be very happy to make such a contribution and to receive the visit
of a child to whom they could pass on part of their linguistic
heritage.
In order to carry out the above mentioned steps it would be very
useful to develop teaching materials which combine the vernacular
language and the more classical written language. Such efforts
have already been made, and should be encouraged. Finally, one
might create opportunities for Breton-speakers from the city and
Breton-speakers from the countryside to meet with each other,
by, for example, inviting native speakers to visit schools or
language classes, or by sending schoolchildren and students to
visit the homes of native-speakers. The ideal solution would be
to set up several permanent meeting centers, offering various
types of cultural activities, likely to attract both types of
speakers and whose function would be to encourage regular exchanges.
Is the Breton language's present popularity merely a mean for
cultural distraction or is it a sign of reproduction ? If
the first hypothesis is true, rates of transmission among locals
are likely to remain very low and the practice of Breton limited
to a happy few. In this case, the language would likely become
the cultural capital of a small community, similar to other present
day minority groups who are sometimes at risk of living in a closed
environment. The attempts at revival we are witnessing today might,
as always in cases of endogamy, produce a strange fruit :
a half-baked language made up of Breton or neo-Breton words and
of French syntax and pronunciation.
In order for the natural reproduction of a living species to take
place, two different partners must come together. As far as the
Breton language is concerned, these two partners are the native
speakers and the neo-Breton speakers.
1. For instance : Balzac, Les Chouans, Victor Hugo,
Quatrevingt-treize and Flaubert, Par les champs et par
les grèves.
2. Ory, Pascal, " La Bretagne dans la littérature
enfantine et la bande dessinée ", in Balcou
et Le Gallo (ed.), Histoire littéraire et culturelle
de la Bretagne, Paris-Genève, Champion-Slatkine, 1987,
t. 3, p. 373.
3. Le Coadic, Ronan, L'Identité bretonne, Rennes,
Presses universitaires de Rennes and Terre de Brume, 1998, p. 197.
4. Idem, p. 187.
5. Ouest-France is a regional daily newspaper. It has the
highest circulation of any French daily newspaper.
6. Results of a poll on the practice of Breton done on a sample
of 2 500 people by the TMO Ouest Institute in March-April of 1997,
for Le Télégramme and France 3 Ouest. Cf.
Le Télégramme, April 12-13, 1997, last page.
7. The Diwan schools are cooperative schools in the Breton
language, created in 1977. Their popularity has led to the creation
of public and private catholic schools offering bilingual classes.
6 000 children are presently enrolled in the bilingual sections.
8. Laurent, Loeiz, " La connaissance du breton ",
Octant, n° 56-57, 1993, pp. 7-12.
9. Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalisme. Différence et
démocratie, Paris, Flammarion, 1994, p. 42.
Over the past ten years there have been many significant
developments in support of the Manx language. This paper attempts
to identify the most important issues which will need to be addressed
over the next 10 years.
In April 1998, I began work as 'Yn Greinneyder' (Manx Language
Development Officer) for Manx National Heritage (MNH) and the
Manx Heritage Foundation (MHF) the two main cultural/heritage
organisations in the Isle of Man. The primary task I was given
was to produce an Integrated Development Programme for Manx Gaelic
incorporating the work of public, private and voluntary organisations.
In writing this programme, I have built on two previous Manx Government
reports - "Report of the Select Committee on the Greater
Use of Manx Gaelic - 1984" and "The Future Development
of the Manx Language - A report to Tynwald by the Department of
Education (DoE) - 1995".
In considering the long term viability of our language two immediate
areas for action are readily identifiable. We must improve and
expand the facilities for teaching Manx, and we must do more to
show the majority of people living in the Isle of Man that Manx
is worthy of support. Education has perhaps the most important
role to play in this regard, though Manx Gaelic can be used in
Economic, Social and Political Development and in the Media, Arts
and Cultural Development to help achieve these goals.
Perhaps the most important element I have had to address in the
programme is the reason for bothering to support or develop a
language which for much of the twentieth century was being declared
dead by prominent linguists. I have endeavoured to do this by
expanding on the cultural significance of Manx Gaelic and its
related traditional culture.
Through cultural reconstruction the wide range of interests which
make up contemporary Manx culture in Mann can be brought together
to build and strengthen our sense of place, community and national
identity, which have been considerably weakened over recent decades.
If this reconstruction is not to be wholly artificial, it must
draw heavily on our traditional, Manx Gaelic derived culture.
I have used the themes of cultural reconstruction/development
and sense of community and identity throughout the programme to
reinforce my reasoning for development in the areas outlined below.
Manx Gaelic currently receives support from the Department of
Education (DoE), MNH, MHF and the IOM Arts Council, however, the
level of support remains modest when compared with support given
to Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Irish. It is also true to say that
Government support for Manx Gaelic is to some extent haphazard
in its application and the few existing Departmental budgets for
Manx Gaelic are far from secure.
If there is to be a successful expansion of provision of Manx
Gaelic services, even to meet current demand, then there must
be greater security in the support infrastructure for the language.
To this end it is important that either a current Government agency
or department, or a new Government body be established to take
specific responsibility for the development and coordination of
Government policy on Manx Gaelic together with the implementation
of this policy.
I would envisage that this proposed body might include political
representation through Tynwald members, representation from appropriate
Government Departments, and, most importantly, representation
from the voluntary organisations such as Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh
(Manx Gaelic Society), Mooinjer Veggey (Manx Preschool Organisation)
and Caarjyn ny Gaelgey (Friends of the Manx Gaelic). The body
would have a similar function to the MHF in terms of providing
grant aid to Manx Gaelic projects, as well as employing at least
two full time development officers.
Of these officers, one would be responsible for administration,
policy development and coordination of Manx Gaelic policy throughout
Government. This officer would work with the DoE, MNH, MHF and
other Manx Gaelic Governmental organisations providing support
and advice as appropriate. The second officer would provide support
for adult and preschool education (including resource development,
promotion and administrative support) and would introduce and
manage a suitable support structure for Manx Gaelic related cultural
activities such as music, song, dance, folklore and literature
(including Manx English).
To keep up with current grant aid to Manx Gaelic, the new body
would need to have a grants budget of around £40-60,000.
The officers would work closely with organisations which received
aid to ensure effective use of the money was made and that different
organisations were not working needlessly on the same subjects.
Department of Education - The DoE is currently providing a very
effective programme for raising the profile of Manx and ensuring
that a large proportion of children in Manx schools attend Manx
lessons during their school years. The introduction of the Teisht
Chadjin Ghaelgagh TCG and endeavours to introduce an 'A' level
in Manx are crucially important in ensuring that Manx is taken
seriously as an academic discipline. However, despite overwhelming
pressure for more teachers for the Manx language team to ensure
adequate provision throughout primary and secondary schools, only
modest staffing increases have been forthcoming. Bearing in mind
the high level of parental support for Manx in schools, it is
essential that the IOM Government, through DoE, makes a commitment
to ensuring that the teaching of Manx in Manx schools is given
a higher priority.
While the current DoE programme is providing an invaluable service
in terms of promotion and understanding of Manx Gaelic, it is
unlikely that it will produce many, if any, fluent Manx speakers.
Through the significant work of Mooinjer Veggey, a growing number
of parents wish to send their children to a Manx medium primary
unit, where their children would be taught through the medium
of Manx Gaelic. A new organisation 'Parents for Gaelic Medium
Education' has been lobbying the DoE for the establishment of
such a unit with the parents of over 20 children committed to,
or very interested in sending their children to a Manx Gaelic
Medium Unit (MGMU).
In similar units in Scotland, children become fluent understanders
of Gaelic in their first year in the unit and rapidly become competent
speakers thereafter. The effect of just 10 years operation of
a fairly small MGMU would be to yield up to 80 fluent Manx speaking
children - at least 12 times the number of children who became
fluent in the last 10 years.
Such children would be the teachers, writers, playgroup leaders,
etc.. of the future and would ensure the long term survival of
Manx. If we are to achieve this reproductively significant number
of fluent Manx speaking children, then the DoE must support the
establishment of this unit.
Mooinjer Veggey - Mooinjer Veggey currently operates at four different
locations throughout the island, has over 60 children registered
and employs 15 members of staff. Mooinjer Veggey shows clearly
how Manx medium education is successful and has parental support,
as well as demonstrating the potential economic and social development
which can be achieved through Manx Gaelic based initiatives.
Mooinjer Veggey currently relies on very high levels of voluntary
work from its committee and staff to ensure its success. Recent
expansion of the group could lead to an undermining of Mooinjer
Veggey's achievements so far, unless paid administrative and development
workers are employed by the group. Mooinjer Veggey has been lucky
to receive funding from MHF and DoE, however, this support is
very small when compared with the funding available to similar
groups in Scotland and Wales. Guaranteed funding for general preschool
work as well as higher levels of specific Gaelic grants for preschool
education is essential if Mooinjer Veggey is to achieve its full
potential.
General - There remains considerable scope for development and
expansion in the voluntary sector in terms of adult education.
We desperately need more courses for teaching Manx, particularly
intensive and immersion courses, and a centrally based comprehensive
resource centre housing all currently available material would
reduce the amount of time wasted in producing resources which
already exist. Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh and/or Caarjyn ny Gaelgey
must work in conjunction with Government agencies to ensure that
these important issues are addressed.
In trying to win the argument for greater support and development
of Manx Gaelic, the ways in which the language can be used to
bring medium to long term economic benefits to Mann are of fundamental
importance. Use of Manx in cultural tourism, the work of MNH,
in business as a 'branding' tool, and the increasing need for
adequate support services for education and fluent speakers (including
publishing, broadcasting and IT) will generate new employment
and small business opportunities.
To understand the significance of Manx it must be clearly identified
at the heart of our native culture. If people are to be drawn
to Manx Gaelic it must be demonstrably an essential element of
contemporary culture and artistic life in Mann. Language planners
use the promotion and development of cultures associated with
minority languages as an invaluable way of reestablishing links
between communities and their disregarded languages. We will use
similar methods to promote better access to, and understanding
of Manx Gaelic through folklore, music, literature (including
Manx-English) and the arts.
The use of Manx in broadcasting, publishing, festivals and other
promotional events has been increasing in recent years. The second
development officer, suggested earlier in this paper, would have
responsibility for ensuring that the growth in these areas would
continue, providing an improving service for fluent speakers and
learners.
It is important that a greater understanding of the roles which
Manx can play, socially and politically be promoted in the Isle
of Man. Manx certainly can be, and indeed is already being, used
as a branding tool both inside and outside the Isle of Man. For
example it is harder for a monoglot English speaking offshore
island with no culture to speak of to defend its semi-independent
political status, than it is for an island with its own strong
language, culture and heritage. While this is a fairly clear cut
matter to the 'Gaelophile' it is perhaps the most difficult area
to convince the cynic as the arguments are less clear cut and
often more subjective than objective.
An example of this difficulty is shown by the following : a Manxman
who argues strongly that he can be truly Manx without Manx Gaelic
has as valid a case as another Manxman, or a new resident for
that mater, who argues the opposite. There is no clear answer
here as both are right in their own context, however, to many
Manx residents (99.9% of respondents to my survey of Manx speakers
and learners) the belief that Manx Gaelic is an essential part
of Manx identity, is fundamental to their support of the language.
That said the potential roles for Manx in this area include continuing
to strengthen community and political identity, building links
with Celtic neighbours and other minority language regions in
Europe and helping to build greater political, social and cultural
awareness in Mann. This area builds on the work already being
done by MNH to bring cohesion to our collective understanding
of what the Isle of Man and its people are and where we have come
from, as well as indicating how this can be used beneficially
in the future.
The writing of this Integrated Development Programme has provided
an opportunity to secure the future of Manx Gaelic whose declining
fortunes are only just beginning to be reversed. An important
theme throughout the programme is that the development of Manx
Gaelic is not purely a linguistic matter, but a highly relevant,
contemporary, cultural issue. I have not attempted to draw up
a programme to restore the language to its ancient form, but rather
tried to create the conditions which will nurture a vibrant, 'relevant'
language which can be used for the social, political, cultural
and economic benefit of the Isle of Man.
Work has begun on a new computer-aided analysis of
the Cornish texts, using Kernewek Kemmyn as a standard
comparison instead of Unified Cornish. Suffixed and mutated words
need to be related to a head-word, but instead of tagging every
such word, they are identified using the principles of relational
data-bases; only homographs in the standard text need be tagged.
Details of this labour-saving procedure are given.
In the discussion about the CELT project at XI-ICCS in Cork in
1999, the remark was made that metatextual grammatical tags had
been added to scarcely any Celtic texts, because of the volume
of work involved. The work may be prohibitively onerous for syntactic
tagging, but for lexical tagging it is not. The labour may be
much reduced, because there is no need to tag every mutated or
suffixed word in a text. Instead, only the homographs need to
be tagged, to differentiate them, and recourse may be had to the
principles of relational databases to deal with the rest of the
exercise.
Cornish was spoken traditionally as a vernacular until the end
of the eighteenth century, and was revived in the twentieth century.
The first computer-aided analysis of traditional Cornish texts
was carried out by the present author (George, 1988), resulting
in a large data-base, used primarily in order to study the phonological
history of Cornish (George, 1984). Because the spelling of traditional
Cornish was not fixed, it was helpful to have a standardized orthography
to which the textual spellings could be related. Nance's Unified
Cornish (1929) was used for this purpose; the analysis showed,
however, that Unified Cornish could be improved (George, 1986),
and a new orthography, known as Kernewek Kemmyn,
was introduced to replace it.
The data-base was later used in the compilation of a new dictionary
using Kernewek Kemmyn (George, 1993). In this dictionary,
a tripartite authentication code was devised and given for each
head-word. This included an indication of where and how often
a given head-word was attested. It was the first time that such
detailed information had been provided in a Cornish dictionary,
and the idea received widespread acclaim. Nevertheless, the authentication
codes were not always complete or correct, as pointed out by Edwards
(1999). The relevant files have been edited in order to improve
the authentication codes, in anticipation of a new edition of
the dictionary. Rather than continue with this piecemeal approach,
however, the time has come to carry out another detailed analysis
of the texts.
The new computer-aided analysis is known as Nessa Tremen
'Second Pass', the first pass being the analysis carried
out in the early 1980s. George (1988) noted that "If the
work were to be done again, it would be better to use a phonemic
orthography as a comparison standard". Kernewek Kemmyn
is not completely phonemic, but is much more so than Unified
Cornish. Dunbar and George (1997, p. 11) described the idea of
Nessa Tremen as "using an iterative technique
to produce an ever more accurate solution".
Since the first analysis, computers have become much more powerful,
large and common. Whereas it was previously necessary to process
texts line by line, reading and writing data sequentially to work-files,
it is now possible to read the entire extant corpus of traditional
Cornish (< 2 MByte) into memory. A new suite of more efficient
programs (in FORTRAN) is being developed to process the data.
Another improvement is the more judicious arrangement of the texts
into blocks; e.g. the Ordinalia are separated into their three
separate plays, because they were written by different scribes.
In the texts, words are spelled in variable orthographies; they
may show initial mutation; nouns may show plural or singular
suffixes, and verbs may be conjugated. In a dictionary, words
are in a fixed orthography, and words with suffixes, if shown
at all, are attached to a head-word. A key aspect of Nessa
Tremen is the reduction of the words in traditional Cornish
texts to a form suitable for publication in a dictionary. The
process may be divided into three steps, from level 5 to level
2 in the following table:
1 ROOTS
determine the morphology
2 HEAD-WORDS kemmeres 'to take'
split into head-word and suffixes
3 UNMUTATED TEXT kemmeras 'he/she/it
took'
remove initial mutations
4 STANDARD TEXT gemmeras
put the word into Kernewek Kemmyn
gomeras, etc.
Although there are no plans at present to go above level 2 in
Nessa Tremen, it would be possible to go one stage
further, and split words into their constituent morphemes (level
1).
Andrew Hawke kindly provided the author with computer-readable
forms of most of the Cornish texts in their original spelling.
After completing the corpus, reference numbers were added to all
the lines (about 18000 of them). As an example, the following
is the opening stanza of Beunans Meriasek, written by Radulphus
Ton in 1504, with a literal translation into English appended.
BM.0001 me yw gylwys duk bryten / I am called the Duke of Brittany,
BM.0002 ha seuys a goys ryel / and risen from royal blood,
BM.0003 ha war an gwlascur cheften / and a ruler in the kingdom,
BM.0004 nessa 3en myterne vhell / second to the high king,
BM.0005 kyng conany / King Conan;
BM.0006 aye lynneth purwyr y thof / I am very truly of his lineage,
BM.0007 gwarthevyas war gvyls ha dof / master over wild and tame,
BM.0008 doutis yn mysk arly3y
/ feared among lords.
The first problem is that the orthography is not fixed. This is
not obvious from the eight lines shown here, but becomes so on
reading a larger sample; e.g. for 'to the', Ton sometimes wrote
3en (as here), and at other times then. Each word
therefore needs to be referred in the first instance to the equivalent
word in a standardized orthography. A double file was therefore
made of each block of text, with the original text (level 5) on
the left and the standard text in Kernewek Kemmyn (level
4) on the right. At the time of writing, not all blocks have yet
been finished. The author is indebted to Keith Syed for making
available versions of texts in Kernewek Kemmyn.
BM.0001 me yw gylwys duk bryten / My yw gelwys Dug Breten,
BM.0002 ha seuys a goys ryel / ha sevys a woes ryal,
BM.0003 ha war an gwlascur cheften / ha war an wlaskor chyften;
BM.0004 nessa 3en myterne vhell / nessa dhe'n myghtern ughel
BM.0005 kyng conany / King Konani:
BM.0006 aye lynneth pur~wyr y+th~of / a'y linyeth pur wir yth ov,
BM.0007 gwarthevyas war gvyls ha dof / gwarthevyas war wyls ha dov,
BM.0008 doutis yn mysk arly3y
/ doutys yn mysk arlydhi.
Since the division of words is not always the same in both versions,
the original text has been marked so as to correspond to the text
in Kernewek Kemmyn. The marker ~ is used to split
a word, and the marker + is used to join two words. Thus the three
words purwyr y thof is re-written as pur~wyr y+th~of,
so that the division and number of words corresponds to the
four words pur wir yth ov in the standard text.
The other modification made at this stage is to remove all punctuation
and most capitalization from the standard text, giving the following:
BM.0001 me yw gylwys duk bryten / my yw gelwys dug Breten
BM.0002 ha seuys a goys ryel / ha sevys a woes ryal
BM.0003 ha war an gwlascur cheften / ha war an wlaskor chyften
BM.0004 nessa 3en myterne vhell / nessa dhe'n myghtern ughel
BM.0005 kyng conany / king Konani
BM.0006 aye lynneth pur~wyr y+th~of / a'y linyeth pur wir yth ov
BM.0007 gwarthevyas war gvyls ha dof / gwarthevyas war wyls ha dov
BM.0008 doutis yn mysk arly3y
/ doutys yn mysk arlydhi
Direct lexical tagging would involve adding markers or tags to
all words in the standard text which are not in the form of a
head-word, to reduce them from level 4 to level 2. This process
might produce a text like the following:
BM.0001 my bos>S13 gelwel>PP dug Breten
BM.0002 ha sevel>PP a{of} 2<goes ryal
BM.0003 ha war an 2<gwlaskor chyften
BM.0004 nes>CP dhe'n myghtern ughel
BM.0005 %king Konani
BM.0006 a'y{of his} linyeth pur wyr yth bos>S11
BM.0007 gwarthevyas war 2gwyls ha dov
BM.0008 doutya>PP yn mysk
arloedh>PL
Here words with suffixes have been replaced by the appropriate
head-word, followed by the symbol > and a code to denote the
form of the suffix; words with initial mutation have been replaced
by the root form, preceded by a number indication the type of
mutation and the symbol <; and homographs have been distinguished
by putting the English meaning after the word in curly brackets.
In addition, the word king has been marked by the symbol
%, denoting an unassimilated English word.
It is clear that to add lexical tags like these to the whole corpus
would be a time-consuming task. Fortunately, there is no need
to go down this road. The alternative, which involves much less
labour, is to tag just the homographs. When these tags are included,
the stanza becomes:
BM.0001 me yw gylwys duk bryten / my yw gelwys dug breten BM.0002 ha seuys a goys ryel / ha sevys a7 woes ryal BM.0003 ha war an gwlascur cheften / ha war an wlaskor chyften BM.0004 nessa 3en myterne vhell / nessa dhe'n myghtern ughel BM.0005 kyng conany / %king konani BM.0006 aye lynneth pur~wyr y+th~of / a'y2 linyeth pur wir yth ov BM.0007 gwarthevyas war gvyls ha dof / gwarthevyas war wyls ha dov BM.0008 doutis yn mysk arly3y / doutys yn mysk arlydhi
The only two words which have been tagged are a and
a'y. Cornish has several words spelled a,
here distinguished by numerical tags: a0 'O'
(vocative, causing lenition); a1 'ah' (no mutation);
a2 (verbal particle); a4 'if' (causing
provection); a6 'goes'; a7 'of'.
The phrase a'y can mean 'of his' or 'of her', these
being distinguished respectively by the numerical tags 2 and 3
(because these are the numbers referring to the mutations which
they provoke).
In order to relate level 4 to level 2, it is necessary to set
up a file which lists every different word at level 4. For this
file unmutated and mutated forms (e.g. penn 'head',
its lenited form benn and its spirantized form fenn)
are listed separately. The file is known, rather prescriptively,
as LAW.TXT (i.e. List of Allowable Words). The following small
extract includes the word gelwys 'called', which
appears in the stanza from Beunans Meriasek.
2 gelmi hm 2kelmi 7 gelwel H VN gelwel *** 1 gelwes d 73 OM.2774 gelwel 2 gelwir d 18 gelwel 1 gelwis1 d 31 RD.0271 gelwel 1 gelwis3 d 33 BM.4428 gelwel 27 gelwys H AJ gelwys *** 7 gemmer dm 13 2kemmeres 1 gemmera' dmv 11 OM.1208 2kemmeres 6 gemmeras dm 33 2kemmeres 1 gemmerav dm 11 OM.1234 2kemmeres 9 gemmeres hm 2kemmeres
The present state of the file is by no means definitive, since
not all of the corpus has been processed. The extract does, however,
give an indication of the methodology used. The columns represent,
from left to right:
e.g. H = head-word, hm = mutated head-word, d = derivative, v = variant;
e.g. VN = verbal noun, AJ = adjective, 11 = 1st person singular present indicative
2 = lenition, 3 = spirantization, 4 = provection, 5 = mixed (as in text-books); here
<g-> represents lenited /k-/ as well as /g-/.
In this small extract, the following are noteworthy:
There is no need to tag every occurrence of each suffixed word;
instead, the referencing of such words to the relevant head-word
is done in the file LAW.TXT. For instance, instead of separately
tagging the six instances of gemmeras, the referencing
of this word to its head-form kemmeres is done once
and once only. This idea, which is used in relational data-bases,
saves work. Should it be nevertheless be desired to append lexical
tags to each suffixed word, then software could be written to
do this by machine.
A new computer-aided analysis of the Cornish texts, known as Nessa
Tremen, will use Kernewek Kemmyn as a standard
orthography for comparison. In relating individual words in the
texts to the appropriate head-forms in a dictionary, it will not
be necessary to add lexical tags to every mutated or suffixed
word. Instead, the principle of relational data-bases is used,
with purpose-written programs. This reduces the work-load considerably.
Dunbar, P. and George, K.J. (1997) Kernewek Kemmyn - Cornish
for the twenty-first century. Cornish Language Board, Saltash.
Edwards, R. (1999) Notennow Kernewek. Notes on the Cornish
texts published by Kernewek dre Lyther, Sutton Coldfield.
George, K.J. (1984) The phonological history of Cornish. Unpublished
thesis for Doctorat du Troisième Cycle, University of Western
Brittany, Brest.
George, K.J. (1986) The pronunciation and spelling of Revived
Cornish. Cornish Language Board, Saltash.
George, K.J. (1988) 'The use of a mainframe computer to analyse
the orthography of traditional Cornish'. Proc. 1st North American
Congress of Celtic Studies, pp. 89115.
George, K.J. (1993) Gerlyver Kernewek Kemmyn An Gerlyver
Meur. (a major Cornish English dictionary) Cornish
Language Board, Saltash.
Nance, R.M. (1929) Cornish for all. James Lanham, St Ives.
There has been much controversy about Intensive Language
Learning Centres over the past twenty years. Whilst they have
fallen out of favour in England, they have continued to receive
support in many areas of Wales. This short article explores the
reasons for this apparent success.
During the nineteen sixties and seventies Intensive Language Learning
Centres were set up in English conurbations (Coventry, Bradford,
etc.) to meet the challenges posed by an influx of new in-migrants.
The Language Centre was therefore the most common provision encountered
by the Bullock Commission (1975). Bullock, himself believed that
no ordinary school was equipped to meet the challenge - specialist
language teaching being crucial to ensure success. Language acquisition
was too important to be left to chance.
The report however conceded that there were weaknesses. For example,
pupils could lose both academic and social contact with their
ordinary day school and a retreat could be unsettling for in-migrant
children. The same concerns were voiced in a Welsh Language context.
For example, in a hitherto unpublished survey of parental opinion,
the fact ëthat all primary schools donít have their
own Welsh Language' was often regretted. And whilst conceding
that attending a Centre could be a holiday for some, for others
'it was rather unsettling to have so many changes of school in
quick succession...í. But to the more pragmatic, although
'ideally... the centre should be local', ... 'that would be impossibleí.
Bullock was also concerned about methodology fearing a disparity
between the Centres and mainstream teaching. The work of the centre
could appear to occur ëin complete isolation from the childís
school, and ... his other teachers, including his head, may be
unaware of what he is learning and of the methods used to teach
himí. Other facets to the same problem were continuation
and progression which are especially crucial in the field of language
learning. The alternative view is that 'special language teaching
is unnecessaryí, and 'that the children will pick up English'
without much assistance.
Bullock's (1975) final conclusion was a compromise - an 'arrangement
... where the immigrant children [we]re not cut off from the social
and educational life of a normal schoolí (t. 289) but given
linguistic assistance and support by specialist teachers. It was
an arrangement that quickly found favour in the light of experience.
Over time, specialist teachers drifted from the Centres to ordinary
schools - to sit in on classes, analyse pupil needs, and strengthen
the provision. This undoubtedly was their role in the Swann Report:
Education for All (1985). The CRE Report: Teaching
English as a Second Language (1986), also argued strongly
for integration and against any concentration in Language Centres.
Not only did it believe the arrangement to be uneducational but
surmised that it might even be transgressing the Race Relations
Act (1976).
But having such ideals and realising them are two different things.
For example, in the Survey of the Teaching of English as a
Second Language, (DES,1988) it was observed
that the Swann ideal ëwas rarely observed in practice and
demanded careful planning and organisation, genuine co-operation
and frequent review and evaluation to be effectiveí. Even
where first and second language learners were taught together,
with a language specialist available to provide guidance and support,
ëadvice on ways of providing this support in the classroom
remain[ed] vague at national and local levelsí (Bilingual
Pupils Project : NFER 1985/88). But despite such failings
Intensive Language Centres were replaced in England by mainstream
provision.
Several factors underpin and explain the English position. Firstly,
the second language being taught in the Centres was the majority
language. It was also being learnt within an additive context.
Secondly, the target language pupils were rarely acquainted with
the learners mother tongue and could not therefore offer assistance
when conversations lapsed. Thirdly, the schools under review were
mostly urban with a staffing capacity that could assimilate specialist
language staff. In a converse situation, such as Wales, it is
easy to understand the attraction of the Language Centres. The
context is subtractive, the target language pupils can
speak the learner's mother tongue, and the schools are mostly
rural with a staffing shortage. In such a context in-migrants
would have a much more significant impact on the teaching situation.
The following teacher comment captures the mood:
Already many of our country schools, as a result of the in-migration,
have been turned into English-medium schools. By now the threat
has come to the most Welsh areas of the county ... and there is
great danger that these areas will also deteriorate ... The headmasters
foresee that things can only get worse during the next few years
with more and more non-Welsh speakers moving into their districts.
It was in such circumstances that the Welsh Intensive Language
Centres of Wales (Canolfan[nau] Iaith) were established. The first
of these was established in 1984 at Caernarfon 'on the pattern
of similar Centres ... on mainland Europe' (Gwynedd Report, 1989).
But nowhere is the exact model adequately identified. Other centres
followed, scattered throughout Wales, for similar reasons. The
system briefly works in the following way. When in-migrants first
visit a school, both pupil and parents are interviewed by the
school's headmaster. Their attention is immediately drawn to the
language of the school, the working language being Welsh in many
areas. The pupil is then offered a free intensive language course
in order to be able to participate. Each centre (in the main an
adjunct to an ordinary school) is normally staffed by two language
specialists, and has a teacher/pupil ratio of 10/12:1. Their task
is to teach the pupils enough language, in ten weeks, to enable
them to join the Welsh-medium mainstream of ordinary schools.
Attendance at each centre is entirely voluntary. During his/her
stay at the Centre, to maintain contact, the pupil will periodically
visit the future mainstream school. Contrary to the English experience,
the Language Centres of Wales have retained their widespread support.
The remainder of the article explores why this is so.
In a study, conducted during the nineties, the Centres were found
on the whole to be highly efficient and the attitudes of both
teachers, pupils and parents towards them favourable. Teachers
maintained that
'The Centres have been a blessing that cannot be over-emphasised
especially in the small schools. Since they were established
I don't get any English speaking kids in my school. What I get
are new children from London and Birmingham who can speak quite
good Welsh. Without the Centres I doubt whether I would have the
time to give them enough attention ...'
The same attitude was often echoed in the parental and pupil responses:
'It has already been of advantage in our small Welsh-speaking
community'. 'My child now employs Welsh as a medium of communication
with local children'. 'I can see only a positive result from the
experience. It appears easier for them to communicate and understand
what is said at local events, e.g. plays, pantos , etc.' 'I feel
that my children will benefit from knowing Welsh as we are living
in a very Welsh community' (parents). 'Mr X kept on making us
laugh and things like that ...í; ëit was good ...
the teachers ... playing games and things ...; ëThe way they
taught Welsh it was easy to understand and it was enjoyable ...í;
'It was brilliant' (pupils).
Another contributor to the success was the learning atmosphere.
Charles A. Curran (Blair:1982) found that all learners considered
language learning to be intimidating, describing their ëcomplex
personal involvementsí in ëcounselling interviewí
terms. The most common problems were: a feeling of ëpersonal
threatí; anxiety, ëpersonal confusioní and
ëemotional conflictsí; a feeling of insecurity and
inadequacy; a feeling of frustration; a feeling of not belonging;
and boredom. Constant efforts were made in the Centres to minimise
such 'problems'. The chief instrument of any success was the language
teacher. It was he/she who ensured that the teaching conditions
were right. All manner of strategies were used to allay pupil
fears, the aim, at all times, being to create a relaxing classroom
atmosphere:
The first thing I do during the first week is to ensure that they
like it here ... that they donít come here because they
are learning Welsh. They come here because they like it here.
Parental comments again provide corroborative evidence. According
to one, the centres thrived, because the pupils felt so much ëat
homeí, whilst the fact that the learning regularly occurred
ëin a non-threatening way' was cited by another. Yet another
thanked the teachers ëfor their sympathetic... approachí.
The pupils again endorsed the parental view, stressing the fact
that they got much ëmore attention in learning Welshí.
The centre was also ëfriendlier than an ordinary schoolí.
One pupil thought that her centre was:
More peaceful than where Iíve come from, itís lovely
... From the word go I thought, this is going to be a lovely school
... Iíd love to stay here. Itís a lovely school,
and we have nice teachers, and I like it.
The main ingredient seemed to be the warm teacher/pupil relationship,
the essence of which is summarised in the following statements:
We have to be big kids donít we, because when these children
go back to their own schools we hope that they will be able to
play in Welsh in the school yard and be able to live their life
fully in Welsh. And if that is the case they want someone to practise
on don't they?
The relationship is a close one. They are allowed to say ëYouíre old', 'you're silly', 'youíre ugly' to us and after about four weeks some sometimes tend to go over the top. But, we are willing to suffer because they receive so much benefit from it.
In other responses, the teacher is sometimes compared to a ësisterí,
or a ëmotherí and, at other times, to a research 'companion'
or ëfriendí. This inevitably affects the nature of
the experience, leading to much less conscious learning than occurred
in the past. In the words of one teacher; ëA mother never
tells a child - ìnow weíre going to learnî,
she merely lets the learning happen naturallyí.
The pupils were also individually linguistically engaged, teachers
knowing when to be tolerant and when to be demanding:
When a child is dying to tell me something - being ill or hurt
- he will use his first language naturally. Iím not the
kind of person who insists, when someone has broken his arm that
he informs me in Welsh!
Pupils were often urged into expression with the words ëtry
to say it againí. But the basis of the relationship was
the praise that each endeavour elicited -ëvery goodí;
ëexcellentí; ëcleverí; ëthank you
very muchí - and the smiles that greeted all manner of
communicative attempts.
The relationship was also manifest in gentle teasing that was
a daily leavening occurrence in the Canolfannau Iaith. It was
referred to by one teacher as:
... teasing and joking all day every day, from the minute they
come here for the first time to the time they go to the taxis
on the last day of term, and the kids love it because they
are the centre of attention in such activities, they are
the important ones.
Teasing was even used when monitoring language. Teacher attitudes
to the mother tongue are obviously crucial and can profoundly
affect the pupil/teacher relationship. The perennial dilemma is
condensed in the following statements:
I donít want to speak too much English with them ... or
they will expect me to speak English with them all the time.
Some teachers think that they are kind to the children when they
speak English to them ... but theyíre not.
The extremes are over and underuse of the mother tongue and the
consequence of both (according to the centres) is usually failure.
In the former the second language is seldom used ; in the latter
the pupils are often linguistically overwhelmed. Neither is it
easy to strike a balance between the extremes, the aim being to
be quite firm but not overbearing. This, in essence, was the policy
in the language centres. Early on, English was often used as an
explanatory tool but, even then, the activities were conducted
in the second tongue. The first tongue was only used when all
else failed. The extent to which it was used depended entirely
on such factors as - the nature of the children, their background,
linguistic abilities, nature of the work, etc. As time went on,
proceedings would increasingly occur in the second language, being
eventually jointly monitored by pupils and teachers , the former
sometimes even mimicking teacher admonitions. In a different atmosphere
such conduct could very easily produce negative results.
Joviality is not a feature that is easily time tabled its spontaneous
nature being conveyed by the following event. One wet day, the
children of a centre stayed in to play. But during the break they
were seen to be eavesdropping on adult conversation. This was
used by the language teachers for their own ends. They started
talking willy nilly about imaginary friends whilst at the same
time asking the pupils to cease eavesdropping! In the ëstoryí
one of the teachers was having a relationship with a superstore
girl whose antics on a daily basis became more colourful. One
day she had soundly punched a bully at work, and bitten an astonished
co-worker on another occasion - the linguistic boundaries being
extended in the wake of the tales. In the words of one teacher
ëWhen you come to think about it, we learn a great deal of
our language whilst listening to talk. The attraction of listening
to the forbidden was an added incentive'.
Such banter also performed another role. Cummins (1981) divides
language learning into (i) the Basic Interpersonal Communicative
Stage (BICS) and (ii) that of acquiring Cognitive/Academic Language
Proficiency (CALP). Both stages are equally important and essentially
sequential. Rushing through BICS can serve to weaken our grasp
on CALP; over-concentrating on CALP can weaken our interpersonal
communicative skills. The results are learners who are often uncomfortable
in both. The Welsh Centres believed they could be developed simultaneously
the competencies being 'evolving, dynamic, interacting and intricate'
(Baker: 1996). The result was a much fuller and more balanced
linguistic product.
Another facet of the learning atmosphere was the language support
- which was to be seen within the classrooms in many guises. Faced
with doubt, the learner inevitably turns to his mother tongue.
He will only avoid such a course if given a lifeline. This was
why the Centres taught - the incidental language of the class,
the language of enquiry, the language of problem solving, - What
is the Welsh word for ...? How do you say ... in Welsh? May I
have a rubber, Miss? May I go the the toilet, etc. The aim was
to ensure that the first language did not unduly impinge on the
learning atmosphere.
Classroom walls were also decked with supportive material: charts;
strips containing the main constructions in daily use (May I ...?;
Excuse me ...; I donít know how to ...; Will you help me?
How do you say ...?; How do you spell ...?; Iíve finished,
etc.); the basic vocabulary of various fields (clothes; colours;
the body; time - dayís of the week, the months of the year,
the weather; the key words of a theme, etc.) and a variety of
songs. Early in the ëcourseí, eyes would frequently
scan the room for visual assistance, but as time progressed, the
walls began to be merely a means of display.
Support could also be offered by curricular choice. For example,
the first unit of many programmes was a visit to the Zoo, primarily
because the context was rich in cognates. The situation was chosen
ë because much of the vocabulary is already familiar to the
children, i.e. similar to English. It will therefore be possible
to focus on learning the structuresí. Many centres also
extensively made use of sport, because it ëlends itself,
like science, to repetition and the patterning of languageí.
At times too a taught structure would be underpinned with actions
or 'experienceí.
The main strength of the Centres was the balance that was kept
between freedom and licence. There was also a balance to be seen
between stimulation and support. The sensitive nature of the interaction
is exemplified below. The words in bold are the meanings being
taught by the Welsh language teacher (T). ëPí is used
to denote pupil contributions:
T: Look at these counters. I call these ëglasí (blue), not glass as in the
windows, but ëglaaaasí.
P: Glaaas.
T: Letís see, these are ëmelyní (yellow) ones (taking them out one by
one) melyn, melyn, melyn, etc. Are you helping me?
P: melyn, melyn, melyn, etc.
T: (Pointing to other counters) What do I call them?
P: Orange.
T: Ie (yes), oren (orange). Oren, oren, helpwch fi (help me).
P: Oren, oren, oren, etc.
T: Which ones am I going to start with?
P: Melyn.
T: (Counting the yellow ones, and placing them on the table.
Drawing attention to the numbers on the wall) Un ...(one)
P: Un.
T: Dau (two).
P: Dau.
T: You can say it better then me. Bendigedig! (wonderful).
(puts another one on the table): tri, (three) the same sound as
tree.
P: Tri
T: Faint, is - how many? Faint? (taking one away).
P: Dau
T: Faint? (taking two off).
P: Un.
T: Faint (putting two counters back)
P: Tri.
Using the yellow counters, the teacher then introduced the numbers
up to nine:
T: ëNawí (nine) is a special figure. If you add another ëmelyní to it,
it becomes a ëglasí one. So ëglasí
is ëdegí ten.
Two columns were then created on the table, a blue counter being
placed in one, yellow counters in the other. In this way the pupils
were taught the numbers eleven, twelve, etc. The teacher then
briskly continued until he reached a hundred. The word for hundred
was then taught and two hundred, three hundred, etc. By now there
were three columns. Three dices were now being thrown to get combinations
one of which was the number 632.
T: What are you going to call that now?
P: Chwech cant tri deg a dau...
(One dice was accidentally dropped on the floor).
P: O, bechod! (O,what a shame).
The next step was to lessen dependence on the mother tongue, by
providing them with an activity with which they could cope.
It developed into a lively pupil/teacher competition. There followed
a competition between the pupils themselves. The aim of the game
was to obtain the highest number which they could correctly name.
What is of interest is that the teacher, although introducing
mathematical concepts, seized upon every second language opportunity,
stepping back into the first language only when there was no other
choice.
The use of the second language was quite deliberate based on an
acceptable but clearly defined pupil/teacher relationship. It
was never an arbitrary sop to the language learner. Its basis
was the notion that the teacher is the embodiment of the second
language (ëWhen they deal with us and when we are engaged
in an activity with them, the language is Welshí), and
the knowledge that help would be forthcoming should a problem
occur. It should also be stressed that as the 'lesson'
progressed the learning increasingly occurred in the second language.
The same could also be said in relation to the term.
The main ingredients of success may be summarised as follows - a non-threatening learning atmosphere; the setting of clear, attainable targets; clarity of presentation; sensitive teacher support; engaging and interesting activities. But as always they are better captured in a pupil response: ëThe way they taught Welsh it was easy to understand and it was enjoyable ... and each day you knew a little bit more Welsh and you could sort of measure your progress ...í
This paper describes the background
and principles used in the development of the Welsh language Y
Termiadur Ysgol (School Terminology Dictionary). Linguistic
and computational issues are discussed and the way in which objective
criteria were used to resolve some problems are analyzed.
In 1998 Y Termiadur Ysgol (Prys and
Jones) was published by the Qualifications, Curriculum, and Assessment
Authority for Wales (the statutory curriculum authority in Wales
and usually referred to by its Welsh acronym: ACCAC). Y Termiadur
Ysgol is a Welsh>English and English>Welsh terminological
dictionary covering all school subjects and it includes about
35000 entries in both languages. These are the terms that are
recommended by ACCAC for use in the classroom and for classroom
resources and assessment materials.
Technical dictionaries to support Welsh medium
teaching have been produced for many years (Prys, Jones, and ap
Emlyn 1995); these have been published principally by the University
of Wales Press and by the Welsh Joint Education Committee. In
1964 there was a significant publication Geiriadur Termau (Williams
Jac L (ed)) and until recently that has been the only comprehensive
technical dictionary. More recently The Welsh Academy English-Welsh
Dictionary (Griffiths B, Jones D G, 1995) was published and
this is an invaluable resource, providing wide-ranging translations
of words and phrases. Nevertheless the need to standardize technical
terminology, in particular to serve Welsh medium education, was
identified. This article describes how that was done at the Centre
for Welsh Terminology at the University of Wales, Bangor.
The Geiriadur Termau was published
in 1964 and many other technical dictionaries were published more
than 15 years ago, since that time there have been extensive developments
in science and technology (in particular in Information and Communications
Technology) and this has led to an increasing need for new terms.
Also Welsh medium education has developed, not only in the extent
and breadth of the subjects taught, but also subjects are taught
to a higher level in schools and colleges. This too has meant
an increasing demand for standardized terminology.
Developments in Welsh technical terminology
and in the vocabulary of Languages for Special Purposes (LSP)
in the past have taken place in a somewhat haphazard manner. Different
bodies developed terminology for their own subjects without due
regard to developments in cognate disciplines. For example two
words were in common use for pressure: these were gwasgedd
and pwysedd. Both terms are acceptable conceptually
and linguistically but many teachers felt that requiring pupils
to use two separate labels for the same concept in different contexts
(namely physics and meteorology) was unacceptable.
There were also inconsistencies in orthography.
Dr Bruce Griffiths, the principal editor of The Welsh Academy
English-Welsh Dictionary in a lecture to the National Eisteddfod
(Griffiths, B 195) stated the many terminology lists were 'alive
with mistakes of orthography and gender'. The rules of Welsh orthography
are well established (Lewis 1987, Thomas P W 1996, Thorne 1993)
but problems arose with neologisms and, in particular, with borrowings
from other languages. This led to copper sulphate having
many versions in Welsh depending on whether copr or copor,
sylffad, sylffat, swlffad ... were used.
Most of the terminology lists had been developed
on an ad hoc basis. Sometimes they were produced by individuals
and sometimes by groups of people. The individuals and the groups
had specific subject expertise and linguistic expertise but they
tended to operate without objective criteria. By now there are
international criteria (see below) that can be used as a basis
for terminology.
Although Welsh is well provided with general
dictionaries, in particular Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru and
The Welsh Academy English-Welsh Dictionary neither gives
detailed and accurate technical definitions which can be used
by subject specialists.
With the exception of Geiriadur Termau
(Williams J L, 1973) most of the terminology dictionaries
were English>Welsh only. This happened because most of the
users, such as teachers in schools, had received their subject
specific education in English and wanted to know what the Welsh
versions were of terms, which were already familiar to them in
English. However with the development of Welsh medium education
the demand for Welsh>English dictionaries was also growing.
Two policy decisions were made in the Centre
for Welsh Terminology at the University of Wales, Bangor about
the way in which the work would proceed. These were:
The terminology criteria published by the
International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) have been
used as a basis for the work. Two documents in particular have
proved invaluable: Principles and methods of terminology
(ISO 704: 1987 (E)) and Terminology work - harmonization of
concepts and terms (ISO 860: 1996(E)). The main criteria are
that a term should:
Aspects of some of these criteria are discussed
below.
There were two principal areas of work: orthography,
and morphology. It was decided that Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru
(University of Wales Dictionary) would be used as the standard
for orthography. This in turn uses the rules set out in Orgraff
yr Iaith Gymraeg (1987). However the first parts of Geiriadur
Prifysgol Cymru were published in 1950 and the work is as
yet unfinished; consequently many of the technical words and neologisms,
which have entered the language during the last 50 years, do not
appear in the dictionary. The editor and staff of Geiriadur
Prifysgol Cymru were always ready to advise us when there
were problems. Some illustrations of the type of problems we encountered
are described below.
Welsh spelling is generally phonetic and reflects
the sound of the word more than its derivation. This can lead
to problems with words borrowed from other languages, particularly
Latin based and Greek based words borrowed through English. For
example the English word cytology has been rendered in
Welsh as cytoleg and seitoleg. The pronunciation
of the second spelling is more readily recognisable aurally because
c in Welsh is pronounced [k], whereas the first spelling is more
readily recognised visually. This has been discussed by Hughes
(1985) and Williams (1985). In general it was decided to use a
spelling (and pronunciation), which reflects the commonly recognised
English (and other widely used languages) spelling. However when
a word is commonly used in everyday speech its pronunciation,
and consequently its spelling is usually influenced by the English
spelling rather than by the derivation and no attempt was made
to change this usage; examples include meicroffon (=microphone),
bronceitus (=bronchitis).
The Welsh alphabet does not include the letters
k, q, v, x, and z. Nevertheless some published terminology lists
contained Welsh words, which included these letters. These were
usually scientific terms such as kilogram which translated
into Welsh as kilogram. The rationale for this was that
the international representation kg should reflect the
spelling. This was based on the misconception that the representations
were abbreviations whereas the guidance given by the Conference
internationale du poids et mesures indicates clearly that
representations such as kg ar symbols and not abbreviations
(McGlashan 1971, Metrication Board 1977). For this reason the
Welsh spelling cilogram was used; similar considerations
were used to determine the spelling of chemical elements such
as crypton and fanadiwm. (Prys and Jones, 1994).
Other grammatical issues, such as those relating
to gender and plurals, needed to be resolved. There is always
conflict about what is correct or acceptable, some authorities
will decree according to conservative and traditional criteria
while others take a more tolerant and liberal view. The recent
grammar Gramadeg y Gymraeg (Thomas P W, 1996) describes
a 'liberal standardized' form of written Welsh and this was used
as a guide to our work.
Welsh and English use plurals in different
ways. A tent exhibition and an exhibition of tents in
English both convey the same meaning. However in Welsh arddangosfa
pabell and arddangosfa pebyll convey different meanings,
pabell is singular and pebyll is plural so arddangosfa
pabell (= exhibition [of] tent ) implies that there
is only one tent to be seen. So the translation magnetomedr
proton (for proton magnetometer) has been rejected
in favour of magnetomedr protonau using the plural form
protonau rather than the singular proton.
Welsh nouns have two gender classes called
masculine and feminine. In some instances the gender will vary
with dialect, in which case both forms are accepted. This can
on occasions lead to problems with compound noun phrases. For
example the noun diweddeb ( = cadence) can be either
masculine or feminine. The gender of a noun affects the initial
consonant mutation of a modifying adjective. So when diweddeb
is combined with perffaith (= perfect) and diweddeb
is treated as a masculine noun one gets diweddeb perffaith,
but if it is treated as feminine one gets diweddeb berffaith.
Listing all these varieties of noun phrases was impractical so
an arbitrary decision was made to choose one of the forms while
making it clear that both are acceptable. In some instances the
noun's gender indicates its meaning so de (masculine) =
south, and de (feminine) = right (side).
Plurals of nouns are formed from the singular
in a variety of ways (Thorne, 1993, Thomas P W, 1996); these include
the addition or elimination of endings, internal vowel changes
and combinations of these. For this reason it was decided that
plurals would be shown fully in the dictionary. Some polysemous
singular nouns have different plural forms, for example llwyth
(= load) forms the plural llwythi (= loads), whereas
llwyth (= tribe) gives llwythau (= tribes).
The well-established Welsh word for television
is teledu. But if native speakers are asked for the Welsh
equivalent of televisions or to televise they will
have a problem and offer suggestions such as setiau teledu
( = television sets) and darlledu (= broadcast).
The word teledu is not productive of other forms. The reason
is probably associated with its ending in -u; this is normally
a verb-noun ending and such words do not normally form plurals.
The criterion that a word should be productive was used to choose
between some synonymous forms. Both egni and ynni
can be used to translate energy, but it is easier to form
an adjective (egnïol) and a verb-noun (egnïo)
from egni rather than from ynni. Thus in a technical
context egni is preferred, though ynni is perfectly
acceptable in a non-technical context.
The fundamental principle used to standardize
terminology was that the term should reflect the concept rather
than reflecting the English words used to describe the concept.
There are two terms used in Welsh for database, these are
bas data and cronfa ddata. Bas data is a
word by word rendering of the English and does little to convey
the meaning whereas cronfa ddata ( = reservoir of data)
is more expressive and was adopted.
Termau bioleg, cemeg a gwyddor gwlad (Hughes,
1982) distinguishes between two meanings of the word salt.
For the everyday meaning of common salt (chemically: sodium
chloride) the word halen is used; but the word halwyn
was designated to mean salt (= a substance formed when
a metal displaces hydrogen from an acid). Similar considerations
apply to the translations of the word pole. Pegwn
is a well-established word used in geographical and metaphorical
contexts, but the word pôl was also used at times
and in some contexts. It was decided to retain pôl
in a scientific context to refer to electrical and magnetic phenomena;
this was done to allow concepts to be distinguished and because
pôl is more productive of forms corresponding to
dipole, quadrupole, polarized etc.
The terms for speed and velocity
required some attention. In everyday language speed and
acceleration are synonymous, but in the context of physics
they are carefully distinguished. Speed is a scalar quantity
(i.e. it is a measure of magnitude only) whereas velocity
is a vector quantity (it is a measure of both magnitude and direction).
Acceleration is also a vector quantity and is related mathematically
to velocity. In order to reflect this mathematical relationship
the related words cyflymder and cyflymiad were used
for velocity and acceleration and the somewhat uncommon
word buanedd was designated to mean speed. However
in everyday speech cyflymder is used to mean speed
and teachers and pupils were confused as to whether it was 'correct'
to use cyflymder to mean speed. This problem was
resolved by stating that the accepted translation of speed
in general context is cyflymder, but if it is necessary
to distinguish scalars and vectors then buanedd should
be used. Similar issues relating the words used to translate melt
and dissolve had to be resolved.
A database structure was developed which includes
separate fields for the English term, the Welsh term, grammatical
information, short disambiguators in both languages, and other
information such as source and notes. The structure conforms to
the evolving international standards for terminological databases.
From the database it has been possible to produce Welsh > English
and English > Welsh lists.
A major issue with the Welsh > English
list was the alphabetical sorting. The Welsh alphabet uses the
digraphs ch dd ff ng ll ph rh th as single letters. The digraph
ch comes in between c and d and ng comes between g an h; consequently
the correct alphabetical order for the following words is cath,
ci, chwaer, deg. Similar considerations apply when the digraphs
occur in the middle of words so the correct order for the following
words is: agos, angel, ail, anaf. The situation with ng
and rh is made more complex because in some words they are digraphs
and in other words they represent n+g or r+h. A computer program
was written to allow the output from the database to be sorted
according to the usual conventions of the Welsh alphabet. As there
are no simple algorithms that can be used to distinguish between
ng and n+g or rh and r+h, words including these combinations had
to be listed in the sorting program.
The use of a database has also made it possible
to make the resources available electronically; this has been
described in more detail in another paper to this conference.
(Prys and Morgan , 2000).
Griffiths, B Darlith yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol
Hela Geiriau, 1995
Griffiths, Bruce; a Jones, Dafydd Glyn Geiriadur
yr Academi University of Wales Press, Cardiff 1995 0-7083-1186-5
Hughes, R Elwyn (ed) Termau bioleg, cemeg,
gwyddor gwlad, Cyd-bwyllgor Addysg Cymru, Cardiff 1982
ISO 704 Principles and methods of terminology,
International Organization for Standardization, Geneva 1987
ISO 860 Terminology work - harmonization
of concepts and terms, International Organization for Standardization,
Geneva 1996
Lewis, Ceri W (ed) Orgraff yr iaith Gymraeg
- rhan 2: geirfa, University of Wales Press, Cardiff 1987
0-7083-0917-8
McGlashan SI Units, The Chemical Society
1971
Metrication Board How to write metric:
a style guide for teaching and using SI units, HMSO, London
1977 0-11-700867-2
Prys, D Planet Gender and sex in Welsh
nouns, 1997 112
Prys, D; Morgan, M E-celtic language tools
to be published 2000
Prys, Delyth a Jones, Prys Morgan Matholwg
7 Sawl 'c' sydd yn kilo?, 1994
Prys, Delyth; Jones, J P M; ap Emlyn, Hedd
Llyfryddiaeth geiriaduron termau, Canolfan Safoni Termau,
Bangor 1995 0-904567-42-7
Thomas, Peter Wynn Gramadeg y Gymraeg,
University of Wales Press, Cardiff 1996 0-7083-1357-4
Thorne, David A A comprehensive Welsh grammar,
Blackwell, Oxford 1993 0-631-16407-3
Williams, B Y Gymraeg mewn addysg uwchradd
Termau ar gyfer dysgu gwyddoniaeth trwy gyfrwng y Gymraeg,
Canolfan Addysg Ddwyieithog ac Addysg Iaith, Aberystwyth 1983
Williams, Jac L (ed) Geiriadur termau, University of Wales Press, Cardiff 1973 0-7083-0518-0
Manx Gaelic is most often described as "the
extinct or former language of the Isle of Man." Whilst it
is true that the language has been pushed to the edge, Manx speakers
are now determined to show the world that it has not jumped or
fallen, but on the contrary, it is fighting back as a modern,
living and vigorous tongue that remains the language of choice
for many. However, the help and expertise of other Celtic countries
is required to speed up the process.
"Manx Gaelic passed into oblivion as a native spoken language
on the 24th December 1974 with the death of Edward Maddrell, the
last reputed native speaker of the language. With him an Indo-European
language disappeared, the first this century, one branch less
on the tree." (1)
Such chilling words are commonplace reading for speakers of Manx
Gaelic. They have heard the death knell for the language being
continually sounded, not only in recent times, but also for many
generations past. Today, the tolling of the bell persists in a
variety of forms but mainly through a general misrepresentation
of the state of the language in dictionaries, encyclopaedia, journals,
reference works and even, as in the above example, on the Internet.
All portray the same dark and dismal picture of Manx Gaelic -
the stench of decline, decay and corruption is all-pervasive.
However, Manx speakers are not unduly surprised by this interpretation
of the state of their language, indeed, they are inured to it,
for the Manx language has had high profile detractors from early
times. In a letter to John Wesley, the preacher George Holder
expressed the desire to publish a Manx Hymn Book. In reply, Wesley
wrote to him in November 1789:
"I exceedingly disapprove of your publishing anything in
the Manx language. On the contrary, we should do everything in
our power to abolish it from the earth, and to persuade every
member of our Society to learn and talk English." (2)
Again in 1853 an observer was apparently content to report in
a guidebook describing the Island's language in the following
manner:
"The Manks is now only spoken in the north-western parishes
and at a few localities along the western coast, though, with
few exceptions, the natives are able to converse in the English
language. The services in the parish churches are given alternately
in the Manks and English languages, though the Manks is not taught
in any of the parochial schools; and it is very probable that
in the course of the next generation it will become utterly extinct,
like many other of the early languages, before the masterly refinement
and progress of the Anglo-Saxon race." (3)
It cannot, unfortunately, be asserted that all such assaults on
the language were from careless or uninformed outsiders, as the
homegrown sentiments of Edward Callow in 1899 clearly demonstrate,
the attacks came also from within:
"Unlike the Welsh people, they (the Manx) have had the good
sense to see the advantages of bringing up their children to use
the English tongue, and only English is taught in the schools."
(4)
Such then was, and to a lesser extent still is, the poor perception
of the Manx language, that even less than a decade ago, one member
of the Manx Government thought it proper, when appearing on a
United Kingdom television channel, to expound his personal views
regarding the proposal for teaching of the Manx language in schools
in the following terms:
"There are more important priorities such as pre-school training,
such as the serious development of modern languages, for example
Spanish. I find this (the teaching of Manx) to be a somewhat costly
indulgence." (5)
Typically, for him, as for many in the Isle of Man, the understanding
of the language's worth was to be evaluated in purely monetary
terms. His comments demonstrated not only a total lack of comprehension
of the national and international significance of the Manx language
culturally, but also served as an indictment of the paucity of
his own values and perceptions whereby any language other than
Manx appeared to have some intrinsic usefulness. These sentiments,
although totally misdirected, are still a cause both for great
sadness and annoyance to Manx speakers, in that they know such
assertions to be entirely inaccurate and misleading. If the language
can be portrayed so negatively at home, in what light do we expect
the rest of the world to perceive it?
In many ways that same spirit of self-deprecation is not yet dead.
Every ensuing generation unfailingly brings forth its harbingers
of doom. They are prepared to disparage, denigrate and belittle,
not only the efforts of those determined to promote a positive
attitude towards learning the language, but the very language
itself. Such a detrimental self perception should come as no surprise
to Manx speakers, and although largely confined to a certain age
group and mind set, such an attitude has been an undeniable hindrance
to the favourable development of the language in general.
That the Manx language has been to the edge and looked over, is
amply demonstrated by the census returns showing the numbers of
speakers during the twentieth century.
1901 4,4191911 2,3821921 8961931 5311941 ---
no census1951 3551961 1651971 2841981 --- no language
question on census1991 634
By the 1960s the outlook for the language was certainly dire,
but by the 1970s a sea change in attitudes had occurred which
has resulted in a steady increase in interest over the following
thirty years. Such has been the rate of change that a leading
article in a local newspaper was able to report the following:
"A gradual but significant change in the political climate
has resulted in a new initiative designed to ensure the survival,
and hopefully revival, of the Manx language. For too long the
political will necessary for the proper promotion of the language
simply did not exist. Manx was regarded as a cultural hobby, as
quaint and pointless as folk dancing, with little relevance to
the modern world. Gaelic may not be much of a tourist attraction,
but without it Manx heritage has no heart. It is the most complex,
distinctive and unique feature of that heritage." (6)
It seems likely that the next census will show an increase to
approximately one thousand speakers, even if the number of schoolchildren
who have been learning Manx since 1992 is disregarded.
The main initiative taken in response to the change of public
and political attitude was the creation of the Manx Language Unit
as part of the Isle of Man Department of Education. This was established
in 1992 with the aim of introducing the teaching of Manx within
the Island's schools, and is supported by central government funds.
Bearing in mind that these objectives were to be met initially
with a team consisting only of a Manx Language Officer and two
peripatetic schoolteachers, the scale of the task can be envisaged.
However, vigorous efforts have been made to raise the profile
of the language, particularly outside Mann. In the last year alone,
members of the Manx Language Unit have had introductions to the
U.K. Ministers of Education for both Scotland and Northern Ireland,
and recently the Minister of Education for the Republic of Ireland.
In addition members have visited, and formed useful contacts and
ongoing links with Gaelic speakers in Skye, Belfast and Dublin.
A liaison has also been formed with the island of Jersey, which
is currently undertaking a similar language programme to Mann
within its schools. In September 1999 the establishment of the
Manx Language Unit was increased to a Manx Language Officer and
three peripatetic teachers.
Recent Information and Communications Technology initiatives within
the Island's schools have focused the need for the provision of
readily accessible Manx material in electronic form. It is the
Isle of Man Department of Education's stated aim "to prepare
pupils for life in an information age and to enhance the process
of teaching and learning." In order to achieve this the department
will: -
It is self evident that if Manx is to increase, let alone maintain,
its position and status within the school curriculum, it must
be able to create and deliver modern attractive computer programs
providing material of relevance and quality. It is important that
Manx material should be equal to, if not better than, that which
is now readily available for foreign language teaching. Technology
has brought the hope that some of the expectations can be substantially
fulfilled, but of course the use of technology is not without
its own problems when only a small number of people are involved
in its production and operation. To date the application of computer
technology to Manx language teaching has been utilised in the
following areas;
All the above are now a reality but remain very much in their
infancy, as the production of suitable teaching material falls
upon the same limited number of activists working for the maintenance
of the language. Although geographically central in the Celtic
speaking world, Manx unquestionably remains a language on the
edge in a number of other ways.
Regrettably, Manx still remains on the periphery of many projects
and initiatives from which it could undoubtedly benefit. It is
often, understandably, overlooked because of the comparatively
insignificant number of speakers and, hitherto, small voice. I
would, therefore, appeal to all those presently working assiduously
for the advancement of their own languages to consider if, in
some way, their ideas and efforts could be shared and made available
to their smaller relations. Much has already been achieved for
Manx through the generosity of contacts in the other Gaelic speaking
countries and also America, who have provided computer expertise
including the processing and the hosting of data. Particular mention
should be given to Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle at
Sabhal Mòr Ostaig and John T. McCranie at the University
of California for their help and encouragement for Manx on the
Internet.
The recently launched "Eurolang", a project of the European
Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages, is a welcome new development
in such partnerships; "The objectives of Eurolang are to
supply national and regional media with news of general interest
about Europe's linguistic diversity. It concentrates on minority
and regional language matters and news from European Institutions
which affect the minority communities of Europe." Unfortunately,
Mann's political position, being outside of the EU, has for the
present time left Manx once more on the edge and unable to participate
- yet another example of a missed opportunity for us in Mann to
share and cooperate.
Projects that may be considered worthy of joint production through
cooperation between Gaelic speaking countries might include: -
Describing Manx as a Language on the Edge may seem to be reinforcing
the very arguments of the pessimists previously quoted. However,
I believe that the language is now "on the edge" in
another and more constructive sense. Manx in the twenty-first
century is undoubtedly on the edge of a significant breakthrough
in numbers, status and utilisation and there is every reason to
have great optimism for the future of the language. We may still
take comfort from the words and observations of an old Manx fisherman,
conversing with George Borrow on the 23rd of August 1855, but
which nonetheless, still ring true down the years:
"I said that I believed there were a great many Manx people
ashamed to speak Manx, and that in a little time it would be discontinued;
he said, No Manxman need be ashamed of speaking the language of
his country, and that Manx would be spoken as long as Man floated."
Fortunately, it is not only the Island itself that has remained
buoyant over the years but also the hopes and aspirations of an
ever increasing number of Manx speakers. Their enthusiasm and
drive has ensured not only a retreat from the edge, but a positive
move for Manx back towards the centre of the Celtic speaking world.
(1) http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~stephen/manxgaelicwww.html .
(2) Proceedings 6.1.26, Mannin 9.516.
(3) Kerruish's Guide to the Isle of Man.
(4) From King Orry to Queen Victoria, Edward Callow 1899.
(5) David Corlett M.H.K. B.B.C. Television.
(6) Stadtler Waldorf, I.O.M. Examiner, June 1991.
The teaching of Cornish to adults is becoming more
professional as student numbers grow, but much depends on amateur
activity. This article warns against over-reliance on the established
technical-rationality of language teaching and calls for imaginative
responses which acknowledge tacit understanding, indeterminacy
and the importance of professional artistry. It also calls for
an appeal to the aesthetic qualities of Cornish, rather than a
vain quest for functional motives or calls to nationalistic duty.
Everyone's teaching practice is unique. Individual personalities,
approaches and styles create differences even when factors, such
as the curriculum and environment are the same. As a teacher of
Cornish, uniqueness applies to most of what I do. In promoting
a language with few speakers, I am removed from vocational and
functional concerns, indulging in an activity which many regard
as pointless or eccentric, the irrational antithesis of the modernist
notion of progress. Cornish is now taught in varied contexts but
most of us work in relative isolation, often outside educational
institutions with few colleagues or off-the-shelf resources and
no imposed curriculum. We operate without a ready-made framework
and there is little by way of an established body of experience
to draw upon. There are few opportunities to swap ideas and no
ready-made corpus of teaching strategies or accepted wisdom. There
is often no prescribed set of competencies that learners work
towards. These circumstances are both a blessing and a curse.
They give freedom from imposed constraints and preconceptions
and allow negotiation of the learning process. We can set our
own agenda, aims and objectives. The down-side is that teachers
are reliant on their imagination, and that of learners, to devise
resources and strategies. Imagination and creativity determine
success. That's fine when it is 'coming up with the goods' and
there is time to apply ideas, but on occasions sessions stagnate
for want of a fresh input.
These are exciting times. There is renewed interest in the local
and a growing acceptance of difference as something enriching
- or at least a fact of life. Liberal assimilationism is being
questioned and plurality championed.
'[T]he conditions of postmodernity offer new opportunities…
In the rediscovered emphasis on the 'local', the 'particular'
and the 'unique', a space may be being created for the Cornish
language that did not exist in conditions of modernity.' [Deacon
B., 1996: 103]
If postmodernity permits a multiplicity of views, values and
perspectives, and if postmodernism rejects notions of uniformity,
then this is certainly the case.
'Metessen, en norveaz crownick'ma, nye ra cavas preze noweth en amyttians an cowethians plurel; Metessen, en leasder e gowethians moye comprehendes, na veath comeres gon gonesegath ha gon deffrangow en disdayne, ha en luddras'na nye alga trouvia vor tha voaz clowes gon leav.'
(Perhaps, in this global world, we will find a new opportunity in the acceptance of the plural society. Perhaps, in the breadth of its more inclusive society, our culture and our differences will not be derided and in that framework we could find a way for our voice to be heard.)
[Kennedy N., 1997]
Doors are opening. Small spaces for Cornish are being created
within institutions which once excluded it. Heightened interest
in identity, coupled with globalization and improved technologies,
has strengthened links with our diaspora, making it possible for
migrants and their descendents to keep in contact with an imagined
home and participate in its life without being present. Technologies
which might be viewed as the instruments of a homogenizing cultural
imperialism are, paradoxically, helping to maintain distinctiveness,
facilitating the growth of a Cornish 'affective alliance' globally.
People in Australia's Little Cornwall or Michigan's U.P. can actively
take part, contributing as well as benefiting.
Imagination is at play in the construction of identity, the reinvigoration
of diasporic links and the visualization of the language itself.
It seems appropriate to consider the rôle of imagination,
and the linked factor of artistry, in teaching. Imagination is
a vast and polysemous category, but for my purposes, common understandings
of the productive, creative imagination are adequate. They cover
the areas of dream, fancy, fantasy, creative thought and conjecture.
The decision to learn Cornish requires an imaginative element
of fancy. Learners visualize a world where it is possible to use
Cornish in all situations, extending it from the closeted domain
of the organized event, to the shop, pub and work-place. Whilst
Gerald Priestland, from a position of ignorance, has described
the revival as 'rather like putting a corpse on a heart-lung
machine and claiming it is alive' [1980], some enthusiasts
speak as though their fully Cornish-speaking community is already
a reality, claiming that new vocabulary is 'naturally generated
amongst Cornish speakers, just as in English' [Lyon 1996].
Here imagination merges with self-delusion but Ken George, whilst
asserting that Cornish is alive, sensibly points out that:
'[R]evivalists must not get so carried away that they forget that
Cornish is not in all 'respects like other tongues.....this argument
[the 'natural' generation of vocabulary] is less valid for Cornish
than for a major language like English or French' [George K.J.,
1986]
Against this background, the way in which we present language
has great impact, as recognized by Bev Newman of WEA South Wales:
'The imagery associated with many of the minority languages ...can
cause young adults to reject them entirely as being an historical
extension of what they are already experiencing in the present...Languages
must be presented socially and in educational settings in such
a way that they are shown to be relevant to modern life.' [Newman
B., 1996]
Creativity must be employed in countering negative, received images
of the language as variously:- quaint, twee and druidic (the preserve
of robed bards of the Gorsedd), insular and exclusive (a refuge
for the inward-looking), extreme and dangerous (likely to lead
to conflict), dead and academic (for historians and linguists),
eccentric and comic (for the loonies). Whilst the language, as
a powerful symbol of distinctiveness, lies at the heart of various
overlapping constructions of identity, the inheritance of imagery
from the early 'Celtic Revival' (c.1890-1945) is at odds with
a popular Cornishness based on past industrialization and occupational
cultures. Such 'Celtic' images, many of them imported from the
Gaelic Ireland Movement, still distance people from the language.
The early revival is now understood as a romantic reaction to
the 'great paralysis' [Payton P., 1992] of Cornish industry
which sought escape from the perceived horrors
of modernity by looking to a rhetoricized, pre-industrial, 'Celtic'
past. Its leaders were typically middle class, often anglicized
and Anglo-catholic with establishment credentials and Tory sympathies.
They were informed by prevalent English imaginings of the 'Celts'
as mysterious, romantic providers of otherness and had no real
notion of Cornish becoming a community language. By contrast,
present-day learners are invariably motivated by feelings of economic,
political and cultural marginalization and their sense of Cornishness
is likely to be based on the constructions of the industrial
age: accent, mining, rugby, diet, choirs, bands, emigration, Methodism
and egalitarianism. Learners are increasingly drawn from the poorer
sections of the community, have anti-establishment views and are
sceptical about authority. Their engagement may be seen as reclaiming
a language which has been misappropriated by 18th century
antiquarians, romantic Celtophiles and academics. Thus, the current
growth of a popular, grass-roots movement represents a significant
discontinuity with the early revival and can best be fostered
by linking it to lived Cornish experience and employing positive
imagery to create a 'cool' aura of cultural value.
Although the revival began c.1890, its expansion dates from the
1970s and the move towards professionalism from the 1990s. We
are operating in a new area with no technical rationality other
than that of language teaching in general. Whilst theories of
learning, language acquisition and group dynamics are useful,
we are forced to deal with situations as they arise, encountering
problems with no ready-made answers. I am, for example, faced
with a group which has reached a plateau of achievement beyond
which it seems unable to proceed. The precise situation is new
and I am finding it difficult to think my way out of the impasse.
Discussion with my students and other teachers has failed to show
a way forward and there is no Penguin Guide to Teaching Cornish
that I can refer to. In such situations I often fall back on intuition
rather than theory and much of the progress made stems from a
mixture of 'feel', imagination and inspiration, led by an identification
of learning needs.
Donald Schön contrasts the safe 'high ground' of technical
rationality and research-fed, professional knowledge with the
less certain areas of problem-solving which he calls the 'swamp'
[1987] Within the swamp he maintains that 'indeterminate features
of practice' are at work: - artistry, intuition, improvisation,
invention and 'testing in practice'. This would seem to
characterize the confused area into which I have ventured, an
unexplored zone which has no hard rock other than the language.
I am forced to improvise and invent strategies which I immediately
test. Schön refers to 'an art of problem framing, an art
of implementation, and an art of improvisation -all necessary
to mediate the use in practice of applied science and technique.'
[ibid.] These arts assume a rôle which greatly overshadows
the application of theoretical or technical knowledge, and imagination,
frequently of a disciplined variety, informs them.
Schön has described how the academic status of individuals
and areas of activity are related to their proximity to basic
science and technical knowledge, showing how this leads practitioners
to seek research-based, technical knowledge and apply it. We need
not worry; Cornish has such low status that there is little to
lose by wading into Schöen's swamp. Even so, Revived Cornish
(what is taught, rather than how) is the subject
of intense debate, conducted within the limits of scientific/empirical
linguistics and modernist assumptions. The wisdom of this has
been questioned by Deacon:
'..the language debate must move beyond the scientific discourse
and open up the debate to such things as speculation, reflection,
intuition and feelings. Such knowledge should be admitted as equal
and no longer, as assumed by modernism, inferior to the knowledge
produced by scientific method.' [Deacon B, 1996:102]
Much the same could be said of how the language is taught.
Perhaps we should ask why sessions work before looking for shortcomings.
That might identify an alternative or complimentary approach to
applying theories of learning, in Schön's words, 'turning
the problem upside down', asking what can be learnt from how
we deal with his 'indeterminate zones of practice' before
applying research from elsewhere. I am often at a loss to define
the factors that have made successful sessions gel. Often I feel
that I am responding to events instinctively rather than consciously.
This is hard to reflect upon. It is easy to consider the effectiveness
of an activity or resource but hard to do so for something intangible
that falls outside technical rationality. Schön suggests
that we should ask what we can learn from examining artistry (rather
than seeking to apply technical knowledge) but I am reluctant
to analyze the process closely for fear of becoming self-conscious
in an area which relies on a lack of inhibition and spontaneity.
This is what Michael Polanyi called the 'tacit dimension' [1967]
, where we instinctively use knowledge and skills that we are
not aware of consciously and cannot break down into
a convenient set of actions for future use. The paradoxical
danger of trying to examine the process or attempting a break-down
of Schön's 'knowing-in-action' (forms of know-how
demonstrated in active practice but defying verbal description)
is that it can place newly constructed knowledge in an expanded
technical rationality as accepted truth.
But it does no harm to consider how sessions succeed in firing
the imagination. I have started encouraging students to enjoy
language before concentrating too heavily on grammar or the deliberate
memorizing of vocabulary. Some years ago a campaign in Brittany
encouraged people with the inviting slogan 'taste your language',
the idea being that language is something sensuous to be savoured
and rolled around on the tongue as an enriching part of life.
When a language has little commercial application, this motivation
would seem to be an obvious one to stress, yet teachers have been
slow to identify and exploit its potential, instead repeating
the tired, unimaginative mantra of the early revival: 'Why
should Cornishmen learn Cornish? ...the answer is simple. Because
they are Cornishmen.' [Jenner, 1904:xi] Learning is
reduced to a chore which we have a duty to perform in order to
assert group identity. Imagination is called for in creating a
sense of fun and cultural enrichment if the public is to be enthused.
Richard Kearney, in discussing the postmodern imagination, writes
of the need to be poetical '...in the broad sense of 'inventive'
carried by the word poiesis.' [1994]. The postmodern
imagination 'needs to be able to laugh' [ibid.]. Such
remarks fit comfortably with trying to create an aesthetic which
is removed from functional concerns. Learners need to be encouraged
to develop an empathy and intuitive feel for Cornish. This may
help them use it to its full capability, making an imaginative
leap beyond the limits of English. To this end we might consider
how they can enjoy the sounds, rhythms and textures of language.
In this we have the advantage many learners drawn to Cornish by
a love of place-names. I have started exposing people to songs,
readings and fluent conversation in the early stages, being aware
that care must be taken. Stella Hurd warns that 'For many adult
learners and teachers the introduction of a song or poem into
the lesson has little appeal.' [1992] but she recognizes 'the
cultural significance of this kind of material and the wealth
of possibilities it can open up.' This meets needs which for
other languages can be met by visiting communities where they
are spoken.
I am conscious of the need to move students towards a creative
use of language at an early stage i.e. putting words together
in sentences of their own devising, rather than repeating ready-made
phrases. Drama and improvisation often allow them to communicate
effectively, using gesture, mime, facial expression and body language
to fill gaps in their vocabulary. It brings out the extrovert
in many and generates a sense of achievement, but as Hurd points
out:
'[S]hy or slow learners may be unwilling or unable to participate.
Some profess quite openly to have 'no imagination' and
find the whole process....bewildering and painful.' [1992]
The reasons for using such techniques are well stated by Hurd:
'[They] release inhibitions that can act as a barrier to learning....help
establish a co-operative, collaborative atmosphere' enabling learners
to '...engage at their own level in their chosen manner,
to surprise and be surprised, and to discover their own personal
language "gaps"'[ibid.]
They encourage learners to take possession of events and elicit
an imaginative, active input.
Initially, I simply abandoned the idea of a linear and graded,
grammar-based approach in favour of a communicative style (again
applying research-based knowledge), but, as time has gone on,
I have often plunged classes into chaos. Whilst the best sessions
involve immediacy and rapidity, their essential volatility and
departure from convention can be their downfall. In trying to
enthuse I may destroy all structure. From being spontaneous, classes
degenerate as learners find that they have so much to say to each
other in English. I am having to manage enthusiasm whereas previously
I simply sought to generate it. It has also been necessary to
appreciate that linear progressions suit certain learners and
should not be dismissed as never being appropriate. Different
people approach language in different ways and we should not exclude
received practices from simple scepticism. I have mainly been
reacting against an experience of audio-visual and behaviourist
methods (e.g. those of B.F.Skinner) and, in questioning wisdoms
drawn from empirical rationality, I am not arguing for the abandonment
of all such theory. I simply wish to see other forms of knowledge
admitted within an imaginative, aesthetic framework. In the case
of a language revival which defies functional or rationalist explanations,
this seems particularly appropriate. We do not need practical
reasons, excuses or ideological justifications for Cornish anymore
than we need them to grow flowers or play music.
Deacon B., "Language Revival and Language Debate: Modernity
and Postmodernity" in P. Payton ed., Cornish Studies Four,
Institute of Cornish Studies, University of Exeter Press 1996
George K.J. (1986), The Pronunciation and Spelling of Revived
Cornish, Torpoint: Cornish Language Board
Hurd S., in L. Arthur & S. Hurd, (1992), The Adult Language
Learner - A guide to good teaching practice, CILT: London
Jenner H., (1904), A Handbook of The Cornish Language,
London
Kearney R., (1994)The Wake of Imagination, London: Routledge
Kennedy N., in Keskerdh Kernow, 1997
Lyon R., 1996 Interview, BBC Radio Cornwall
Newman B., in Visionet Minority Languages Network - Living
Languages Conference Report, Cardiff 1996
Payton P., (1992), The Making of Modern Cornwall, Redruth:Dyllansow
Truran, ch.6
Polanyi M., (1967), The Tacit Dimension, New York: Doubleday
Priestland G., in G. & S. Priestland (1980), West of Hayle
River, London:Wildwood House
Schön D.A., (1987),Educating the Reflective Practitioner,
San Francisco (CA):Jossey-Bass
Skinner, B.F., (1957) Verbal Behaviour, Appleton Century-Crofts, cited in L. Arthur & S.Hurd op.cit.
This paper describes a collaborative project between
the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Insititue for Advanced Studies
and the School of Computer Applications, Dublin City University,
the purpose of which is to produce high resolution digital images
of Irish manuscripts together with ancilliary text and commentary
for display on the WWW.
Manuscripts in the Irish language are to be found throughout the
world, in libraries and in private collections. Roughly five thousand
survive and, not surprisingly, the biggest collections are located
in Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales. These manuscripts, as
is well known, range in date from the 12th to the 19th
centuries, and are made from vellum down to about the middle of
the 16th century when paper starts to take over, paper
finally predominating from the early seventeenth century onward.
The ongoing need for primary access to these books by scholars
becomes an increasing concern to librarians depending on the physical
state of the documents. In the past, the use of surrogates such
as facsimiles and photostats was advocated from time to time.
In more recent times microfilm copies of a significant number
of manuscripts have been made and, while this has facilitated
access, it is very rarely that such copies can be considered even
half-adequate as surrogates.
In the area of Celtic languages, the teaching/learning value
of the project rests, at present, in its potential for use as
a primary source for textual and palaeographical studies in the
Irish language. (Scholarship holders at the School of Celtic Studies
are already making use of the resource for this purpose.) As the
amount of available material increases so too should that potential
be increasingly realised. It must be stressed, of course, that
the main concern of ISOS is the making available of that primary
source: the use that is made of it will ultimately be a matter
for the teachers and researchers themselves.
The present paper outlines a project which demonstrates how, using
modern information technology, it is possible to make images of
these manuscripts available to a wide audience without endangering
the originals, while coming as close as is possible to realising
the concept of the true surrogate, and thus resolving the previously
conflicting concerns of access and conservation. The ISOS project
is on-going and some material is already accessible.
Irish Script on Screen (ISOS) is a joint project between the School
of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and
the School of Computer Applications, Dublin City University to
digitise images of Old Irish manuscripts and make them available
for scholarly and for casual use on the WWW. Much advice and guidence
has been provided by the Bodleian Library at Oxford University
who are running a similar project to ISOS. The present phase of
the project is being run in partnership with Trinity College Library,
Dublin.
This project, then, combines the ostensible polarised interests
of the humanities and the sciences in a unique and, we hope, fruitful
colaboration. For the School of Celtic Studies, ISOS represents
a natural extension of its statutory responsibilities with regard
to research and publication of research in the area of Irish manuscripts.
The potential for combining texts, either diplomatic or normalised,
with images of the sources themselves; or for linking those images
to manuscript catalogues - something which has been achieved already
- that potential is an exciting one, deserving of investment of
time, money and research.
For the School of Computer Applications, having already worked
with organisations such as the Irish Times and RTÉ
on information retrieval projects, the attraction of the ISOS
project is that it connects to a core research interest of the
School, namely the development of digital libraries.
The work of the project is divided between the partners as follows:
the School of Celtic Studies selects the material to be digitised
(in consultation with the holding library), prepares the catalogues,
and is responsible for image capture and quality control. Processing
and storage of the images, creation and maintenance of the website,
are the responsibility of the School of Computer Applications.
The ISOS project, therefore, is setting out to digitise Irish
manuscripts of various dates between the late eleventh century
and the nineteenth, and to make them available for educational
and research purposes on the WWW. The contents of the manuscripts
have been recorded, in fine detail, into digital form by scanning
them with a high resolution colour camera. Global access to the
material is ensured by placing them on the WWW. There are several
reasons for, and benefits from, the ISOS project:
A Dicomed Studio Pro XL digital camera is used to capture images.
This is a non-intrusive capture mechanism which does no damage
to the manuscripts as the light levels required to scan a picture
of a manuscript page are much less than that required for copying.
Images are digitised at 600 dpi with each pixel being 24 bit colour.
The file size of any given image varies according to the physical
size of the manuscript page but in general an uncompressed digital
image (TIFF) of a manuscript page may vary from 60Mb to 120Mb.
After scanning, the image is loaded onto a PC and the brightness
of the images is adjusted slightly using Adobe Photoshop so that
the images match the physical pages, in as far as possible. The
images are transferred to 1GB Jazz disks and sent to DCU for further
processing. Equilibrium's Debabelizer is then used to process
the images in batch mode. Each image has a ruler added to it to
give a scale for the image, and each image is also stamped with
an identifier on the top and a copyright notice on the bottom.
The resultant TIFF images are then archived onto DLT tapes each
of which generally stores about 25 GB of images and these are
then stored at different locations for security purposes.
After images are processed by adding a ruler and identifier, JPG
compressed versions of the images are also created using DeBabelizer.
These are done in two levels of compression with large high-quality
JPG images, varying from 1.5 MB to 5 MB, as well as lower resolution
JPG images of a few hundred Kbytes, and finally, thumbnails.
The JPG images are also digitally watermarked using the Digimarc
Batch Embedding Tool [1]. This tool inserts an invisible digital
watermark into each image which can be read using Digimarc's ReadMarc,
a software tool downloadable for free over the Internet. When
ReadMarc is used to read a watermark from an image a URL is given
to the user, who can then go to the URL and get information about
the copyright holder. Digimarc's watermarking has become very
popular in allowing the tracking of image abuse on the internet.
Archival and Conservation Concerns
Crucial to the success of ISOS is the attention to best practices
with regard to the management of the material being digitised.
Great care was taken from the outset to ensure that the camera
technician was fully qualified, to degree level, in archival and
conservation studies. Temperature and humidity are monitored daily
in the digitisation environment, and the modalities of conservation
practice - such as the use of acid-free securing implements, and
so forth - are observed at all times. This means that not alone
are the partners satisfied that every possible care is taken of
the manuscript originals, but confidence in our ability to operate
effectively in a library environment, or with library materials,
is generated, resulting in the excellent relations the ISOS team
have enjoyed with the libraries with which they have worked.
The ISOS project began with a pilot stage lasting from July 1998
to May 1999. This period allowed the project to explore the various
technical challenges which the digitisation of Irish manuscripts
presents, to experiment with the photography, and to gain valuable
experience from handling a range of different bibliographic formats.
The Abbot and community of Mount Melleray Abbey, Co. Waterford,
readily agreed to the temporary transfer of their collection of
thirteen Irish manuscripts to the School of Celtic Studies for
use in the pilot stage of the digitisation project. These manuscripts
had all previously been catalogued by the School, and their availability
to the project was therefore of great value. Images from this
collection are now publicly available on the ISOS website. Coláiste
na Rinne, Rinn Ó gCuanach, Co. Waterford, also placed some
of their collection at the disposal of the project, and images
from these manuscripts are available on the website.
On completion of the pilot stage of the project in May 1999, ISOS
entered into an agreement with Trinity College Library to undertake
a programme of digitisation of some of its important collection
of Irish manuscripts. For environmental and security reasons the
work, which will take a further two years to complete, is being
carried out in the Library in co-operation with Trinity's Conservation
Laboratory and Manuscripts Department.
The project's primary target in TCD is MS 1339 (H 2 18), otherwise
known as the Book of Leinster, a diplomatic edition of which was
published by the School of Celtic Studies [3]. The Book of Leinster,
properly Leabhar na Nuachongbhála, is an anthology
of Irish tradition - prose, verse, and genealogy - the compilation
of which spanned the second half of the twelfth century. It takes
its name from an ecclesiastical foundation in Co. Laois, that
of Oughaval, near Stradbally. Of the number of scribes who worked
on it only one is known by name: Aed mac meic Crimthaind, coarb
of Terryglass, Co. Tipperary.
ISOS also aims to digitise the complete collection of Irish medical
manuscripts in TCD, the catalogue of which is nearing completion
at the School of Celtic Studies. TCD's holding of twenty-eight
such manuscripts accounts for over a quarter of all extant medical
manuscripts in Irish.
As manuscript images are captured, post-processed, archived onto
tape and placed online, there are three levels of resolution available.
Thumbnails and lower-quality JPEGs are available to casual WWW
users. The quality of these images is sufficient for browsing
but not for detailed study so registered users, who complete and
sign a registration form, are provided with access to the higher-quality
JPEG images.
The roles that the different partners play in the ISOS project
are complementary. DIAS are the subject experts, who are familiar
with the material and who carry out the role of scholarly domain
experts. DCU are the technical partners who have the know-knowledge
and experience in building large digital collections for the web.
The benefits of ISOS to both communities are clear. DIAS, and
Celtic scholars worldwide, are provided with access to high-quality
images; DCU has a very real collection of digital artefacts, with
catalog information, with which to pursue its research interests
in digital libraries. And, as a side-effect, casual web users
have access to a previously unavailable resource.
[1] http://www.digimarc.com
[2] http://www.ISOS.dcu.ie
[3] O. Bergin, R.I. Best, M.A. O'Brien, and A. O'Sullivan (eds) The Book of Leinster, formerly Lebar na Núachongbála I-VI (Dublin: DIAS 1954-83)
Teaching Gaelic within a department of Irish to Irish
speakers presents a new set of challenges to the language teacher.
To what extent does knowledge of a cognate language affect progress
in the target language? Prior knowledge of the cognate language
is seen initially to allow speedy development, but later language
interference can hinder attainment of fluency.
This paper is largely a series of observations on my own experiences
of teaching Gaelic to Irish-speaking students in an Irish department.
I compare the progress of the Irish speaking student of Gaelic
with a model used by Brian Page of English L1 speakers learning
French. I make specific references to the 'four stages' Brian
Page uses in his discussion of the development of the English
learner of French (Page, 1998: 124). By comparing each of Page's
stages in turn with my own students' experiences, as I have perceived
them, it is evident that these stages do not apply to the Irish
learners of Gaelic. I relate each of the stages to one of the
four semesters in my two-year Gaelic course.
Assuming stage 1 is absolute beginners to post beginners,
the Irish learner of Gaelic quickly and easily passes this
stage. The grammar, and sometimes vocabulary, at beginner level
may not be totally unfamiliar to the Irish speaker. A typical
first lesson in any Gaelic classroom, or indeed any language classroom,
could involve concepts such as 'greetings'. The teacher might
introduce a sentence such as this:
G. Hallo a Mhairead, ciamar a tha thu? Hello,
Margaret, how are you?
For the non-Irish speaker, the first concept the Gaelic teacher
would need to explain would be the use of the 'vocative case'
here. Mairead radical form, becomes a Mhairead when
the person is being addressed by the speaker. For the Irish speaker,
this would pose no problems, the vocative working in the same
way in Irish:
I. Dia dhuit, a Mhairéad, conas tá
tú?
Most modern structured language courses aim to teach the students
to quickly be able to produce simple informative phrases about
themselves, and to recognise questions relating to the same. An
example of this type of language would be 'what's your name?',
which in Gaelic is articulated as follows:
G. Dè an t-ainm a tha ort? (lit. what
the name which is on you?)
To the English L1 learner of Gaelic, the structure of this question
often causes problems. Firstly the word order is different to
English, in that the verb follows the noun. Secondly the student
is being introduced to the linguistic phenomenon of the 'compound
prepositional pronoun'. The compound prepositional pronouns are
a very common feature in Gaelic: the learner cannot function without
them and it is therefore essential that they are introduced at
as early a stage as possible. It often takes a long time for the
English L1 speaker to get to grips with them, but for the Irish
speaker they pose no difficulties. In this particular example
the compound prepositional pronoun would be basically the same:
I. Cén t-ainm atá ort?
In comparison with Page's stage one students with 'single or two-word
utterances' and 'considerable hesitation', the Irish learner of
Gaelic is considerably more accomplished, syntactically at least.
Page also considers pronunciation, which in his learners has 'strong
interference from native pronunciation'. At stage 1 Gaelic
pronunciation may not seem as 'alien' to the Irish speaker. The
Irish speaker would probably be familiar with various consonant
clusters which might otherwise 'throw' another learner, for example:
ghlan, and dorcha - pronunciation
in the two languages can be similar. They would also be able to
associate what they see on the page with the oral format relatively
easily: orthographic conventions such as 'th' in Gaelic to represent
/h/ and 'bh' to represent /v/ would certainly not be unfamiliar,
as they would be to the learner of Gaelic with no Irish.
Page notes that 'his' learners at this stage will have a 'very
limited vocabulary', and again this does not apply to the Irish
learner of Gaelic. Whereas the non-Irish learner of Gaelic and
the Irish-speaking learner of Gaelic may have been introduced
to the same amount of words by the teacher, the Irish-speaker
will have a much larger passive vocabulary, due to the shared
linguistic ancestry of the two languages.
Page also notes that at this stage the learner will be 'stringing
words together ungrammatically'. At this stage my students will
have been introduced to, for example, a large number of compound
prepositional pronouns, and would be expected to recognise and
use them in idiomatic constructions - for example to express possession:
tha cat agam (I have a cat), and also tha mi
a' bruidhinn ris (I am talking to him). Whereas the
concept and construction of phrases using the compound prepositions
poses less problems to the speakers of Irish than to non-Irish
speakers, there is the possibility that the Irish learner might
use inappropriate prepositions. In the example tha mi a' bruidhinn
ris, the Irish learner often wants to substitute the preposition
le / leis , coming from the Irish tá mé
ag caint leis. The preposition le also exists
in Gaelic, but to use it in this situation would be wrong.
By now students will also have been introduced to the past, present
and future tenses of regular verbs and the verb 'to be', which
they will be able to use with varying degrees of success. There
is a problem with Irish 'language interference' at this stage,
that the non-Irish speakers do not have.
As we know Gaelic and Irish have a different tense structure,
Gaelic having fewer tenses than Irish. In order to make up for
this apparent lack of tenses, Gaelic favours a system of periphrastic
constructions to express different tenses and aspects. The Irish
speaker will be familiar with these periphrastic constructions,
as they also exist in Irish, though are not as widely used as
in Gaelic, nor are they used in the same way. The students will
firstly be taught how to express continuous action in the past,
present and future using the relevant forms of the verb 'to be'
and verbal noun.
e.g. a' cur
PRESENT PAST FUTURE
G. Tha mi a' cur Bha mi a' cur Bidh mi a' cur
I. Tá mé ag cur Bhí mé ag
cur Beidh mé ag cur
Although there is an apparent correspondence between the languages,
there are differences. The English 'I put' can be expressed in
two ways in Gaelic tha mi a' cur and bidh mi a' cur,
which superficially correspond with Irish tá mé
ag cur and beidh mé ag cur. Only the former
of these Irish examples would be associated with the present (along
with cuirim, which Gaelic does not have), whereas the latter
would be associated only with a future meaning.
By extension, this cross-over of aspect and tense applies to all
verbs in Gaelic. Gaelic cuiridh mi, which superficially
relates to Irish cuirfidh mé ('I will put'), may
mean 'I put' or 'I will put'. This frequently causes difficulty
for the Irish-speaking student who finds it hard to disassociate
what s/he knows about the tense system in Irish, when the languages
look as if their tense systems behave in a somewhat similar fashion.
Stage 3 of my course for Irish speakers would involve a review
of all the irregular verbs in Gaelic, some of which would have
been encountered by this stage. I would also teach modal and auxiliary
constructions - again some of which would have been encountered.
In addition to the formal written aspects of the course, the students
would also be required to do more aural and oral work.
Compared to Page's 'stage 3' learners the Irish learners can also
'form longer sentences, many well formed but most containing formal
errors of some sort'. In this instance the errors are nearly always
due to language interference. Page says his learners 'have a limited
vocabulary'. This need not be the case with the Irish learner
who may still have an advantage over the non-Irish learner, there
still being a discrepancy in the receptive and productive vocabulary
of the Irish-speaking learner. Although the Gaelic and Irish lexicon
are similar, giving an apparent advantage to the Irish student
of Gaelic, there is a problem with 'false friends'. I have noted
a tendency in the students that when they are unsure of a Gaelic
word, they will use an Irish word. Although this sometimes might
work, it is often unacceptable and can lead to complete misunderstanding.
Only familiarity with the target language assures correct lexical
usage. Some examples of common 'false friends' are:
I . ag cur as do (annoying) G . a' cur as do (killing)
ní mór dom (I have to) cha mhòr (barely/almost)
b'fhéidir (perhaps) b' fheudar dhomh (I had to)
An Bhreatain Bheag (Wales) A' Bhreatainn Bheag (Britanny)
Teaching to the 'stage four' learners is largely an exercise in
promoting linguistic independence incorporating idiomatic constructions,
revision of grammar points, new vocabulary, authentic texts for
discussion and as models for free writing. At this level language
interference often prevents the Irish-speaking student achieving
the 'near native production' that Page identifies in his 'stage
four' learners. Written assignments by my advanced learners often
contain a disproportionally high amount of grammatical mistakes,
compared to the non-Irish speaker at this stage. These mistakes
would not normally be made by them when completing tasks centred
around particular grammar points, but when they are required to
write creatively, interference is present.
At this stage, students often still make the mistake of trying
to use a non-existent present tense, based on their knowledge
of the Irish tense system. The dative case in Gaelic is particularly
problematic for the students, whereas nominative, genitive and
vocative are not. The Irish-speaking students may initially appear
to have a distinct advantage over their non-Irish speaking counterparts
being familiar with the concept of initial mutation following
certain prepositions. However, there is a tendency to treat nouns
following simple prepositions in Gaelic in the same way as they
behave in Irish; this would not be acceptable as correct Gaelic.
Comparision of how the (shared) nouns bòrd / bord
(masculine) and gealach (feminine) behave after
simple prepositions, when definite and indefinite, illustrates
where the students' difficulties arise. The Irish examples follow
the standard Irish practices; northern dialects would of course
behave differently.
G. bòrd beag, air bòrd beag, am bòrd beag, air a' bhòrd bheag
I. bord beag, ar bhord beag, an bord beag, ar an mbord
beag
G. gealach bheag, air gealach bheag, a' ghealach bheag, air a' ghealaich bhig
I. gealach bheag, ar ghealach bheag, an ghealach bheag,
ar an ngealach bheag
Students have an erroneous tendency to lenite indefinite nouns
following most simple prepositions, when only 'bho',
'fo', 'do', 'de', 'mu',
'ro', and 'tro' cause contact mutation in
Gaelic. When the noun is definite the students often want to use
eclipsis and they struggle with the internal changes to the nouns
and following adjectives.
As regards oral competency at this advanced stage in their Gaelic
course, there are often some major flaws which can prevent 'the
near native production' Page noted in stage four. My students
are obviously learning in a very artificial environment with little
or no chance to practice their language skills outside the classroom,
except with each other if they choose to do so. If they do choose
to do this it can pose a number of problems, as does getting the
students to talk to each other in pair or group work in class.
When talking to one another, they very quickly lapse into Irish
pronunciation of certain phonemic items. There are several Gaelic
sounds in particular which I have noted the students struggling
with - these sounds often share an orthographic representation
with a different sound in Irish.
For example, 'ao' in Gaelic is pronounced /µ:/
and, approximately, /i:/ or /e:/ in Irish - so shared words such
as craobh, aon and daoine are pronounced differently.
'mh' is often pronounced /w/ in Irish whereas it is usually /v/
in Gaelic, and sometimes silent. The '-adh' suffix is nearly always
voiced in Gaelic, but rarely in Irish and is normally rendered
as /«/.
Other pronunciation problems which are still prevalent at this
stage are stress patterns, the consistent production of authentic
Gaelic 'l's, 'n's and 'r's and the production of preaspiration
so that cat will be pronounced /khaht/,
Gaelic, and not /kat/, Irish, and mac will be pronounced,
for example, /maxc/ or /mahc/ and not /mac/.
The Irish-speaking learners of Gaelic are often able to make themselves
understood more quickly than non-Irish speakers. In terms of achieving
'near-native' competencies, however, interference from the cognate
language makes this goal at least as hard for them as it is for
the non-Irish speaking student.
Ball, Martin J., The Celtic Languages, Routledge, London,
1993.
Jackson, Kenneth, 'Common Gaelic' in Proceedings of the British
Academy 37, London, 1953.
Ó Maolalaigh, Roibeard, Scottish Gaelic in Three Months,
Hugo, Suffolk, 1996.
Page, Brian, 'Why do I have to get it right anyway?' in Teaching
Modern Languages (ed. Ann Swarbick), Routledge, London, 1998.
Robertson, Boyd & Taylor, Iain, Teach Yourself Gaelic,
Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1993.
Graiméar Gaeilge na mBráithre Críostaí, An Gúm, Baile Átha Cliath, 1999.
Until two years ago such a phrase would have been
equivalent to Beckett's "Waiting for Godot", so hopeless
(or at least far ahead) did it seem for Breton speakers to finally
get the adequate TV service in their language that most of their
Celtic counterparts had secured for themselves in the 1980s or
90s (S4C in Wales, the CTG financed programmes in Scotland, and
TnaG - now TG4 - in Ireland). But things are changing...
After the dramatic drop in the number of speakers throughout the
XXth century (from 1,5 million after World War I to 1 million
after World War II to an estimated 240 000 in 1997), the main
challenge facing the Breton language for its survival into the
XXIst century and beyond is most certainly the near extinction
of family transmission within the homes.
In a survey published in 1998 by the INED (National Institute
of Demographic Studies) about various language communities in
France, native or migrant alike, Breton shows the lowest rate
of transmission, close to 0%. In the Euromosaic report
(production and reproduction of minority language communities
in the European Union) published in 1996 by the European
Commission, Breton ranked 32nd out of 48 communities, with a rating
of 8 for "reproduction" on a scale graded from 1 à
28.
The authors of the Euromosaic report, Belgian P.Nelde,
Catalan M.Strubell and Welshman G.Williams considered that situation
to be "[...] a consequence of the extreme position of the
French state by reference to the modernist goal of cultural and
linguistic homogenisation, and the associated denigration and
neglect of minority language groups within its territory. This
has certainly been responsible for generating a profound negative
identity among members of the respective language groups . Furthermore,
while the current situation begins to approximate a situation
of benign neglect, there is little indication of any policy development
that seeks to redress the situation."
A merely mechanistic analysis of the demographic situation of
the language could lead to the conclusion that Breton is doomed.
But the socio-linguistic trends of the past 20 years should allow
us to think quite differently. Seemingly, the very socio-economic
factors that contributed to the decline of the language during
the transition from a traditional society to the industrial era
are now the basis of its present revival.
Far from being a nostalgic attitude, the promotion of the social
and educational use of Breton is widespread in the general public.
The age of "negative identity" is over and done with
for a growing number of Bretons : a poll carried out in 1991 in
the Finistère/Penn ar Bed (the westernmost part of Brittany)
showed that 94,5% of the people surveyed thought that the language
should be retained, among which non Breton speakers were the most
determined. Even the French population as a whole think that "regional"
languages should be recognized and protected (77% in favour of
a law and 19% against in 1994).
For decades, nobody but a few really cared about the decline of
the language : Bretons were busy studying - through the medium
of French - to become civil servants (and therefore often emigrate)
; or else, when they stayed on the farm, they were fighting off
degrading stereotypes by becoming more and more competitive all
the time.
Its presence in the environment was felt to be so "natural"
that no one could imagine it possible for Breton to disappear.
The new generations, deprived from the language and therefore
unable to pass it down to their own children by themselves, have
developed a deep sense of loss. Feeling that they had been dispossessed
of part of what they were, they are the ones who have strongly
demanded Breton medium schools, and even created them (Diwan)
when they weren't granted.
Since the first Diwan school was set up 22 years ago, and despite
the fact that the overall numbers of school age children in Brittany
have been going down steadily since then, Breton medium education
hasn't ceased to increase in numbers (between +15 and +20 % every
year), also in state and catholic schools, to reach the global
figure of 5600 students in september 1999. Although family transmission
is unbeatable when it comes to language maintenance, the growing
social demand for Breton medium education, as a substitute, can
be considered a vital criteria that marks off a language of the
future from a purely residual phenomenon.
The demand would originally come from educated lower middle class
families, but the recruitment is increasingly diverse now, becoming
closer all the time to the local community's socio-cultural structure
: even though social careers (and teachers in particular) are
still overrepresented, more and more workers, employees and farmers
are sending their children to Breton-medium schools. All the more
so since bilingual children's school results have been found very
good : educational authorities have avoided conducting a general
assessment of their standards in Breton as yet, but national evaluations
in French and maths at primary and secondary level have confirmed
their excellent level, and the first three generations of Diwan
teenagers have passed their baccalaureat (leaving certificate).
Breton is now generally seen as a dynamic element in a society
that has to find new solutions within itself to transcend such
crisis as agricultural overproduction and its environmental consequences,
or the end of state assisted industries like the navy arsenals.
Cultural activities and production, often language linked, provide
more and more qualified jobs - without having to emigrate. They
also generate profits in other sectors of the economy, increasingly
eager for "authenticity" (tourism, food industry,etc),
through the positive image conveyed internationally by Breton
musicians and singers.
Not surprisingly, the newest developments in this permanent search
for non-standardized products have taken place in the communication
and media sector : the Breton Language Office, set up in june
1999, region and state funded ; new Breton language radio stations
and internet sites ; and a television private venture due to go
on the air on August 4th, 2000, during the Lorient Interceltic
Festival : TV-Breizh.
Joshua Fishman writes in Reversing Language Shift : "Even
the much touted mass media are insufficiently interpersonal, child-orientated,
affect-suffused, societally binding to attain cumulative intergenerational
mother-tongue transmission, particularly so since the proportion
of Yish [i.e.French] utilized by the media will long (and
perhaps always) be greater than the proportion of Xish [i.e.Breton].
[...] The favorable outcomes of the Hebrew, Catalan and Quebec
French cases did not begin with work, media or government
Xization ; they began with the acquisition of a firm family-neighborhood-community
base." Having said that, he also adds further in his book
that "the importance of Xishization of these services and
influences is beyond question". As head of TV-Breizh Rozenn
Milin when interviewed by a French TV magazine : "I don't
know if we'll manage to reverse the decline of the Breton language,
but it's important to try".
For the past two decades, those few families (a few thousand people
across Brittany at most) who did transmit the language in their
homes and/or send their children to Breton medium schools expressed
their frustration over the lack of adequate Breton TV programmes
for the youth, but they weren't strong enough a lobby to have
any influence on the issue. Hence the ridiculously small amount
of hours (85 h a year...) broadcast in Breton on France3Ouest,
the state run public television service.
All programmes are broadcast during the most inconvenient time
slots (lunchtime, saturday afternoon, sunday morning) ; after
a short-lived attempt at providing programmes for all ages and
tastes in th 80s, nearly all programmes now belong to the "news-current
affairs" category, to suit the mainly ageing target audience
(a 1994 survey by the INSEE - National Institute of Statistics
- found that 300 000 people listened to TV or radio programmes,
at least sometimes, out of 689 000 who said they understood Breton.
But listeners and viewers were rather old : 159 000 above 60 and
only 21 500 under 30. Most of them didn't get an extensive education:
171 000 had been to school until the age of 14/15. 31 000 out
of 39 000 regular listeners/viewers were retired) ; all programmes
are now subtitled in French (without any opt out) except for the
daily 4'30" news - which are discontinued during the summer
; finally, you won't have access to the same amount of Breton
programmes if you live in the West (all programmes, the news being
the most successful with circa 20 000 viewers daily), the
East (no daily news... unless you go on the internet !) or the
South (only sundays).
Television programmes in Breton (and radio programmes to a lesser
extent) are at the same time the popular media, so to speak,
with a population which is generally a lot more familiar with
the oral message than with the written word (contrary to the Welsh
public for example). Quite naturally for a language that has presently
no widespread accepted standard form, people often complain -
though sometimes with an obvious lack of goodwill - that the dialectal
variety of people interviewed, or indeed the attempted "central"
expression of the announcers is an obstacle to comprehension.
Over the past two years the whole picture has been changing rapidly
: following a project carried out by the Cultural Council of Brittany,
an umbrella organization for all language and culture groups,
and the commentating of the soccer World Cup in Breton on Eurosport,
the Breton born president of TF1 (the biggest private channel
in Europe) announced in october 1998 that he would launch a bilingual
satellite/cable digital television channel broadcasting across
Europe, an information that was confirmed in April 1999 in the
Isle of Skye during the Interceltic Film and Television Festival.
Market research allegedly showed that Brittany was the only region
in the state with both a strong identity and enough population
(4million), plus an important diaspora in France and Europe with
strong attachment to the old country. Even if broadcasting costs
are getting cheaper all the time, due to digital technology, those
were conditions that made the project viable. The potential audience
will initially be the 75 000 households with access to cable television
in Brittany (2 million in France), and the 100 000 equipped with
satellite dishes. Considering that both figures are on the increase,
and also that Brittany will be the first region to get digital
terrestrial television in 2002, the aim is to have 200 000 viewers
after 4 years of broadcasting.
TV-Breizh will be a private channel with private funding. Anybody
in France and Europe will be able to receive TV-Breizh provided
they have subscribed to the multiplex by satellite or cable. Advertisement
and sponsoring will be part of the funding to. The initial budget
was to be over 100 million francs a year, it will be closer to
80 million - 1/10th of Welsh S4C's annual budget - causing the
channel to give up on news (unfortunately, because Breton would
have had access to international, not just local news). Industrialists
of Breton origins will be the main investors, but also international
TV tycoons such as Berlusconi and Murdoch. This brought about
controversy over the cultural quality and the general ideology
of the channel : in a country where the public/private and left/right
divides are historically vivid, reconciling these opposite views
will therefore be yet another challenge.
TV-Breizh will broadcast daily from 7 a.m to 1 a.m. The 5 to 6
hour grid of "fresh" programmes, between 5.30 p.m and
22.30 p.m (repeated 3 times a day) will be as follows :
Viewers subscribing primarily for the language will obviously
be a minority, but the channel's commitment to broadcast in Breton
will be made easier by digital technology, through the use of
two sound channels on option, one for each language. That choice
will be made possible for all children's programmes and for documentaries
from the start. As for feature films, only one a month will be
available in the Breton version (dubbed from English) during the
first year, then one a week. Talk-shows invitees will be welcome
to use Breton whenever they happen to be speakers of the language...
and willing to do so. Altogether there should be an average of
2 hours of Breton daily (broadcast three times) .
"Television is for watching, television is for fun, not for
teaching" would still be quite a common view among the public,
and probably even more so among teachers, who often see it as
nothing short of a (badly) influential rival. And so it is, in
a way. But it has become such a big part of children's and teenagers'
lives, conversations and concerns that schools simply can't ignore
it anymore. Parents of Breton speaking children had until now
a narrow range of moving pictures to choose from : just a few
cartoons released on videos, but these were also usually showed...
at school.
The very fact that a daily peak-time children's programme will
exist - be it on a paying channel that not everyone will get,
be it dubbed mostly from British, American or Australian programmes
- is going to change a lot of things in the schoolyard. It will
also modify the image that non-speakers have of the Breton language.
Especially so since TV-Breizh have also announced that they want
to be an interactive channel with a strong multimedia presence.
It could change things within the classroom too, way beyond the
sitcom for learners itself. "Celtic" cultural background
programmes will be preferred whenever possible : a cartoon version
of Tristan and Izold is currently being dubbed, and some "historical"
feature films - Holywood and others - will follow. Some of that
material will be usable in schools without fear for embarrassment
: a big change, since fiction production in Breton has been rare
and, one must admit, often not very good (due to shortage of trained
scriptwriters, filmmakers, actors, and of course time and money,
but there's hope that, through dubbing, a new generation will
be able to make their own films in due course, that could eventually
amount to 30% of the total).
For the past decade anyway, only documentaries - some very good
ones - and news/current affairs programmes have been produced,
but they don't have the same effect as fiction on a child's imagination
and expression. TES (Ti Embann ar Skolioù - the multimedia
resource centre for Breton medium schools) for example have released,
in cooperation with France3Ouest, a compilation of agricultural
news items: hardly something you'd use everyday.
What is the main objective of using TV news programmes (or radio
or audio-tapes, for that matter, although they're not as successful
with the pupils) ? In the Breton context of a declining social
use, it is, most certainly, to enrich the sometimes overstandardized
language used in schools by bringing right into the classroom
the richness of all varieties of Breton (accents, dialects, registers,
men and women, young and old, etc) while keeping in mind that
the Breton population has of course become very mobile and isn't
living.
That richness should be kept in TV-Breizh programmes, despite
the technical constraints of synchronized dubbing, because Rozenn
Milin has made sure to recruit translators and studio actors across
all those varieties, and the commitment to use a rich, but authentic
language has been stressed throughout their month-long training
during the summer of 1999, especially when it comes to accentuation
and intonation.
TV-Breizh translators will have to deal with the same old dilemmas
(dialectal/"standard" ; loanwords/neologisms ; code-switching
and mixing, etc) as other sectors, except with a much greater
responsibility. Some challenges actually sound very exciting :
which of our dialects will we use to dub the Scots, their Irish
allies... and their English enemies in Braveheart ?
Another predictable outcome : with the boost to all sectors of the Breton audio-visual industry (including France3Ouest, hopefully), Breton teaching will at last lead to more careers than just those of... Breton teaching.
This paper will provide a preliminary survey of various
archives throughout North America that have Celtic language recordings.
In general, it will treat only collections that are held at institutions
as opposed to ones that are in the possession of private individuals.
Also it will not, for the most part, consider holdings that are
outside North America, although they may contain much interesting
North American material. Therefore Archives such as those of the
BBC, the School of Scottish Studies and the Department of Irish
Folklore in Dublin or Radio na Gaeltachta will not be considered.
These are the general guidelines but there may in fact be one
or two deviations from them in the course of the paper.
To begin it might be well to consider briefly the history of sound
recording. As we were leaving the 1990s and entering the year
2000 one heard more and more reference to the invention of sound
recording. Some months back National Public Radio in the United
States started a series of programs which play excerpts from recordings
made over the course of the twentieth century. In November of
1999, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, acknowledging the lead
of NPR, also started a radio series entitled "Lost and Found
Sound" which plays home recordings made by Canadians in past
decades.
Sound recording was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, just one
hundred years too late to record Dolly Pentreath of Cornwall.
Edison's first device used tin foil. Tin foil was soon replaced
by wax cylinders. Edison was followed by a number of others, such
as the German-born Emile Berliner, who invented the gramophone
in the 1880s and also was the first to use disks to record sound.
Berliner produced a series of disks between 1888 and 1901 which
included vocal selections sung in English, French, Italian, Russian,
Spanish and at least one piece in Scottish Gaelic. The Gaelic
selection was recorded in Glasgow on September 5, 1899 and features
the soprano Jessie Niven MacLachlan singing "Oro Mo Nighean
Donn Bhòidheach" to piano accompaniment. These recordings
of Berliner's were re-issued in CD format in 1988 to commemorate
the centenary of the invention of the gramophone. The Loeb Music
Archive at Harvard has a copy of the CD and they have given me
permission to play the Gaelic track here.
As early as 1901 the music of Irish piper Patrick Tuohey had been
recorded and phonograph selections of his were being advertised
for sale in the New York Irish World. In the early years of this
century a number of Irish Gaelic language courses on record, some
produced in Ireland, some in the United States, were advertised
in Irish American publications. These advertisements are interesting
in that they stress the importance of learning to speak the language
and one even points out that a person who cannot read can learn
with this method.
By the late 1920s various recording techniques were being used
to record Celtic folklore and linguistic data. In 1929 James Delargy
became the first investigator to use the Ediphone to record Irish
folklore (Dorson 1966). In 1931 Professor Dögen who was director
of the Lautabteilung of the Preussische Staatsbibliothek in Berlin,
made a number of 78 r.p.m. disk recordings of most Irish dialects
that were still extent, including eighty disks of Ulster dialects.
For further information on this project see the Appendix to the
Minutes of the Royal Irish Academy, Session 1928/29 and
Colm Ó Baoill's texts in Appendix II of volume 4 of Heinrich
Wagner's Linguistic Atlas and Survey of Irish Dialects,
p. 283-303.
Let us turn now to North America and we will begin in Nova Scotia
with Helen Creighton, one of the early collectors of folklore.
Creighton was a remarkable woman who became an icon in Nova Scotia
and indeed all of Canada. She was born to an affluent family in
1899 in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia just across the harbor from Halifax.
In 1928 she was a journalist looking for a story line. Someone
suggested that she do a story on pirates and pirate songs and
mentioned that she might be able to get some material by talking
to people in a small coastal village outside of Halifax. She went
there, met just the right tradition bearers and thus stumbled
into her lifelong vocation as a collector of folklore. Just outside
the Halifax area she was to continue to find a treasure trove
of English-language folklore, including a good many Child ballads.
In 1933, she traveled to remote Cape Breton, accompanied by a
music teacher, to collect folksongs but she did not yet have a
recording device. Miss Creighton tells us in the introduction
to her Gaelic Songs in Nova Scotia that she and her companion
were perplexed to discover that most of the people they met in
Cape Breton had either French songs or Gaelic songs (Creighton
and MacLeod 1964). They decided to go for what they considered
the more exotic Gaelic songs and succeeded in taking down the
notation of forty Gaelic songs that weekend. In 1943 the Library
of Congress supplied Creighton with a recorder which enabled her
to take down Gaelic and French songs as easily as English. Over
the course of her collecting career which lasted into the 1970s,
Creighton recorded hundreds of Gaelic songs in Cape Breton, the
eastern mainland of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. The
interesting thing is that she says that she never sought out Gaelic
songs and she never attempted to learn Gaelic but if Gaelic songs
were what people offered to sing for her, she accepted them readily.
She published 150 of these songs in 1964 in the book referred
to above, Gaelic Songs in Nova Scotia. Calum MacLeod of
St. Francis Xavier University supplied the Gaelic texts which
he transcribed from Creighton's tapes and he also made the translations.
There are still many more of Creighton's Gaelic tapes that have
never been published. These are housed in the Public Archives
of Nova Scotia in Halifax along with the thousands of tapes she
collected of English and French material. Copies of some of her
material are also found at the Library of Congress in Washington
and at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. In November
of last year a biography of Creighton was published, authored
by Clary Croft who worked with Helen Creighton in her last years
cataloguing her collection.
Just at the time Helen Creighton was taking an interest in Nova
Scotia folklore, John Lorne Campbell of Scotland was absorbed
by the question of Gaelic in Canada. Campbell had studied Gaelic
at Oxford with Professor John Fraser. Campbell moved to Barra
and became the first to use the Ediphone to collect Scottish Gaelic
folklore. In 1932 he visited Nova Scotia and returned in 1937
with an Ediphone to record the Gaelic songs of the province. In
that year he also made some recordings of the Micmac language
which are said to be the first ones made of that language. He
returned to Nova Scotia a number times in later years and was
given an honorary doctorate by St. Francis Xavier University in
recognition of the work he was doing in the field of Gaelic both
in Scotland and Nova Scotia. In 1990 Campbell published Songs
Remembered in Exile which contains sixty of the songs he recorded
in Nova Scotia. In addition to a wealth of songs from such excellent
Cape Breton singers as Mrs. David Patterson, the book also contains
songs from two remarkable mainland Nova Scotia singers. These
were Angus MacIsaac of Giant's Lake, Guysborough County, just
south of Antigonish and Angus "the Ridge" MacDonald
of Antigonish County. MacIsaac sang a number of interesting songs
for Campbell, but the most extraordinary was his version of "Teanntachd
Mhór na Féinne," an Ossianic ballad, that has
never been recorded in Scotland. The other remarkable singer,
Angus "the Ridge" MacDonald, was from a family of tradition
bearers who could trace their ancestry back to the MacDonalds
of Keppoch, known as Sliochd an Taighe. They would be distant
relations of Sìleas na Ceapaich. This family came to Nova
Scotia and settled first on the "Ridge" in Mabou, Cape
Breton, hence the nickname "the Ridges." After a few
decades in Cape Breton the family moved to Antigonish County on
the mainland of Nova Scotia, but the name "the Ridge"
stayed with them for generations. This family maintained Gaelic
learning and traditions for many generations. St. Francis Xavier
University has in its Special Collections an extensive manuscript
of Gaelic songs written down by Alexander "the Ridge,"
Angus' father. John Lorne Campbell recorded fifteen songs from
Angus, twelve of which are published in Songs Remembered in
Exile. Another of the songs Campbell collected from Angus
was published by Sister Margaret MacDonell in The Emigrant
Experience. John Lorne Campbell passed away just a few years
ago. His entire collection is in his residence on the Isle of
Canna. The collection catalogue is being entered into database
and plans are underway to have the material digitized. We have
a small amount of copies of John Lorne's material at StFX. In
recent years when he would come to visit StFX he would bring several
reel to reel tapes which we would duplicate to cassette tapes.
Also in the 1930s, Sidney Robertson Cowell, an ethnographer and
folk music collector was working for the Library of Congress and
managed to persuade the Work Projects Administration to support
her recording of various ethnic groups in Northern California.
This was one of the earliest undertakings of its kind in one region
of the United States. The Irish and the Scots were among the groups
recorded but as far as I can tell all the Irish material is in
English. Much of the Scots material, however, is in Gaelic. The
Gaelic material was supplied by several Hebrideans resident in
California. More interesting for our purposes, however, are the
items Cowell recorded from a Mary A. MacDonald on April 11, 1939.
MacDonald was a ninety-year old native of Cape Breton who had
come out to California in her youth in a covered wagon. The three
local Cape Breton compositions MacDonald sang for Cowell and,
indeed, much of the other material Cowell collected, are available
on the Internet as sound files at the California Gold site of
the Library of Congress (Library of Congress 1 & 2). In 1953
Cowell went to Cape Breton and recorded a number of the fine singers.
In 1955 she brought several of Cape Breton's North Shore singers
to Boston, where she recorded them performing milling songs and
precenting the psalms. A house session in Boston was also recorded.
These tapes are in the Folklife Archives of the Smithsonian Institute.
Another American woman who was extremely active as a folk music
collector at that time was Laura Boulton. She traveled the world
in search of folk music. As early as 1931 she was recording native
American music. In the early 1940s she traveled throughout Canada.
She collected widely in Nova Scotia from various ethnic groups.
She also took moving pictures and one especially valuable film
for folklife studies is her movie of an Acadian milling frolic.
She recorded a fair amount of Gaelic material both in Cape Breton
and in mainland Nova Scotia. She too recorded Angus the Ridge
MacDonald. Copies of Laura Boulton Collection audio recordings
exist at Columbia University, the Library of Congress, and the
Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music. I would like
to play a Gaelic example recorded by Laura Boulton in October
1941 from Angus the Ridge MacDonald. This copy was supplied by
the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music. The text
I give you is taken from J. L. Campbell's book Songs Remembered
in Exile. Note that the singer did not sing as full a text
for Miss Boulton as he did for J. L. Campbell. Furthermore, note
what he says at the end of the song. I would point out two things.
First of all, in the Laura Boulton recording, Angus knew he was
singing for a collector who did not understand him and who could
not appreciate the song. Secondly, and possibly more important,
it is clear from the tape that there was a fair number of English
monoglots present, (remember this is mainland Nova Scotia in 1941),
not Cape Breton, and Angus may have felt uncomfortable singing
an old lengthy Gaelic song in the presence of this predominantly
English-speaking company.
In 1941 another person was in Nova Scotia collecting Gaelic songs.
This was Charles Dunn, chairman emeritus of the Department of
Celtic languages and literatures at Harvard, who is responsible
for much of the blossoming of Celtic Studies throughout North
America. Dunn had studied Celtic at Harvard and was aware of the
rich oral Gaelic traditions existing in Nova Scotia. He brought
an Ediphone with him to Nova Scotia and proceeded to record a
wide variety of Gaelic material. His book The Highland Settler
is a classic in the field of Gaelic culture in Nova Scotia. In
the 1960s Charles Dunn traveled to Québec and Ontario and
recorded some of the last Gaelic speakers in those regions. His
tape collection has long been housed at Harvard and over the years
it has served as a research resource for a number of investigators
including Nancy Rose Dunkly, William Mahon and Sr. Margaret MacDonell.
Six years ago when I was teaching a course of Scottish Gaelic
poetry, the class was looking at some of the poems in Sr. Margaret
MacDonell's The Emigrant Experience. Mary Jane Lamond,
who was in the class, was particularly interested in a certain
song in the book that had been collected by Charles Dunn in 1960
in Ontario from ninety-four year old Donald Fletcher. Mary Jane
went to talk to Sister MacDonell about the song, Sr. MacDonell
sang it for Mary Jane and when Mary Jane produced her first album
it was the first song on the album.
There are a few other Celtic collections at Harvard, such as the
David Riply collection of English and Gaelic material recorded
in Cape Breton in 1975 and a series of readings in Manx by John
Comish, who considered himself a semi-speaker of Manx. These were
recorded by Pádraig Ó Broin, the Toronto bookseller
and publisher of the small Celtic journals: Teangadóir
and Irisleabhar Ceilteach. John Comish, who was born in
the Isle of Man, had traveled as a merchant sailor all over the
world before he settled down in Kirkland Lake, Ontario where these
recordings were made. The readings are from stories Comish had
published in Ó Broin's Teangadóir.
One item I personally had a hand in was the Joe Heaney appearance
at Harvard in February, 1975, which served as the Vernam Hull
Lecture for that year. I am very happy that I requested at the
time that the performance be recorded. We have as a result a recording
of about an hour and a half in length. This material has been
digitized and is being made available for use in courses at Harvard.
I would like to play a selection from that performance of Joe
Heaney singing "Curachaí na Tráighe Báine,"
which, as he tells us in his introduction, was composed by Bridget
O'Malley in South Boston.
We turn at this point back to Canada. I mentioned earlier the
Canadian Museum of Civilization formerly known as the Museum of
Man. The Museum is actually located in Hull, Québec, but
the archives are in Ottawa. One of its most important Celtic holdings
is the collection done by the late Gordon MacLennan, Professor
of Celtic Studies at the University of Ottawa. In the 1960s, MacLennan
was hired by the Museum of Man to record Gaelic speakers throughout
Canada: in Cape Breton, mainland Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island,
Québec, Ontario and Saskatchewan. We at StFX have a tape
that was made at one of MacLennan's recording sessions in mainland
Nova Scotia. It is clear from this tape that two machines were
present at the time because at several points MacLennan can be
heard rewinding his own tape and playing it back. I would like
to play a piece from this tape of a man named Angus MacIsaac from
Giant's Lake, Guysborough County, not the same Angus MacIsaac
who was recorded by J.L. Campbell. He tells the tale of one of
the pioneers from Scotland who was so sick of all the trees in
his new home that he decided the best way to clear the land was
to set fire to the forest. This nearly resulted in disaster for
this man himself and his neighbors did not approve of his method
either.
There are some other collections of Celtic recordings at the Museum
of Civilization, most notably one of Gaelic recordings from the
Province of Québec and another interesting group of Welsh
recordings from various Canadian provinces, but principally relating
to Saskatchewan and its Welsh settlement.
We started this tour in Nova Scotia and I will draw to a conclusion
in Nova Scotia. Two major archives remain to be discussed namely
the Beaton Institute in Sydney, Cape Breton and the archive of
the Celtic Studies Department of St. Francis Xavier University.
The origins of the Beaton Institute which is at the University
College of Cape Breton date to 1957 when Sister Margaret Beaton,
the former College librarian began collecting material pertaining
to the Gaelic language and culture. Throughout the course of the
1960s and until her death in 1975 Sr. Margaret Beaton, who was
herself a native Gaelic speaker, recorded Gaelic speakers and
hired collectors to record Gaelic speakers. The resulting collection
consists of several hundred reel-to-reel tapes. Recently approximately
half of this material has been duplicated to 100 cassettes and
copies are now at the Beaton Institute and also at the Gaelic
College in St. Ann's, Cape Breton.
At my University, we also have a major archive of recorded Gaelic
material. The main part of the archive compromises the StFX Cape
Breton Gaelic Folklore Project. Back in the mid-1970s Sr. Margaret
MacDonell and John Shaw, applied for a grant to the Canadian Multiculturalism
Directorate. Their proposal was successful and for five years,
from 1977-1982, John Shaw was hired as a full-time collector.
The project was limited to Cape Breton where the richest stores
of Gaelic folklore remained. Forty Gaelic speakers were recorded,
two of whom, Joe Neil MacNeil and Lauchie MacLellan, had so much
material to contribute that it was decided to make them full-time
paid contributors. The results of this project are truly impressive.
John Shaw collected a total of 2000 folklore items, 1000 of which
are songs. The material includes hero tales and interesting pieces
of Fenian material. An idea of the kind of material obtained can
found in Luirgean Eachainn Nìll which was co-produced
by MacDonell and Shaw and also in the Joe Neil MacNeil collection
Tales Until Dawn which John Shaw edited. This material
was originally recorded on 350 reel-to-reel tapes but over the
last number of years we have had it duplicated onto approximately
100 cassettes. A copy of it has been placed in the University
library where it can be listened to by the public. Also, over
the last few years I have had a number of students, such as Mary
Jane Lamond, working on entering the catalogue of the material
into database. This has been completed for some time and we hope
soon to have the catalogue available on the Web. At StFX we also
have a number of ancillary collections, including the recent StFX
Gaelic Video Project, which is a series of video recordings of
thirty Cape Breton Gaelic speakers done from 1994-1996 and which
represents approximately thirty hours of Gaelic on good quality
video.
In conclusion, as the number of speakers of the various Celtic
languages diminishes these archives increase in importance. As
more and more people around the world start to take up the study
of the Celtic languages it is important that they have the opportunity
to hear authentic Celtic speech. Teachers of the Celtic languages,
especially those of us who are not native speakers of the languages
we teach, should be familiar with this archival material and should
make use of it to whatever degree possible in their classes so
that the legacy of "an Teanga Bheo," the Celtic languages
as a living means of communication, may continue for generations
to come.
Campbell, J. L. (1990) Songs Remembered in Exile. Aberdeen:
Aberdeen University Press.
Creighton, H. and MacLeod C. (1964) Gaelic Songs in Nova Scotia.
Ottawa: National Museum of Canada.
Croft, C. (1999) Helen Creighton : Canada's first lady of folklore.
Halifax: Nimbus.
Dorson, R. (1966). "Foreword" to Sean O'Sullivan's Folktales
of Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dunn, C. (1953) Highland Settler. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Library of Congress 1. http://rs6.loc.gov/ammem/afccchtml/cowhome.html
.
Library of Congress 2. http://rs6.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/ammem/cowellbib:scottish
.
MacDonell, M. (1982) The Emigrant Experience. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
MacDonell, M. and Shaw, J. (1981) Luirgean Eachainn Nìll.
Stornoway: Acair.
MacNeil, J. and Shaw, J. (1987) Tales until Dawn. Kingston,
Ont. : McGill-Queen's University Press.
The CELT project aims to produce an online database
of contemporary and historical topics from many areas, including
literature and the other arts. It provides material for the greatest
possible range of readers, researchers, academic scholars, teachers,
students, and the general public. The texts can be searched, read
on-screen, downloaded for later use, or printed out. The article
outlines the aims and achievements of CELT and its predecessor
CURIA before discussing the provision of a facility for searching
the collection for instances of names in a fashion which can take
into account differences of orthography and even source language.
CELT, an initiative of University College Cork, initiated by Donnchadh
Ó Corráin, was launched in June 1997 to create an
online corpus of text material of Irish interest. The project
has been able to make use of the texts made available in Cork
by the earlier CURIA project [1] (a joint project of University
College Cork and the Royal Irish Academy, also initiated by Donnchadh
Ó Corráin) which terminated in 1997. This is a very
large text base freely available on the Internet: by June 2000,
the CELT project will have over two million words available online.
A complete list of the materials available can be found at [2].
Its aim is to bring the wealth of Irish literary and historical culture (in Irish of all periods, Old Norse, Anglo-Norman French and English) to the Internet in a rigorously scholarly project, that is, at the same time, user-friendly for the widest possible range of readers and researchers - academic scholars, teachers, students (at all levels), and the general public, in Ireland and internationally. Recently we have got feedback about CELT materials having been used for research by various scholars in Russia.
The Annals of Ulster
431 Kl. Ienair . Anno ab Incarnatione Domini H16ra
.cccc.xxx.i. Palladius ad Scotos a Celestino urbis Romae
episcopo ordinatus episcopus, Etio & Ualerio consulibus,
primus mittitur in Hiberniam ut Christum credere potuissent,
anno Teodosi uiii.
|
...
<DIV0 TYPE="Annals">
<HEAD>The Annals of Ulster</HEAD>
<PB N="38">
<MLS N="16ra" UNIT="folio/column">
<DIV1 N="U431" TYPE="Annal">
<DIV2 N="U431.0" TYPE="Entry">
<P><DATE VALUE="0431-01-01">Kl. Ien<EX>air</EX>.<GAP><FRN LANG="la">Anno
ab Incarnatione Domini .cccc.xxx.i.</FRN></DATE></P>
</DIV2>
<DIV2 N="U431.1">
<P><FRN LANG="LA"><PS><FN>Palladius</FN></PS> ad <ON
TYPE="people:Irish">Scotos</ON> a <PS><FN>Celestino</FN></PS>
urbis <PN TYPE="city">Romae</PN> <TERM TYPE="bishop">episcopo</TERM>
ordinatus <TERM TYPE="bishop">episcopus</TERM>,
<PS><FN>Ętio</FN></PS> &ersir; <PS><FN>Ualerio</FN></PS>
consulibus, primus mittitur in
<PN TYPE="country:Ireland">Hiberniam</PN> ut Christum credere
potuissent, anno <PS><FN>Teodosi</FN></PS>
<NUM VALUE="8">uiii</NUM></FRN>.</P>
</DIV2>
</DIV1>
...
|
The texts are taken from the best printed editions (with due regard
to copyright), scanned, proofread and encoded in SGML [3] according
to the Document Type Definition (DTD) [4] of the Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI) [5]. These stages are illustrated in Figures
1 to 3 which are taken from Text Searching in the CELT Database
by Peter Flynn [6]. SGML was chosen because it is a non-proprietary,
platform- and software-independent format that guarantees the
future of the text base, regardless of hardware and software developments
and can easily be converted into other languages, such as XML.
The only problem there concerns the DTD, because without this,
there would be no possibility of robust navigation (a lot of attribute
information would be lost because only CDATA attributes would
be allowed). As yet it is not possible to convert the DTD within
a document, because there is no DTD for full TEI in XML available
yet (there might be next year). But a lot will depend on the speed
of development of the browsers/readers - there are a lot of possibilities.
We are keeping an eye on these developments, and on the development
of the DTD for full TEI in XML, so we can address this issue as
soon as it becomes relevant.
It also serves to generate browsable HTML [7] files for those
who do not require the scholarly detail possible in SGML/TEI files.
The TEI specifications were chosen because TEI is the established
standard for almost all text-based projects of similar scope (see
[8] for a list of projects which have adopted TEI). The texts
are available online in several formats:
The SGML text encoding is applied to the texts at two levels:
The TEI framework offers a wide range of SGML markup possibilities,
catering for virtually all the text-editorial requirements of
the most diverse projects. Further details can be found in [9]
and [10]. CELT has, in its early stages, seen a good deal of experimenting
to find out the level of encoding best suited to the needs of
historians and other scholars.
At this stage, what are regarded as the project's most important
texts (annals, sagas, early Irish verse) have both types of markup
applied. Many have only structural markup at present. Translations
of texts available on the site are marked up less heavily than
the originals. The descriptive markup on some texts is also undergoing
constant revision.
The web site's search engine offers refined search options which
have been formulated in accordance with the input from the user
communities. Words and phrases can be identified and used to find
names, dates, places and events. For example, the search can be
restricted to text type (verse, prose and drama) and to markup
only, or text only. Search can be restricted to personal names
or occupations.
The possibilities which the text corpus holds are vast, and depend
in the first place on the creativity of the researcher. And this
is what makes them so interesting. They are useful for diverse
disciplines which make use of Irish texts as a source for intra-
and extra-textual information. With the kind of corpus we have
in CELT, what first comes to mind are areas such as lexicography,
syntax, grammar, but also language style and register, and in
the case of the Annals, genealogical and geographical information.
The information contained in the markup could for example be used
to draw up statistics about the extent to which different languages
are used in one text and in different parts of the same text.
For instance, in some of the Annals, the early entries are mainly
written in Latin, a good part of the entries is written in a mixture
of Latin and Irish, and the latest entries are written predominantly
in Irish. If there are manuscripts where different hands and maybe
different chronological strata can be identified, the relationship
between these can be identified, and the extent of additions made
by different hands to the text can be established swiftly and
conveniently.
CELT aims to be interdisciplinary, that is to contributing to
research in other fields - but we also hope to make use of data
furnished by other disciplines, such as geography: by linking
each placename in the database to its geographical coordinates,
in the long term we are aiming at providing the online user with
popup maps showing the actual location of a given place, even
if the name recorded in the Annal entry might have been long obsolete.
The possibilities SGML holds for textual enhancement and exploitation
may only come to be properly savoured by one after some experiences
have been gathered in a given individual project when research
results have indicated the possible avenues further research could
take - for one can always add more markup of one's own to any
given text.
The texts of Irish provenance made available on the web have been
heavily edited - corrections of errors, normalisation of orthography
and segmentation are provided to help the reader in many of the
most culturally significant texts (for example, the annals). This
enables and greatly enhances exploitation and search of the text
for scholarly purposes. Each text is enhanced, and that enhancement
can be cumulative over time, since additional markup can be added
within the conventions of SGML/TEI markup protocols. SGML-encoded
Texts from the CELT Corpus formed the basis of two articles by
Mavis Cournane [11, 12]. The text encoding practice of CELT was
addressed in her Ph.D. Thesis [13].
For use with its search engine, CELT aims at enabling a comprehensive
name index, among other things for purposes of prosopography -
an independent science of social history embracing genealogy,
onomastics and demography, something that has scarcely begun in
Celtic Studies. This index will be based on markup and machine
retrieval of names in a logical order - given names, additional
names, nicknames, role names and surnames. A personal name index
will consist of all the personal names found in the CELT database.
It will allow personal names, kindred and dynasty names to be
identified, to be placed in their social and historical context,
and every mention of them to be traced so as to give comprehensive
data of a given individual's life.
A particularly valuable source for information retrieval regarding
personal names are the Irish Annals which are extant in Irish,
Latin and English. There are major problems, however. Most of
the body of the Annals written in Irish covers a wide timespan,
and major language changes have occurred within that period, as
is inevitably the case with any large, heterogeneous database.
Besides, many texts are written in a mixture of Irish and Latin.
This affects many things, including the orthography of personal
names which may differ greatly from century to century and from
text to text. For research in Irish history and related fields
this has given rise to problems for those less familiar with Irish
orthography. And sometimes, for those less familiar with Latin,
it may not be easy to equate a latinised personal name with the
corresponding Irish or English form.
However, this problem can be overcome so that a search can be
enabled for somebody outside the specialist field of early medieval
studies. We wish to talk a little about this. The variants in
spelling and morphology of a given name are given a single target
value. The variants are then used to create a name pool. Search
options could include selecting between a thesaurus match - which
will yield all variants in the name pool, and an exact match -
which will exclude unwanted orthographic variants. A user who
wants to submit a query will also be able to select only certain
name forms to be included in the search, thus getting individually
dove-tailed search results. This would allow for a great amount
of flexibility to the individual's research preferences.
Consider the following example. You are searching for the Old-Irish
personal name Aed, with thesaurus match enabled. Now you will
get all the orthographical and morphological variants, such as
Áed. Áid, Áeda, Aeda, Aoda, Áedh,
Aedh, Aodh, Aodha, Aedha. You will also get unusual spelling.
In addition, you will get English forms (for example Hugh),
and Latin forms (for example Aedus, Hugo). The value of
such a tool will be evident immediately to the historian. Consider
a second example. You are searching for Middle-Irish Aed
(nominative without a length-mark) with exact match enabled. Now,
you are shown only hits for this exact form, and that is all you
get and is presumably what you want.
In discipline like philology, textual studies, and history, where scholars work with manuscripts many of the polymorphic variants are not occasioned simply by the evolution of language over time, but also by scribal idiosyncracy, local scribal practice, varying levels of education and linguistic competence, or by the absence of any established orthographic standards, and such absence is normal in the middle ages, even for Latin. But the scholar-editor is left to decide whether or not to regularize these inconsistencies. Best practice reports all significant textual variants in an apparatus criticus, and this is possible in SGML/TEI. In fact, CELT has been done this in the case of a very short text: G301000. sgml (Compert Conchobuir I). The question remains: How does one retain all variants in an effective way and yet make searches efficient? Since CELT reports the text as is, one cannot interfere with the text itself by regularising. As we note, SGML/TEI allows one to enter regularisation in addition to reporting the actual reading, but this kind of markup is very slow (as we have learned by experiment), especially if used over a wide range of texts, and thus inordinately expensive. Another route is possible in the case of a large corpus. Individual instances of names can point to variant stacks for these names, compiled from the corpus itself, reporting all variants known. These stacks can also list standardised forms. What is then required is a search routine that offers: (i) exact match; and (ii) all forms. If one selects all forms, the search routine goes to the relevant stack and uses all forms there recorded as search forms, and returns all forms found. Thus the user has access to all forms of a name such as Aed, and the forms remained unchanged and unregularised in the corpus, thus retaining the integrity of the texts.
The TEI markup can be applied to virtually all textual elements:
morphological, lexical, syntactical, metrical etc. By using the
same technique of variant-stacks, other remarkable results can
be achieved. For example, the Old-Irish verb is, morphologically
speaking, inordinately difficult, synchronically as well as diachronically.
If however one creates full paradigms of the verbs from the grammars
and dictionaries and sets them up as variant stacks, unrecognised
verbal forms occurring in texts can be identified. This is a more
tricky task than names, but it is not only possible to do it but
it is very desirable, and would provide a vital tool for students
of medieval and early-modern Irish literature. To do this all
we need is the money and the workers.
[1] Flynn, P. (1992). Tagging Irish Manuscripts. Proceedings
of the SGML Conference, November 1992, Danvers, Mass. http://imbolc.ucc.ie/~pflynn/articles/danvers.html
.
[2] CELT (1997). Celt Corpus of Electronic Texts: List of Published Texts.
http://www.ucc.ie/celt/list.html .
[3] Cover, R. (1999). The XML Cover Pages. SGML: General Introductions and Overviews.
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/general.html#overview .
[4] W3Schools (2000). W3Schools Online Web Tutorials: DTD School.
http://www.w3schools.com/dtd/default.asp .
[5] Plotkin, W., & Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. (1999). Text Encoding Initiative.
http://www.uic.edu/orgs/tei/ .
[6] Flynn, P. (1997). Text searching in the CELT database.
http://www.ucc.ie/celt/doc/searching.html .
[7] Raggett, D., Jacobs, I., Ishikawa, M., & Asada, T. (2000).
HyperText Markup Language Home Page. http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/
.
[8] Plotkin, W., & Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. (1996). TEI
Application Page Project Descriptions. Document TEI A 14,
14 August 1996. http://www-tei.uic.edu/orgs/tei/app/index.html
.
[9] Robinson, P. (1994). The Transcription of Primary Textual
Sources using SGML. vol 6. Oxford: Office for Humanities Publications.
[10] Olsen, M. (1996). Text Theory and Coding Practice: Assessing the TEI. Proceedings of the ALLC-ACH conference in Bergen, Norway, June 1996.
http://duras.uchicago.edu/ARTFL/philologic/papers/bergen96/ .
[11] Cournane, M. (1997). Names Proper and Improper: Applying
the TEI to the Classification of Proper Nouns. Computers and
the Humanities, 31(4), 1997.
[12] Cournane, M. (1999). Intellectual encoding issues: The case
of early Irish Metrics. Proceedngs of the Joint ACH/ALLC international
conference, University of Virginia, June 1999.
[13] Cournane, M. (1997). The Application of SGML/TEI to the
Processing of Complex Multilingual Historical Texts. Ph.D.
Thesis, University College Cork, 1997.
This paper will adopt a modular approach to the teaching
of the rules for the initial consontal mutations of verbs, nouns,
and adjectives in Modern Irish, proposing that the rules be presented
grammatical module by grammatical module, starting from the relatively
straightforward operation of the rules in the case of the regular
verbs and ending with the relatively complex and idiosyncratic
operation of the rules in the case of nouns in dative constructions
or "prepositional phrases".
Mastering the initial consonantal mutations of verbs, nouns, and
adjectives in Modern Irish remains a constant problem for the
learner of Modern Irish in the normal classroom environment, even
in Ireland itself. It is not unusual for third-level students
of Irish in their third year of university Irish classes to have
persistent and pervasive problems in internalizing the system
of rules underlying the operation of lenition ("aspiration")
and voicing/nasalization ("eclipsis") in both their
spoken and their written Irish. The problem is compounded by the
frequent absence or near-absence of contexts on lower academic
levels in which the Irish language could be used as a normal medium
of spoken or written communication on a broad variety of topics
relevant to the students' personal and academic experience, so
that even the most frequent applications of the rules of initial
mutations in normal conversation are often not part of the students'
experience. The problem is further compounded by the lack - real
or imagined - of systematic presentation of the grammatical rules
underlying the initial mutations in the pre-university educational
experience of the students. Adding to the students' frustration,
perhaps, is the fact that reference materials on the grammar of
Modern Irish - in English or in Irish -, though often quite comprehensive
in their treatment of initial mutations, often present the student
with ad hoc lists of rules for initial mutations and of the lexical
and grammatical items which trigger the operation of the rules.
As a result, in handling even the simplest written grammatical
tasks, with all the time in the world allowed for completing the
task at hand - as opposed to the "real-time" pressures
of normal conversation - students are often completely at a loss
in deciding whether to lenite, to voice, to nasalize or simply
to leave alone the initial consonant of a given word. Students
often try random solutions. To use real examples found in papers
written by my own third-level students, faced with the translation
into Irish of a question in English beginning with the words "Do
you see...?", one student wrote, for example, "An bhfeiceann
tú...?", a second wrote "An fheiceann tú...?,
a third wrote "An feiceann tú...?, and a fourth wrote
"An chíonn tú...". Faced with a similar
problem, the translation of a question in English beginning with
the words "Did you leave..." into Irish, students wrote
"An bhfág tu...?", "An d'fhág tú...?",
"Ar d'fhág tú...?" and "Ar fágadh
tú...?". On the other hand, besides finding students
in complete confusion over which mutation rule to apply, one often
finds students applying mutation rules confidently, consistently
and systematically - but in the wrong grammatical contexts. These
are common, deep-rooted student errors such as "Ní
cheart..." (= "Ní ceart..."), where a mutation
rule appropriate for verbs is being applied to nouns or adjectives,
or "Ar ghortaíodh é?, where a mutation rule
appropriate for a regular verb in the simple past or habitual
past tense is being used here for the simple past tense of an
impersonal verb form. In most cases, it seems that the operations
themselves - the mutations - have been internalized by the students,
but there exists considerable confusion in the students' minds
over the proper grammatical contexts for the realization of a
given rule of mutation. In my own teaching, I have proceeded on
the assumption that clarifying the contexts for the application
of mutation rules will aid students in using mutations with greater
confidence. It seems as though students do benefit from such clarifications
in their understanding of the whole system of mutations; whether
such understanding will automatically result in reduction of mutation-related
errors among students, however, is another question. Nevertheless,
I feel that an approach which clarifies the grammatical contexts
for mutations can at least do no harm from the standpoint of sound
pedagogy.
For maximum clarification of grammatical contexts, I advocate
a modular approach to the teaching of the rules for initial mutations,
proposing that the rules be presented grammatical module by grammatical
module, starting from the relatively straightforward operation
of the rules in the case of the regular verbs and ending with
the relatively complex and idiosyncratic operation of the rules
in the case of nouns in dative constructions or "prepositional
phrases". I believe that through such an approach complex
information can be presented to adult learners of Irish in a relatively
comprehensible and comprehensive way which might aid them not
only in internalizing the rules of initial mutation but also in
applying those rules in the appropriate grammatical contexts.
Such an approach, furthermore, would be consonant with a more
general gradatory approach to the teaching of Irish to adult learners
that I have advocated earlier.
Perhaps the simplest place to start in teaching consonantal mutations
in Modern Standard Irish is with the simple past tense of the
regular verbs. (I exclude here for the moment the impersonal forms
of the verbs, the so-called "passive" verb forms.) With
such verb forms, only one mutation takes place: lenition. It matters
not whether one is negating, querying, performing both operations
or performing neither of them. It matters not whether the verb
is in a relative clause or in a subordinate clause; the operation
is always the same: lenition. As in the case of the other tenses,
examples of verbs taken from both the first and second regular
verbal conjugations and of verb beginning a vowel or with [f]
or [f'] would be given, so that the student would be given a well-rounded
appreciation of the shapes of verbs which accompany mutations
in particular grammatical contexts. The examples of verbs beginning
with a vowel or with [f] or [f'] would be of particular interest
here in that the morpheme {d-} or {d'-} occurs only with simple
(non-negated, non-interrogative, non-subordinated) forms of such
verbs, and is the single exception to the lenition rule.
The next module to present, perhaps, is the future tense of the
verb, which requires no inflectional endings for person, but which
reveals clearly the existence of two separate verbal conjugations.
Here also the full range of possibilities for mutations is employed:
lenition ("aspiration"), voicing/nasalization ("eclipsis"),
and absence of mutation. Since the student is familiar with the
mutations themselves, this provides the optimal opportunity for
clarifying the grammatical contexts in which the separate mutations
occur without the distractions of the inflectional endings for
person: lenition for negation of the verb, voicing/nasalization
for the interrogative form of the verb (whether positive or negative),
and absence of mutation for simple positive declarations. In addition
to clarifying the mutation rules for simple clauses, the instructor
has the opportunity here to point out - for more advanced students,
perhaps - that the positive verb form in a direct relative clause,
with its lenition, stands out not only from its counterpart in
a negative relative clause (direct or indirect) but also from
its counterparts in other subordinate clauses as well, whether
positive or negative. To put it another way, exactly the same
form of the verb is used for negative interrogative forms, for
negative relative forms, and for other subordinate clause forms,
whether positive or negative, which simplifies the operations
required to produce appropriate mutated forms of verbs while neutralizing
the distinctions between grammatical contexts.
The hypothetical conditional tense of the verb is perhaps the
next module to present, because while introducing a number of
inflectional endings for person it employs the tense suffixes
used in future forms of the verb, which have just been presented
to the student. Furthermore, in the case of the irregular forms
of the verb (to be discussed later), the same suppletive or otherwise
irregular forms of the verb root used for the future tense will
be used for the hypothetical conditional as well. The mutations
employed in the hypothetical conditional will be the same as those
of the future tense, with the exception of the simple positive
verb form, which is lenited. This is in fact is a simplification
of the mutational system, since only two options exist: lenition
or voicing/nasalization. In any event, with the exception just
mentioned, both the operations to be performed and the contexts
in which they occur are the same as in the case of the future
tense. Another small but important exception, also involving lenition,
is the case of verbs beginning with a vowel or with the consonants
[f] or [f']; as in the case of the simple past tense, the morpheme
{d-} or {d'-} must be used before the verb stem in contexts requiring
lenition.
Having dealt with the forms of the verb in the future and hypothetical
conditional tenses as paired sets of forms, we can do the same
for the forms of the verb in the present habitual and past habitual
tenses. Both sets of forms share a common meaning: repeated or
habitual action (with the exception of a few verbs of cognition
or perception, which, in the present tense, can also have a meaning
of momentary or continuous activity which is not necessarily repeated).
Both also, like the verb forms of the future and hypothetical
conditional tenses, share the same forms of the verb root and,
despite the differences in inflection in the verbal endings, seem
to pair together naturally. In the case of the present habitual
tense, the student need only employ the initial mutations learned
already for the future tense. In the case of the past habitual
tense, the student need only employ the initial mutations learned
for the hypothetical conditional tense. Once again, in the case
of the past habitual verb forms, the student must use the morpheme
{d-} or {d'-} in the case of verbs beginning with a vowel or with
the consonants [f] or [f'].
Having dealt with "active" forms of the verb, we can
now deal with "passive" forms of the verb: the impersonal
verb forms. I find it convenient to deal with the impersonal verb
forms separately and as a group, since both conceptually and formally
they seem to stand apart from "active" forms of the
verb. Certainly their verbal endings may have little or nothing
in common with the endings of their "active" verbal
counterparts, and in the case of the simple past tense, their
behavior in regard to initial mutations is in sharp contrast to
their "active" verbal counterparts. While "active"
verb forms in the simple past tense employ a "lenite under
all circumstances" rule, the impersonal verb forms employ
a "lenite (or voice/nasalize) under no circumstances"
rule. Here the student must restrain himself/herself from leniting
verb forms which from the standpoint of habit and logic demand
lenition. As for all the other tenses, impersonal verb forms follow
the rules of initial mutation already presented for the "active"
verb forms.
The irregular verbs have been left aside until now for two reasons.
First, their idiosyncratic behavior in regard to mutations does
not aid the student in internalizing the mutational system for
the vast number of verbs in Irish which are not irregular. Second,
the high frequency of most of these eleven irregular verb forms
in Irish helps to ensure their acquisition as verbal units, particles
and all. Third, for the student already familiar with the rules
of mutation for regular verbs, the exceptions to rules in regard
to irregular verbs are relatively straightforward. The verb Faigh!
("Get!") presents the most conspicuous exceptions to
the rules of mutation and the verb Abair! ("Say!")
to a lesser extant, while three other verbs - Déan!
("Do!"), Feic! ("See!"), Téigh!
("Go!") - present aberrant forms for both particles
and verb roots in the simple past tense but still follow the regular
rules of lenition for the simple past tense. In regard to initial
mutations in the irregular verbs, then, simple memorization of
verb forms and particles as units, with ample practice through
use, seems to be the best prescription for the learner.
The rules of mutation for nouns and adjectives following the copula
demand separate treatment, since the combination of copula (or
negative/interrogative/negative-interrogative particle) + noun/adjective
do not constitute the normal particle + verb form unit that we
have been dealing with so far. Not surprisingly, the "tense
system" of the copula has little to do with the tense system
of the verbs we have been dealing with so far; it is a simple
two-term system, with one "tense", which might be called
"realis", comprising the not only the present tense
but the future as well, and another, which might be called "irrealis",
serving for both the past and hypothetical conditional tenses.
Not surprisingly again, the rules for mutation are very different
as well, though the same pre-verbal particles are used. In the
"present/future" tense, the negative particle "ní"
does not lenite, and the interrogative particle "an"
does not voice or nasalize. (In fact, no voicing/nasalization
rule is used with the copula). The "past/hypothetical conditional"
tense does in fact behave like that of regular "active"
verbs in that lenition is employed with all forms: positive, negative,
interrogative, and negative-interrogative. As may be noted from
the examples in the introduction, the shapes of negative, interrogative,
and subordinating particles used in copula constructions for given
"tenses" are not necessarily the ones used with their
"active" verbal counterparts in normal verbal constructions.
Such misidentifications can cause considerable confusion in the
mind of the learner, both in regard to the shape of the particle
and in regard to the mutation employed following the particle,
but since the shapes of particles are not our focus here, these
problems will not be discussed in this paper.
Turning now to an entirely different question, the question of
mutations within the noun phrase, there are two completely separate
issues here: mutations involving gender and mutations involving
the case function of the entire noun phrase. The separation of
gender and case is perhaps most clearly seen in the case of a
feminine noun modified by an adjective in a noun phrase in the
dative case, e.g., "...ar an mbean mhaith", where the
mutation of the head noun is governed by the case of the entire
noun phrase while the mutation of the adjective in this instance
is governed strictly by the gender of the noun it modifies. This
independence of gender and case is important to point out when
teaching the mutations, because students are often surprised at
instances where the noun in a noun phrase undergoes one mutation
(or none at all), but the adjective undergoes another mutation.
For example, in addition to the example cited above, we have "bean
mhaith" ("a good woman") and "an tine mhór",
where the behavior of the head noun regarding mutations does not
prepare the student for the behavior of the adjective modifying
that noun. For the student used to textbook examples such as "an
bhean mhaith" and "(teas) na tine móire",
where the head noun and modifying adjective are behaving congruently,
this conflict of mutational behavior can be confusing.
Because the mutational behavior of both nouns and adjectives in
the different cases depends so often on the gender of the head
noun, I deal first with the issue of gender when discussing the
nominal and adjectival mutations with students, and I deal with
that issue in the context of examples in the comparatively unmarked
nominative/accusative case. The gender difference is clear in
the case of definite singular nouns preceded by the definite article,
with feminine nouns (and modifying adjectives) lenited and masculine
nouns remaining unlenited. The principle problem for the student
is identifying which nouns are masculine and which are feminine.
The lack of lenition in feminine nouns beginning with a dental
stop after the singular definite article breaks the pattern of
lenition for feminine nouns, but this exception to the rule is
understandable to the students from the standpoint of ease of
articulation. A good bit harder for students to internalize are
the rules governing the intrusive [t] or [t'] which occurs before
masculine nouns beginning with a vowel and before feminine nouns
beginning with [s] or [] + vowel or with [s] or [] + sonorant
+ vowel. Students will often generalize the rule for masculine
nouns beginning with a vowel to feminine nouns beginning with
a vowel, or they will generalize the rule for feminine nouns beginning
with a sibilant to masculine nouns beginning with a sibilant -
or, in the case of lexical items such as "ubh," they
will simply fail to identify the gender correctly. Also, as mentioned
above, when modifying singular feminine nouns without the definite
article, students may not remember to lenite the modifying adjective
after the unlenited noun. The only remedy for problems in the
areas mentioned above, beyond clarifying the grammatical contexts,
is extensive practice using such forms.
In regard to the plural forms of nouns in the nominative/accusative
case, it need only be stressed to students that there are no mutations
to consider, and that masculine and feminine nouns behave exactly
alike, even in regard to their effect on modifying adjectives.
An intrusive [h] occurs between the plural definite article and
the following noun beginning with a vowel, but students understand
readily that this is only a device to keep the vowels apart. The
subset of plural masculine nouns ending in a slender consonant
present a problem, since they lenite a modifying plural adjective,
but it can be emphasized to students that the lenition here has
nothing to do with gender or case; it has only to do with the
phonological shape of the nominal ending.
In regard to lenition, the genitive case largely reverses the
rules learned for singular masculine and feminine nouns in the
nominative/accusative case. In the genitive case, it is the masculine
nouns (and accompanying adjectives) which undergo lenition, while
feminine nouns (and accompanying adjectives) undergo no mutation
at all (beyond the intrusive [h] which occurs between article
and noun to keep the vowels separate). Genitive plural forms also
differ from nominative/accusative plural forms in that definite
nouns of both genders preceded by the definite article undergo
voicing/nasalization, while their modifying adjectives behave
as they would in a nominative/accusative construction.
The dative case presents the most complex problems in regard to
mutations, but here the particular preposition governing the dative
construction is a key factor in determining lenition. The behavior
of definite nouns preceded by an article is relatively straightforward.
Singular nouns of both genders undergo voicing/nasalization after
nearly all prepositions, except for the prepositional forms "den",
"don" and "sa(n)". Plural nouns of both genders
undergo no mutations, behaving exactly as plural nouns do in the
nominative/accusative case constructions. Modifying adjectives
also behave as their counterparts do in nominative/accusative
constructions. The difficulty here for students is to avoid applying
the voicing/nasalization rule to nouns, since analogical pressure
from dative singular forms and genitive plural forms is strong.
The rules for mutation of both singular and plural, definite and
indefinate nouns not preceded by an article are quite different.
More than half of the prepositions in Irish require lenition in
both singular and plural for the noun they govern, while a minority
require no mutation. A single preposition, "i", requires
voicing/nasalization. Unfortunately, while a case can be made
for a division of the sets of prepositions on a cognitive basis,
students must accept that in this instance a good deal of memorization
is required in order to apply the mutation rules successfully.
The problems of teaching the initial mutations in Modern Irish
are considerable, and only the most fundamental problems have
been considered here. Problems such as the lenition of nouns in
the genitive case which modify feminine nouns, for instance, or
of the lenition of nouns in embedded genitive constructions have
not been considered at all. Nevertheless, I hope that this attempt
to clarify the contexts - phonological and grammatical - in which
the rules of mutation operate will help instructors of Irish as
they themselves clarify the rules for their students, so that
the weight of memorization may be lessened for students, while
the productivity - and automaticity - of the rules of mutation
may be correspondingly increased for them.
Christian Brothers. (1999) Graiméar Gaeilge na mBráithre
Críostaí (3rd edition). Dublin:
An Gúm.
Duran, J. (1995) Dialects, Speech Communities, and Applied Linguistics:
A Realistic Approach to the Teaching of Irish in Non-Irish Speaking
Areas, Journal of Celtic Language Learning, 1, 21-37.
Duran, J. (1997) Preparing a Structural Syllabus for Adult Learners
of Irish, Journal of Celtic Language Learning, 3, 6-40.
Nic Mhaoláin, M. (1985) A Thuilleadh faoin gCaighdeán.
Teangeolas, Journal of the Linguistics Institute of Ireland,
No. 20, Summer, 5-7.
Ó Baoill, D.P. & Ó Tuathail, É. (1992)
Úrchúrsa Gaeilge (rev. ed.). Dublin: The
Linguistics Institute of Ireland.
Pinker, S. (1996) Language Learnability and Language Development
(with New Commentary by the Author). Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press.
Pinker, S. (1999) Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Stationery Office. (1979) Gramadach na Gaeilge agus Litriú na Gaeilge: an Caighdeán Oifigiúil. Dublin: Stationery Office.
This case study investigates two different groups
of learners as they approach the study of L3 (typically French
or German) at tertiary level; one group, co-ordinate bilinguals,
coming from the balanced- bilingualism situation of the Gaeltacht
speech community, the other group being monolingual English
speakers, who have had 13 years exposure to Irish as L2. Taking
account of crosslinguistic interactions and the impact of bilingualism
on cognitive development, this study, using questionnaires and
reflective-type interviews, will examine, for the first time in
the case of Irish/English as L1/L2, the degree to which balanced
bilingualism (Irish-English) impacts on learner self-awareness
and capacity for reflection
This study is based on research conducted among students of French,
German and Spanish as L3/L4 at tertiary level. 15 students were
co-ordinate bilinguals from the Gaeltacht and fifteen others were
monolingual English speakers who had experienced thirteen years
of school-based learning of Irish as L2. It has always been assumed
by teachers of both Irish and foreign languages (FL) in Ireland
that learning Irish with all the particular conditions that surround
it, has had some relation to or some bearing on the way that students
approach the L3, typically French, German or Spanish. In the case
of additive trilingualism, there has been a belief that bilinguals
are relatively better at learning a new language than monolinguals
(Bild & Swain 1989, Thomas 1988). Studies in this area to
date in Ireland have been regrettably few. Bearing in mind that
there is evidence, as supported by Bialystok (1987, 1994), Karmiloff-Smith
(1986) and Gombert (1990), regarding the acquisition of metalinguistic
awareness, which indicates that learners consciously or subconsciously
draw on various sources of previous language learning in all subsequent
language learning, [learning L3/L4, for example],the present study
sought to investigate the two different groups of learners as
they approach the study of L3 (typically French or German) at
tertiary level; one group, co-ordinate bilinguals, coming from
the balanced- bilingualism situation of the Gaeltacht speech community,
the other group being monolingual English speakers, who have had
13 years exposure to Irish as L2.
Taking account of crosslinguistic interactions and the impact
of bilingualism on cognitive development, this paper intends to
report on preliminary results of a comparative study of learners'
self-awareness in both groups, i.e., the set of beliefs that they
have about themselves as language learners, including their capacity
for reflective thinking (about the learning process itself)
and learning strategies deployed when faced with communicative
and cognitive tasks in L3.
The participants in this short study are 30 students from the
schools of Business, Engineering and Science 15 from the linguistically-defined
Gaeltacht region who are co-ordinate bilinguals, with Irish being
the home language of all 15 (100%) students. 10 students reported
English-Irish as the language of the home domain and 5 students
specified Irish only. 10 students were studying French as L3 and
5 students studying German as L3. The other 15 students were monolingual
English speakers from Business, Engineering, Humanities and Science,
studying French and German as an L3 and had 13 years of exposure
to Irish in the educational system as an L2 (on average: 2500
hours).They were predominantly in the 17-23 years age group which
is typical of the vast majority of our undergraduate students
at tertiary level, with most coming from a rural or small village
background.
The questionnaire comprised four parts. The first part targeted
background information, course, language being studied, age, background,
language learning history, periods spent in the target language
speech community etc.
The second part of the questionnaire sought to explore learners'
reactions to the Irish language, including an investigation of
the extent to which learners had come into contact with it and
used it after leaving school. It sought information on background
knowledge, and on examination performance. In exploring general
attitudes to Irish it intended to gain some valuable insight into
the learning strategies used by informants, by providing them
with a list of learning strategies, adapted SILL (Strategy Inventory
for Language Learning (Oxford 1990) from Abraham's and Vann's
case study (Wenden & Rubin 1987) comprising cognitive, metacognitive,
social -affective strategies as outlined by O'Malley and Chamot,
(1990). The fourth part of the survey sought to get some data
on learners' awareness of learning the L3.
Both sets of learners were asked if studying L3 was 'easier'
because they had previously spoke or had studied Irish and significantly,
they were also asked to comment on any similarities or differences
they perceived between the approach [taken by themselves] to learning
Irish and to learning other languages. Finally, a number of BALLI
(Horowitz 1983) items to identify students' beliefs about language
learning with a view to correlating relatively these beliefs with
the findings on the use of learning strategies e.g. if the connection
of specific belief related to a choice or deployment of a particular
learning strategy.
Not all students in the bilingual group would perceive themselves
as being good at languages.A majority reported themselves as being
not good at languages. This contrasts somewhat with the
monolingual students' approach to L3 where a majority (65%) stated
that they would perceive themselves as being good at languages.
When students in the bilingual group, were asked as to why they
considered themselves not so good at language- 33.4% replied
that they rely more on English (the lesser used language in the
Gaeltacht) more than on Irish, when approaching the L3 and that
they did not perceive Irish to be of any extra help.
Interestingly, when students in the bilingual group were asked
to consider their best skill in the language, most of them recorded
writing as the best skill. This contrasted starkly with the monolingual
group who reported listening to be the best skill. There was a
marked contrast among the bilinguals when asked to consider what
aspects of the language they most enjoyed or found easiest. Those
who had reported themselves to be good at languages highlighted
the following:
Those who had said that they were not so good at languages listed
the ability to read and understand a text as being the most enjoyable
and easiest skill as well as learning about the culture of the
target language country. They also listed that they liked getting
feedback. Interestingly enough, the latter aspects of language
learning were predominantly listed by the monolingual students.
There was also significant variation within the bilingual group
when asked what aspects of language learning in L3 they found
easiest. Those who had professed themselves to have been good
at languages mentioned learning new vocabulary and recognising
vocabulary in new contexts. Those bilinguals who saw themselves
as being less successful learners listed those aspects expressed
by the monolingual group almost in the same frequency:
If there were a certain degree of confidence and initiative
towards the active use of the target L3, it was only to be found
among the bilingual positive learners. This finding coincided
with a low rate of dependency on teacher or tutor-led activities.
Students in the bilingual group were then asked if they found
the L3 easier because they were bilingual. Here students were
100% affirmative in their perception of the facilitative role
of bilingualism. Reasons given as to why and how being bilingual
facilitated the study of L3 are worthy of inclusion here: Some
mentioned that they thought that there was a link between all
languages and all vocabularies, while others mentioned cognates
between Irish and French. And others specified that similarities
between sound patterns in Irish and German helpful in German as
L3! Significantly, many of the students (both positive and negative
bilinguals) implied that over time they felt that they would indeed
master the language. So of this bilingualism is born a certain
confidence and predisposition towards success as they approach
the L3.
This confidence factor was not present in the monolingual
group however, where under 40% said that learning Irish was of
any help in learning the L3; stating that Irish and the approach
they took to learning it was completely different and had no bearing
what so ever on their approach to learning the L3. All of the
bilingual group as opposed to the 60% of the monolingual group
stated that they had a good ear and a good memory for language.
The bilingual group also said that they would prefer to analyse
the language themselves in the case of difficulty in comprehension,
rather than have the difficulty explained to them. This contrasted
with monolingual group who demonstrated less of a preference
for analysis of the language Those who were bilingual also stated
that they wanted less guidance by the lecturer and expressed a
confidence in working on their own which was not present in the
monolingual group.
The most interesting finding was the reply by bilingual learners
to the question: Do you know how the language works even though
you don't fully understand the grammar?. All of the bilingual
students replied yes - where as only 3 of the 15 monolingual speakers
stated this to be the case. This was an interesting finding worthy
of further exploration because it would suggest that bilinguals
are at some potential advantage as learners of another language,
although research would show that they may need explicit instruction
to encourage them to be aware of language as a system before they
can develop a facility for learning L3 (Thomas 1988:236)
Again a surprising finding was that those bilingual learners who
professed to be good at languages stated that when confronted
with a difficulty in L3, they would never compare or contrast
the target L3 features neither to Irish nor to English. Those
who had perceived themselves to be less successful learners stated
similar to the monolingual group that they used English more to
compare contrast and analyse features of the target L3 and thus
facilitate learning.
While no clear pattern has yet emerged in bilinguals' deployment
of strategies, it is clear nonetheless that this group on the
whole including the self-reported less successful learners use
more strategies than the monolingual group when approaching L3.
One interesting example here might suffice to demonstrate this:
when both sets of learners were asked to report on strategies
they deployed in learning to speak the language or to communicate,
The following strategies were mentioned more by bilinguals. Speaking
the target L3 to other students. This was mentioned by 10 out
of the 15 bilingual students compared with 2 out of 15 in the
monolingual group. The bilingual students also scored higher in
specifying the following:
These figures indicate that the bilingual students do in fact
use more strategies than the monolingual students as they approach
the learning of L3. Preliminary findings from this small scale
study would suggest that bilinguals have a more awareness of language
which when made explicit may translate into confidence and a sense
of language usage not demonstrably present in monolinguals' learning
style.
While the findings here lend support to the generally held belief
that bilinguals have a facility for approaching the learning of
L3, obviously potential contributory factors to the data yielded
here such as motivation, intelligence etc will need to be analysed
in all further studies before any scientific conclusions can be
drawn.
Abraham, R. G., Vann, R, J (1987) Strategies of two language learners:
a case study in Wenden, A, Rubin, Learner strategies in language
learning. New York: Prentice Hall, 85-102
Bialystok, E (1987) Influences of bilingualism on metalinguistic
development Second Language Research 3, 154-66
Bialystok, E (1994) Representation and ways of knowing: Three
issues in second language acquisition. In Ellis, N (ed) Implicit
and Explicit Learning of Languages London: Academic Press
Bild E, Swain, M (1989) Minority language students in a French
immersion programme Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural
Development 10(3) 255-274
Chamot, A, U (1987) The learning strategies os ESL students in
in Wenden, A, Rubin, Learner strategies in language learning.
New York: Prentice Hall, 71-83
Chamot, A. U., Küpper, L (1989) Learning strategies in foreign
language instruction. Foreign Language Annals 22,
13-24
Gombert,J. E (1990) Le développement métalinguistique.
Presse Universitaire de France
Horowitz, E.K. (1983) Beliefs about language learning inventory.
Austin: University of Texas
Karmiloff- Smith, A (1986) From meta-processes to conscious access:
evidence from metalinguistic and repair data. Cognition
23, 95-147
O' Malley, J, Chamot, A (1990) Learning strategies in second
language acquisition. Cambridge:CUP
Oxford, R (1990) Language learning strategies: what every teacher
should know. Rowley, Mass: Newbury House
Thomas, J (1988) The role played by metalinguistic awareness in
second and third language learning. Journal of Multilingual
and Multicultural Development 9 (3) 235-246
Wenden, A, Rubin, J (1987) Learner strategies in language learning. New York: Prentice Hall
Bidh cànainean is culturan ag atharrachadh
ach, aig am sam bith, feumaidh cultur a chànain fhein.
Ann a bhith teagasg chànainean mar a'Ghàidhlig a
tha ann an cunnart dol a mach a sealladh troimh bhuaidh na Beurla
smachdail, 's an cultur leatha ann an ùine nach bi fada,
tha feum aig an luchd-ionnsachaidh air am bogadh ann an sampaill
mhath, làidir, brìoghor, troimh chòmhradh
agus troimh sgrìobhadh. Ann an Albainn Nuaidh, gheibhear
sampall dhen t-seòrsa sin ann a'Mactalla.
In writing of the disappearance of Gaelic from the "Scotch
Communities" of the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Margaret
Bennett says of the descendants of the Gaelic settlers: "They
usually begin by emphasizing how strong the Gaelic language once
was --- Next comes reference to the culture that went hand-in-hand
with the language - the songs, stories and the general way of
life. Nowadays, however, fewer and fewer people can comprehend
how much their forebears valued Gaelic culture and, surrounded
by a world of materialism, may ask the question 'What do we mean
by culture?' " (279)
As I understand it, those who participate in a culture experience
both a sense of belonging to it and a sense of difference
from other cultures; traditionally rooted in ethnicity, this experience
of belonging and difference may be realised in other oppositions,
e.g. Youth v. Everybody else. Participants in a culture discover
within it a sense of self-worth, self-value, possibly
the most important characteristic. Additionally, a culture is
expressed by means of a language and customs, including
way of life and modes of artistic expression, which reinforce
these senses of belonging, difference and self-worth. That a language
is necessary to the expression of belonging to a culture,
witness Western Youth Culture with its own vocabulary and linguistic
expressions, as well as its own music, ornament and dress; consider
Afro-American Culture which, having lost long ago its connection
with indigenous languages, proclaims its difference from the mainstream
with its own language, "Black English".
Highland Gaelic culture, transplanted to Nova Scotia, continued
to find its sense of belonging in kinship, in rural community
and local identity, in language and customs which it had experienced
in the "old country". But as in Scotland, the pressures
of an evergrowing "cultural imperialism" (Cohen's words)
of the ever widening English-speaking world, with its promise
of greater opportunity and affluence, with its "industrialised
political economies" and alluring "metropolitan centres",
steadily eroded the Nova Scotia Gael's sense of self-worth which
he sought to recover by participating fully in the "mainstream
culture". On the wrong-headed principle that it would hold
them back in an English-dominated world, many Gaelic-speaking
parents made a conscious effort NOT to pass on the language to
their children.
Paradoxically, globalisation has inspired reaction to its juggernaut
propensities, and created cause for some optimism in what, to
many, is an increasingly pessimistic situation, with the expected
demise of Cape Breton's older, native speaking population within
the next 20-40 years. As Cohen puts it: "---the strength
of local culture thus does not necessarily diminish as the locality
becomes increasingly precarious: quite often the reverse seems
to be the case, when the maintenance of the culture becomes the
effective raison d'être of the peripheral community";
and again "---Locality is anathema to the logic of the modern
political economy and, perhaps for precisely that reason, is increasingly
vocal in almost all spheres of contemporary life." (7) Nova
Scotia Gaels, among them serious young learners, have become increasingly
more vocal in seeking educational opportunities in Gaelic, as
one of the founding partners in the "multiculturism"
which Canada has espoused. They importuned government (always
a sleeping partner); founded the Nova Scotia Gaelic Council (Comhairle
na Gàidhlig, Alba Nuadh), dedicated to activism; instituted
May as Gaelic Awareness Month; began holding local Féisean,
and achieved the teaching of Gaelic in two more schools besides
Mabou, where Gaelic has been taught almost continuously since
the early seventies. Other school teaching opportunities are in
view. Numbers in Gaelic classes at St-Francis Xavier University
have been increasing annually, swelled by the Gael's descendants
from at home and throughout North America. Some young couples,
themselves learners, are seeking to bring up their children in
Gaelic. The necessity for immersion in good language models, both
oral and written, is urgent for the successful transmission and
continuance of Gaelic cultural mores within the current modern,
global context. Oral models are available in the extensive folklore
audiotape collection done by Dr. John Shaw for St. Francis Xavier
University in the seventies, and in the living native speakers,
from whom oral material continues to be collected. Within the
corpus of authentic written material, I'd like to single out as
model, or touchstone of the culture, Cape Breton's own MacTalla.
MacTalla ("Echo") was the name of a Gaelic newspaper/magazine
published weekly - latterly bi-weekly - in Sydney, Nova Scotia,
between May 28, 1892 and June 24, 1904, around 540 issues in all.
Its editor Jonathan MacKinnon (1869-1944), a Gaelic scholar, born
in Inverness Co., Cape Breton, was twenty three years old when
he launched his newspaper, at the time the only such Gaelic publication
in the world. Its store of news, local, national and international,
letters to the Editor, Gaelic proverbs, poetry/song, stories,
translations, articles is a repository of Gaelic cultural ideas,
more often than not couched in pithy, well-turned phrases. Some
of the attitudes, such as advocacy of teetotalism, no doubt seem
old-fashioned nowadays; but many are NOT outmoded precisely because
they reveal the Gael's responses to situations which, with a modern
gloss, could obtain today. And it is precisely the emphases which
Gaelic language structure and lexis can impart that are most revealing.
Here is a brief story from Vol. VI of MacTalla, called
"Mar a fhuair Domhnall bean" where the wise fool, a
favourite topic in Gaelic lore, courtship, and ultimate marriage
come together, with apt use of language, particularly of the pun,
whose play on words at once reveals and harmonises opposite meanings.
Bha Gilleasbuig Aotrom, a bha anns an t-seann dùthaich,
mar a tha fhios aig móran de luchd-leughaidh MhicTalla,
'na dhuine air leth deas-bhriathrach, agus glé thric cha
b' e chuid a b' fheàrr de 'n chainnt a bhiodh aige. Air
eagal a dhiumb a chosnadh, bha gach neach airson an taobh a b'
fheàrr dheth a chumail.
Bha coimhearsnach aig uair a ghabh mór mheas air caileig
òig , bhòidhich a bha comhnuidh dlùth do
'n àite 's an robh e a' fuireach. Am measg gach còmhradh
eile a bh' eatorra, bhruidhinn e rithe airson i 'ga phòsadh;
ach cha ghabhadh i e-oir mar a bha iomadh tè roimpe agus
na déigh, bha dùil aice ri fear a b'fheàrr.
Co-dhiúbh gheibheadh gus nach fhaigheadh i sin mar a bha
i, thachair mì-fhortan dhi a lughdaich a miadh gu
mór. B'e sin gu 'n do bhuail gobhar a h-adharc oirre anns
an t-sùil, 'ga leòn cho dona 's gun do chaill i
gu buileach i.
Bha fios aig Gilleasbuig còir air gach cùis dhe
seo. Ma bha gus nach robh aon eile 'ga h-iarraidh, cha do phòs
i. Ged a bha i air leth-shùil, bhiodh Domhnull riaraichte
leis na bh' ann dhi, agus 'se bh' ann gu' n do chuir e e-fhéin
'na tairgse a rithist, agus bha ise làn-thoileach a ghabhail
air an turus seo.
Rinn iad banais mhór, aighearrach, agus fhuair Gilleasbuig
Aotrom cuireadh; agus tha mi a' creidsinn gu robh fhios aige glé
mhath gu 'm b 'e a shìth a bha dhìth orra agus nach
b' e a chuideachd. Bha fear-na-bainnse a' riarachadh drama uisge-bheatha,
agus a' tighinn gu Gilleasbuig, thuirt e ris, "Seo, òl
deoch-slainte bean agus fear-na-bainnse." Rug Gilleasbuig
air a' ghloine, agus ag éiridh 'na sheasamh, thuirt e,
"Tha mi 'g òl seo air slàinte na gaibhre a
choisinn a' bhean mhath dhut-sa agus a' bhanais mhath dhomh-fhìn".
The English translation (see page 5), even if it were racier,
falls flat. Why is the story peculiarly Gaelic? Well, all Gaels
present have heard of Gilleasbuig Aotrom, and know that "aotrom"
implies much more than can be caught in translation: it means
lacking decorum, not behaving as one should in a given situation.
In this version of the story, there is even a suggestion of malice
aforethought about Archie's pronouncements in the propitiatory
efforts of individuals not to provoke him into speech. At the
same time, there is truth in his bizarre toast to the goat, even
if it is not in the best of taste at such a time.
Other words impossible of one-word translation: "riaraichte"
means accepting what has been prepared for one: "riarachadh"
must precede the condition of "riaraichte" (And indeed
Gilleasbuig Aotrom's recognition of the crucial role of the goat
in bringing about a conclusion satisfactory to all illustrates
this point); and best of all, one word in particular will illustrate
the point of Gaelic contextual vibrations, those reverberations
that are untranslateable. That word is "miadh" in the
clause "thachair mì-fhortan dhi a lughdaich a miadh
gu mór." "Miadh" means honour, esteem, respect
and is found in the alliterative phrase "meas agus miadh":
respect and approbation. But there is another word in Gaelic,
not quite homonymous with it, "mì-adh", usually
translated misfortune, ill-luck. So paradoxically, the very misfortune
that befell her was bad and good luck at the same moment.
And that is what is implicit in Gilleasbuig Aotrom's toast. Outrageously
perhaps, he has hit the crux of the matter.
Immersion by learners in such models of Gaelic expression is essential
to the maintenance of Gaelic culture, which I have interpreted
to include attitudes-of-mind, world-view, and other psychological
intangibles belonging to a particular culture and most clearly
expressed in the language of that culture. The "Gaelic-ness"
of Gaelic culture is defined in and by its language. Gaels by
birth and Gaels by choice - those learners discovering their roots
in the language of their ancestors - in this "multiple-choice"
world, can discover that they belong, take a pride in difference,
achiee a sense of self-worth, practise customs, be creative, all
in the Gaelic language, the best expression of Gaelic Culture.
Barnett, H. G. Innovation: the Basis of Cultural Change
(N.Y., Tor., Lon., 1953)
Bennett, Margaret Oatmeal and the Catechism (Edinburgh,
Montreal, 1998)
Cohen, Anthony P. "Belonging: the experience of culture",
in Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural
Cultures, Anthony P. Cohen (ed.) (Manchester and Newfoundland,
1982), pp. 1-17.
Delbanco, Andrew "The Decline and Fall of Literature",
article in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLVI, No. 17; Nov.
4, 1999. [describes how the Hydra of cultures has largely displaced
the chaste Goddess Culture since market forces have invaded the
universities.]
Foster, George M. "What is folk culture?" in American
Anthropologist, Vol. 55, 2:1; April-June, 1953, pp. 159-173
MacTalla Jonathan MacKinnon (ed.) (Sydney, Nova Scotia,
1892-1904).
In Scotland, as many of MacTalla's readers are aware, there was
a man known as Simple Archie, who was always ready to open his
mouth and speak, and too often it wouldn't be quite the best comment
that he would make. For fear of earning his enmity, everybody
wanted to keep on his right side.
A neighbour of his once took a great fancy to a beautiful, young
girl living nearby. In the midst of the rest of their conversation,
he asked her to marry him but she wouldn't have him: like many
a woman before and after her, she expected to find someone better.
Whether she would have done so or not as she then was, something
unfortunate happened that lessened her chances. A goat had struck
her in the eye with its horn, wounding her so badly that she lost
it completely.
Dear Archie knew all the ins and outs of what happened. Whether
anybody else wanted her or not, she didn't marry. Although she
had only one eye, Donald would be satisfied with her as she was;
finally, he offered himself to her again, and she was delighted
to have him this time.
They made a big, joyful wedding and Simple Archie got an invitation;
I'm sure he knew full well that it was his silence they wanted,
not his company. The bridegroom was distributing drams of whisky,
and coming to Archie, he said to him: "Here, drink a toast
to the bride and groom."
Archie grasped the glass and rising to his feet, he said: "I'm drinking this to the good health of the goat who won for you a good wife and for me a good wedding".
This paper gives a broad overview of the spelling
and grammar checkers and other tools for the Welsh language that
have been developed at the University of Wales, Bangor, and details
new projects currently being undertaken in this area. It also
discusses the lexicographical and terminological work taking place
there and the way two teams originally working independently of
each other have increasingly come to share computational resources,
leading to new and better electronic language tools.
The University of Wales, Bangor, has a long tradition of providing
grammar and lexicographical aids for the Welsh language. This
is where Sir John Morris Jones wrote his definitive Welsh Grammar:
Historical and Comparative (1913), and his Orgraff yr Iaith
Gymraeg (1928), which established the modern spelling of the
language. Following in this illustrious tradition came The
Welsh Academy English-Welsh Dictionary, edited by Dr. Bruce
Griffiths of the University's French department, and Dafydd Glyn
Jones, of the University's Welsh department. This was finally
published in 1995 after twenty years labour, and was hailed as
a major step forward in lexicographical aids for students of Welsh,
since this was the first truly comprehensive English - Welsh dictionary,
with entries running to many columns in some instances, and including
translations of idioms and dialect forms as well as the standard
literary language. Some use was made of computational aids during
the production of this dictionary, notably for sorting the entries
in alphabetical order, but it was still essentially a traditional,
paper-based dictionary. However, this may have been the last such
traditional dictionary to be produced at Bangor, since work was
already under way, even before it was finished, to create new
language tools which would bring Welsh into the electronic information
age.
Strangely enough, the first major project using computer technology
and intended as a language tool for computer users in this field
was undertaken, not at a traditional language department in the
University, but rather at the School of Psychology. There, a team
under the leadership of Dr. Nick Ellis and Dr Cathair O Dochartaigh,
conceived the ambitious plan of a spell-checker, which would also
be able to check some elements of Welsh grammar. This work began
in 1991 and by 1995 the first version of CySill appeared on the
market. One important feature of Welsh grammar, which it holds
in common with other Celtic languages, is that the initial consonant
of a word may change, following specific grammar rules. Thus a
word, which in its radical form begins with the letter 'c', may
under certain conditions begin with either 'g' 'ch' or 'ngh'.
In order for a spelling and grammar checker for the Welsh language
to be of practical use it had to be able to deal successfully
with this and other grammar peculiarities. It also had to be able
to deal with all the many verb endings and plural noun forms possible
in Welsh, and with a combination of these elements, for example,
to recognise 'ellir' as the mutated impersonal present tense of
the verb 'gallu', and correct it if wrongly mutated. These features
were incorporated in CySill from the beginning, and is one of
the main reasons for the program's huge success.
An other reason is the facility to adapt the program to different
language registers. The user is able to modify some of CySill's
default spell-checking and grammar-checking rules to control the
style of language used to check documents. For example, the program
can be set generally for either formal or an informal language,
and it can be further refined to accept or reject specific preferences,
such as colloquial verb ending (eg -es instead of -ais for the
first person past tense), the feminine and plural forms of adjectives,
and even whether to mutate proper nouns as is the conservative
custom (eg 'i Ddafydd') or the more modern custom of leaving proper
nouns unmutated (eg 'i Dafydd'). Of course there are still complex
grammatical structures which are difficult for a computer programme
to recognise, but progress is still being made in this area, and
CySill is now used as a standard tool in many professional situations
in Wales, as well aiding Welsh learners and those who are not
fluent in the written language. Since its launch in 1995, over
3,000 single-user copies of the program have been sold together
with site licences for 8,500 machines.
Having built the necessary foundations for the CySill project,
through developing appropriate algorithms and analytical work
on the language, this basis was then used for further applications.
Two projects were carried out on the back of the software developed
for CySill. The first was the CEG database project, where the
software was adapted to carry out a word-frequency analysis on
a corpus of one million words in a representative sample of modern
Welsh prose. This is still the only large-scale language corpus
we have for Welsh. The second project, of particular interest
to teachers of Welsh as a second language was Rhugl - a computer
assisted language learning course. The computing side of this
project was similarly based on the same algorithms, with appropriate
modifications to allow for the needs of Welsh learners. Further
work needs to be done on Rhugl before it can be commercially available.
At first glance, this may seem a very different product from the
Welsh spell-checker mentioned above. This is a substantial dictionary,
developed by Bill Hicks, who had previously worked on the CySill
project. It contains over 48,000 entries, running in Windows,
and can be accessed from within standard word processors. It will
usually recognise a word as being either English or Welsh and
show it in the appropriate place in the word list. It only needs
a click of the mouse to change from an English>Welsh view to
the Welsh>English format. However, one of its main strengths
is the way it will identify a mutated word, or a conjugated verb,
or both, if highlighted in a document, and give the unmutated,
unconjugated original form in the dictionary table. This is an
invaluable aid to the student of Welsh, and is also recognised
as an important tool on the translator's workstation, improving
the speed and accuracy of lexical searches.
Despite appearances, this programme shares many features with
the CySill spelling and grammar checker. Like CySill, it has algorithms
to deal with mutations, and to conjugate verbs. It can give the
plural of nouns, and plural and feminine forms of adjectives and
has a vast store of irregular forms. As CysGair is an English
and Welsh dictionary, the team have become increasingly conscious
of the difficulties of bilingualism and the consideration of the
needs and requirements of potential users. Although it does not
include definitions or illustrative phrases, an attempt has been
made to distinguish between homographs in order to assist a learner
or non-Welsh speaker to use the dictionary. The entry for the
noun 'jam', for example, shows 'jam n, jam'; 'jam (of people)
n, torf, tyrfa' and 'jam' (of traffic) n, tagfa'. The multiple
translations of a headword such as 'jam' have also been arranged
so that the most common translation appears first. The database
which is the foundation of this dictionary was recognised as providing
a basis for the development of other language technology tools
in the future, without having to start each new project from ground
level. The newly formed Canolfan Bedwyr, set up by the University
to oversee the development of Welsh language and bilingual initiatives,
now provided a home for both the CySill and CysGair projects.
One immediate advantage was that from this database, printouts
could be produced showing an English>Welsh dictionary list
and also a Welsh>English dictionary. Additional information
could be kept in the database, such as notes on decisions taken
on specific terms, and tags as to sources or subject areas, which
need not appear in the printed version. More importantly, this
database had a concept-based structure rather being word based.
Each separate concept therefore had its own entry, in contrast
to the traditional lexicographical approach of listing different
meanings as 1, 2, 3 etc under the same header word. Therefore,
an English term such as 'grain' which had been listed as '1. grawn
(cnwd) 2. graen (mewn craig/pren) 3. gronyn (tywod etc)' in an
earlier dictionary were given three separate entries, as 'grain
(food crop) grawn' 'grain (in rock, wood, cloth) graen' and 'grain
(=particle) gronyn'. This made it much easier for a non-Welsh
speaker to choose the correct entry, and also was the first step
towards providing word-sense disambiguators for the Welsh language.
Also the grammatical information given with each entry, such as
the part of speech, and the plural form in full, meant that material
from this database could be used in some of the other language
tools being developed at Bangor.
Although Y Termiadur Ysgol had been originally envisaged
as a paper dictionary, the fact that it was held as an electronic
database meant that it could very easily be produced in electronic
form. The platform used to produce CysGair was an obvious choice
for this. The databases used for CysGair and Y Termiadur Ysgol
were already similar in structure, and conscious efforts were
now made when equipment was being upgraded to bring both databases
closer together. A new version of Y Termiadur Ysgol was
published on CD Rom in May 2000, the first major English/Welsh
dictionary to be produced in this format.
Other benefits from this co-operation was that the vocabulary
in the spell checking tools could be greatly enlarged. Since the
Terminology Centre was mainly concerned with specialized, technical
vocabularies, its database contained a large number of terms not
found in more general dictionaries. It also recorded new terms
as they came into the Welsh language, and was able to feed these
directly into the language tools under development. A striking
example of this is the way technical terms in Y Termiadur Ysgol
were fed into a new Welsh spell-checker and autocorrect feature
for Word being developed for Microsoft. These additions caused
the beta version to score highly in evaluation of the Welsh technical
terminology the programme could successfully recognise. It also
points the way to an integrated approach in developing future
products. Sharing resources is a very cost-effective way of working,
and for a small language such as Welsh it is one way of overcoming
the lack of commercial power.
Increasing demands for the services of a centre dedicated to standardizing
terminology in Welsh meant that what started as a one-off project
began to take on a more permanent aspect. The establishment of
devolved government from Westminster to Wales in the form of the
National Assembly for Wales in 1999 was an additional impetus
to this process and added legal terminology to a list which already
included Nursing and Midwifery Terms, Archaeology, Social Work
and Social Care, Finance, the Environment etc. The Terminology
Centre took care from the beginning to work to international ISO
standards, both for the content of its terminology work and the
structure of its databases, and although this may have seemed
overelaborate at the time for those customers who were only interested
in the end product of a paper dictionary, this approach has been
vindicated in the way each new project has added to the Centre's
database and fed through into other applications.
It has also been important for the terminology work in Wales to
match up to the current international best practice. This is a
time of rapid development in the field, with an international
infrastructure being established to facilitate co-operation and
the exchange information. A conference in Paris in March 2000,
arranged by TDCNet and the Union Latine, at which representatives
from Bangor were present, addressed this issue. Through developments
such as these Welsh has been able to take advantage of some of
the new technology of the Information Age, rather than being sidelined
in some minority language backwater.
The culmination of much of the activity in the field of computational
lexicography and terminology in Bangor may be seen in its contribution
to the Melin project (Minority European Language Information Network).
This project was designed to establish a centralized World Wide
Web site for the provision of language resources to users of minority
and lesser-used languages in the European Union. Existing language
resources - terminology lists and monolingual/bilingual dictionaries,
including some which were already held at Bangor, were converted
to a standardized storage format and hosted in a database containing
several hundred thousand terms. A standardized multilingual interface
was designed to provide web access to the database in each of
the participating languages.
The website initially caters for 4 languages - Irish, Welsh, Catalan
and Basque and contains resources for each language. These initial
resources are a mixture of general purpose dictionaries and terminology
lists. Since all lexicographical and terminological work being
undertaken at Bangor now follows our own guidelines for such databases,
any new dictionaries and terminology lists being produced here
may, with the minimum of additional labour, be placed on this
web site to ensure world-wide access. It is hoped to extend the
service to other lesser-used European languages, including other
Celtic ones. This site may be found on http://www.melin.bangor.ac.uk
.
It is hoped that this paper has shown how many disparate projects
have been brought together to provide improved language tools
for Welsh. The resources held at Bangor in the form of lexicographical
and terminological databases with all the additional grammatical
and conceptual information they contain may be used and reused
to create new products. Further enhancements in the area of lexicography
using these resources are already underway. The CySill team are
currently creating a Welsh thesaurus of about 18,000 words using
the Microsoft thesaurus API. Hopefully, it will be accepted as
a part of the Welsh proofing tools included in Microsoft Office.
This thesaurus will also be available as a standalone program
for other word processing packages.
The next important computational aids for the Welsh language will
be machine-aided translation and machine translation. This is
already well developed for most of the major world languages,
and Welsh is determined not to be left behind. Professional translators
in Wales are already using translation memory software, such as
Trados, and terminology databases from Bangor have been adapted
to work in the Multiterm template within Trados.
Using the resources and expertise already at hand in the University
at Bangor, the dream of full machine translation does not seem
so unattainable. Although more work needs to be done on parsing
tools for Welsh, many of the other components required for machine
translation are already in place. From a situation a hundred years
ago where the very survival of the Welsh language was in doubt,
we are now able to look forward to the new millennium when Welsh
will be able to participate fully in the Information Society.
Griffiths, Bruce & Jones, Dafydd Glyn.
(1995). The Welsh Academy English-Welsh Dictionary. University
of Wales Press. ISBN 07083 1186 5
Prys, Delyth (20000)
Termau Gwaith a Gofal Cymdeithasol / Social Work and Social
Care Terms CCETSW ISBN 1 857192117
Prys, Delyth (2000) Termau Hybu Iechyd
/ Terms for Health Promotion North Wales Health Authority
ISBN 1 844220 009 7
Prys, Delyth
& Jones, J
P M. (1998). Y Termiadur Ysgol -
Termau wedi'u safoni ar gyfer ysgolion Cymru / Standardized terminology
for the schools of Wales ACCAC.
ISBN: 1 686112 180 6. Now also available on
CD Rom.
Prys, Delyth
a Jones, J P M.
(1998). Termau Deddfwriaeth Priffyrdd /
Highways Legislation Terms Welsh Language Board. Parts of
this report may be found on the Board's web site at www.netwales@uk/byig
.
Roberts, Gwerfyl & Prys, Delyth. (1997) Termau Nyrsio a
Bydwreigiaeth / An English-Welsh Dictionary of Nursing and Midwifery
Terms. University of Wales, Bangor. ISBN: 09045567 958
Williams, J Ll & Griffiths, Bruce & Prys, Delyth
(1999). Geiriadur Termau Archaeoleg / A Dictionary of Archaeological
Terms in English and Welsh. University of Wales Press. ISBN:
07083 16069
Further information on CySill, CysGair and related products may be obtained from the Canolfan Bedwyr website at www.bangor.ac.uk/ar/cb
Mae siaradwyr Cymraeg yn gallu dewis o dair ffordd
i fynegi rhifau ar lafar - gallant ddefnyddio'r dull traddodiadol
ugeiniol neu'r dull degol mwy diweddar neu gallant fynegi'r rhif
yn Saesneg. Awgrymir bod y dewis yn dibynnu ar gymhlethdod o ffactorau
addysgiadol a chymdeithasegol.
According to the 1991 census, 18.5% of the population of Wales
is bilingual in Welsh and English. That Welsh continues to be
a vigorous and healthy language at the commencement of the third
millennium, given the geographical location of Wales relative
to the centre of one of the world's most dominant languages, is
a phenomenon of some noteworthiness and interest (Baker and Jones,
1998). This paper explores a particular aspect of that bilingualism,
the use of number in bilingual Wales, and draws some comparisons
with other Celtic languages. It builds on a more extensive analysis
of the situation in Wales to be published elsewhere (Roberts,
2000).
There is now no impediment to the study of mathematics in Welsh
from the kindergarten through to university. However, the availability
of teaching expertise and opportunity varies according to geographical
location and level of study. In this paper we confine our attention
to one of the most basic components of mathematics - the counting
system.
The traditional Welsh counting system is vigesimal (based on counting
in twenties). Some of the additional idiosyncracies within the
system include the use of fifteen as a further reference number
(for example the number 37 is referred to as 'two on fifteen on
twenty'). This modified vigesimal (MV) system remains in everyday
use. However, a more recent development has been the adoption
of a parallel decimal (D) system (based on counting in tens).
The table below provides a sample of numbers using both systems
to illustrate their differences and diversity.
The D system is used almost universally in the context of the
teaching of mathematical concepts. That system is in fact more
strictly decimal than is the case in English and there has been
interest in the possible influence of the D system in Welsh on
the levels of understanding of number achieved by children who
pursue their early work in mathematics through the medium of Welsh
( e.g. Bryant and Nunes (1996)).
We argue elsewhere (Roberts, 2000) that the availability of two
different counting systems within the same language cannot be
interpreted simplistically. Children and adults are, typically,
familiar with both systems. These systems interplay and have overlapping
linguistic domains of use, the choice of system being influenced
by a plethora of educational and sociological factors.
Vigesimal systems are fairly common. In particular there are parallels
between the Welsh MV system and those to be found in the other
Celtic languages - Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic
- all of which (in their traditional forms) are vigesimal. Some,
but not all, of the other Celtic languages have also developed
parallel decimal forms of counting.
| English | D System Welsh | MV System Welsh |
| fourteen | un deg pedwar
one ten four | pedwar ar ddeg
four on ten |
| eighteen | un deg wyth
one ten eight | deunaw
two-nines |
| twenty-three | dau ddeg tri
two ten three | tri ar hugain
three on twenty |
| thirty-eight | tri deg wyth
three ten eight | deunaw ar hugain
two nines on twenty |
| forty-five | pedwar deg pump
four ten five | pump a deugain
five and two twenties |
| fifty | pum deg
five ten | hanner cant
half hundred |
| fifty-two | pum deg dau
five ten two | hanner cant a dau
half hundred and two |
| sixty-four | chwe deg pedwar
six ten four | pedwar a thrigain
four and three twenties |
| seventy-one | saith deg un
seven ten one | un ar ddeg a thrigain
one on ten and three twenties |
| eighty-six | wyth deg chwech
eight ten six | chwech a phedwar ugain
six and four twenties |
| ninety-seven | naw deg saith
nine ten seven | dau ar bymtheg a phedwar ugain
two on fifteen and four twenties |
| hundred | cant
hundred | cant
hundred |
The Bible was translated into Welsh in 1588 by Bishop William
Morgan. Morgan's translation had a profound influence not only
on the language of religion in Wales but also on the more general
development of the Welsh language. The health of the language
today can be attributed in no small measure to this translation.
A modern translation was published in 1988 to celebrate the quatercentenary
but also to update the original in terms of modern usage, syntax
and idiom. Nevertheless it is remarkable the extent to which the
original remains accessible to people in modern Wales. In particular
the rhythmic poetic quality of Morgan's translation is deeply
ingrained in the Welsh psyche and, although the new translation
is widely used, the original is often referred to as well. In
terms of number conventions Morgan used, quite naturally, the
MV system throughout. The new translation adopts a mixed approach.
When the numbers are large and cumbersomely expressed in the MV
system the translation opts for the D system. For example, in
the account of the storm on the sea of Galilee in the Acts of
the Apostles we read in Morgan's translation (chapter 27, verse
37):
Ac yr oeddem yn y llong i gyd, yn ddau cant ac un ar bymtheg
a thrigain o eneidiau
And we were in all in the ship two hundred and one on fifteen
and three-twenties souls
(It is interesting to note that the King James Version of the
English Bible includes the construction "three score and
sixteen souls".) In the new Welsh translation we have:
Rhwng pawb yr oedd dau gant saith deg a chwech ohonom yn y
llong.
We were in all two hundred seven ten and six in the ship.
Based on a range of observations of the use of modern Welsh in
the fields of religion, broadcasting and the media, education,
business and commerce as well as everyday conversational contexts,
the following general conclusions have been suggested (Roberts,
2000).
Firstly there is a tendency to use the MV system when expressing
ordinal numbers and the D system when expressing cardinal numbers.
Concepts of time are very often expressed within the MV system
and there is a clear sense in which time has a strong ordinal
flavour and the use of the MV system within various time contexts
is a natural consequence of this link. Time is the only measure
which has not been metricated. Implicit within this measure are
a number of base systems (for example, sixty seconds in a minute,
twenty-four hours in a day) and the Welsh MV method rests comfortably
within this system. The MV system was also commonly used in the
context of other measures, including money. The latter was decimalised
in Britain in 1971 and the D system is now commonly used in this
context. Equally one of the side effects of metrication of other
measures has been to erode the use of the MV system.
In Wales virtually all Welsh speakers are also fluent in English.
When they use number words they have, typically, three choices
- English, the Welsh decimal system and the Welsh modified vigesimal
system. All three choices are used both in everyday conversation
and in the particular domains referred to above. For example,
a bilingual's experience of the number 18 includes 'eighteen',
'un deg wyth' and 'deunaw'. The three forms are
commonly used in Welsh speech - including the English form in
an otherwise Welsh sentence. The choice of the form used will
be influenced by a multiplicity of factors. These include age
and educational background (for example, the medium through which
mathematics was learned at school). A further factor is the sociological
context in which the conversation takes place. For example, a
person being interviewed on the radio is more likely to use one
of the Welsh systems in order to be heard to be linguistically
consistent. That same person may use the English form in a more
informal social gathering where the use of the Welsh form might
be perceived by peers as being over formal or even pretentious.
However the nature of the mix of factors is necessarily complex
and easy generalisations are difficult to sustain.
In a recent pilot research programme, the author presented a set
of sentences to be read aloud by a variety of volunteers. Each
sentence included a numeral (e.g. 18) to be read aloud in context.
The pilot quickly established that the presence of the experimenter
inhibited the free choice of the system chosen by the reader -
traditional vigesimal Welsh, modern decimal Welsh or English.
The reader instinctively gauged the expected response or, rather,
that response which the reader perceived would be most likely
to 'satisfy' the experimenter. Despite exhortations to be as natural
as possible it proved impossible to glean a reliable set of responses.
The sociological pressures are very strong.
We conclude by posing general questions which are worthy of further study. All bilinguals in Wales are trilingual in the language of number. Does this affect their perception of the nature of number? Does it, for example, enhance their understanding of number, by having three perspectives on their articulation? Williams (1994) shows that concept understanding in the classroom in Wales can be enhanced when children process the same material in more than one language. Can this claim be applied equally to the learning of number? Does it transfer to other bilingual contexts, particularly in other Celtic nations?
Baker, C. and Jones, S.P. (1998), Encyclopedia of Bilingualism
and Bilingual Education, Multilingual Matters
Bryant, P., and Nunes, T. (1996), Children Doing Mathematics
(Chapter 3) Blackwell
Roberts, Gareth (2000), Bilingualism and Number in Wales, International
Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education Vol 3:1 (to
appear)
Williams, Cen (1994), Arfarniad o ddulliau dysgu ac addysgu yng nghyd-destun addysg ddwyieithog. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wales, Bangor. The relevant work is summarised in Baker and Jones (1998, pp 592 - 595).
Recognition testing of mutated forms of Irish nouns
has been conducted in Canada among secondary school students.
Average recognition of known basic words which have undergone
mutation remained as low as 77% even after four months. Results
for eclipsis were consistently lower that those for lenition We
conclude that word-initial mutations are a major impediment to
comprehension. We suggest that new vocabulary be taught by highlighting
the three forms of the word until such time as the mutation rules
have been internalized by the students.
An experiment has been conducted in Irish vocabulary acquisition
among secondary school students in Canada pursuing an introductory
Irish language course of 125 hours (September 1999 - January 2000).
Vocabulary items were presented and drilled in one of two ways:
with word-initial mutations (lenition and eclipsis); or without.
Students were then tested for their recognition of the words in
their basic, lenited and eclipsed forms. Results discussed here
include rates of recognition for each of the vowel and consonant
mutations, and patterns in which particular sounds seems more
easily processed by the students. It is hoped that these results
may yield clues as to how the mutations are being processed by
the students. These clues in turn may guide the teacher's approach
to this aspect of the language.
Current methods for teaching Irish to the adult learner outside
Ireland typically provide a list of the consonants and vowels
that undergo the different mutation forms, along with a brief
number of examples. It is left to the teacher to point out the
specific contexts in which the mutation is occurring. Alternatively,
learners venturing out on their own are left to figure out the
mutations and to create links to basic word forms. Such methods
may be adequate in written comprehension, where orthographic cues
exist to suggest that mutation has taken place. Difficulties arise,
however, in oral comprehension where the learner is left to decipher
the incoming message (often tape recordings accompanying the textbooks)
with no accompanying cues. It is our opinion that the incoming
message cannot always be deciphered using the basic lexicon that
the learner is building.
In the area of speech processing, the term "word recognition"
refers to the end-point of the selection phase when a listener
has determined which lexical entry was actually heard. It is widely
accepted that listeners generally recognize words, either in isolation
or in context, before having heard them completely (Grosjean 1980;
Marlsen-Wilson 1984). The exact recognition point of any given
word depends upon a number of factors including its physical properties
(e.g. length), its intrinsic properties (e.g. frequency), the
number and nature of other words in the lexicon that are similar
to this word (competitors or fellow cohorts), and the efficiency
of the selection process. As a sequence of discrete segments (phonemes
or syllables) is being put through a selection process, only lexical
entries matching this sequence are retained. A word's recognition
point corresponds to its uniqueness point, in other words, the
point at which the word's initial sequence of segments is common
to that word and no other. How does this work for Irish when there
are potentially three word-initial sequences of segments? How
does the learner reconcile the heard segments with those in his
internal lexicon? Is this a difficult process to learn when this
phenomenon does not exist in the first language of the learner?
It is our hypothesis that the learner is developing a "lenition/eclipsis
menu" of the potentially mutated forms, and that to assist
the learner in developing this menu, the base word along with
its mutated forms should be taught in tandem using word drills.
This hypothesis would imply that:
The method tested involves the drilling of the mutated forms of
new vocabulary items immediately upon introduction. The objective
of the method is to assist the learner in developing a menu of
mutated forms for all new vocabulary items. Because the mutations
are most often triggered by a preceding word, the mutated forms
should be taught with an appropriate trigger word for the given
mutation (lenition or eclipsis). The pattern would be similar
to irregular verb lists for the learner of English as a second
language who learns, take, took, have taken, the learner
of Irish learns cara, mo chara, ár gcara.
In an effort to bring the Irish language into the high schools
in Ontario, a credit program in Irish Studies was offered for
the first time at Kingston Collegiate Vocational Institute in
September 1999 to a group of sixteen senior high school students
who qualified for the program. The students had never been exposed
to the Irish language prior to joining the program. The mutation
patterns of lenition and eclipsis were taught formally in the
first week of class and were reinforced throughout the semester
as new words were introduced, and mutated words appeared in various
grammatical constructions. Vocabulary was introduced at a regular
pace of 10 new words per day, 50 words per week. Approximately
the same amount of time was spent each week drilling the new vocabulary.
Every other week, however, part of this time was spent drilling
the words in their mutated forms. Mutated forms were always presented
with appropriate trigger words: the lenition trigger was the second
person singular possessive adjective "do"; and
the eclipsis trigger was the first person plural possessive adjective
"ár". In effect, during weeks that
mutations were taught, the students were learning 150 new words
(50 basic, 50 lenited, and 50 eclipsed).
Eight tests were administered over the five month duration of
the course, and fell into two categories: English tests (2) and
Irish tests (6). English tests involved the recognition of English
words with Irish mutations. Irish tests involved words drilled
in class. Words drilled with mutations were treated in different
tests than words drilled without mutations, however the structure
of the tests was the same in both cases.
Inference (3) above suggests that the internalization of Irish
mutation rules should permit the student to apply the mutation
rules in new contexts, even within other languages. The English
tests were consequently designed to measure the degree of rule
acquisition, and the role of acquisition in creating a "lenition/eclipsis
menu".
English words were selected to represent each of the word-initial
sounds in Irish which experience mutation, e.g. /a/, slender
/b/, broad /b/, slender /c/ etc. For simplicity, only nouns
were included. This implied, for instance, that the same trigger
words could be used in all cases, viz. the second person
singular possessive adjective "your" for lenition,
and the first person plural possessive adjective "our"
for eclipsis. A database constructed of all common nouns beginning
with appropriate consonants and vowels was generated based on
the Concise Oxford Dictionary. The nouns were then selected randomly
to build each test. For each of the 18 word-initial sound classes,
three different words were chosen, one for each of the basic,
lenited and eclipsed forms. The tests therefore included a total
of 54 words.
During testing, students were instructed to write out the basic
form of the word regardless of whether it was actually presented
in basic, lenited or eclipsed form. Since 18 words were presented
in their base form, students should at least have been able to
get 33% of the test correct. Further, the lenited form of vowel-initial
words is identical to the basic form, and therefore students might
have been expected to recognize words of this type The possessive
adjective "your" (lenition marker) in English
does not contract before a vowel, while the corresponding marker
in Irish "do", contracts to "d'".
| Success Rate (able to give the basic word form) | |
| Test 1 | |
| Test 2 |
The rate of recognition failure is higher for the English words
than for the Irish words (see below). This situation may arise
because the acquisition of the mutation patterns was not complete.
Other factors may also come into play, e.g. the fact that
the students' entire lexicon of English was testable, while only
a limited number of Irish words were testable. Further, some of
the lenited and eclipsed forms yielded perfectly acceptable words
in English and thus created a certain degree of confusion for
the students. The improvement by approximately 10 % in the second
English test would suggest that the students were internalizing
the mutation patterns and that they were becoming better able
to apply these rules in recognizing words that they had never
previously encountered in mutated form.
A primary purpose of testing was to determine if recognition rates
were higher when the mutated forms had been drilled as part of
the vocabulary acquisition process. Again only nouns were included,
drawn from the course textbook Is Feidir Liom 1, as the
class worked through the chapters. The lenition marker was the
second person singular possessive adjective "do"
while the eclipsis marker was the first person plural possessive
adjective "ár". Students were instructed
to write the English translation of the word as this would mean
that the students were able to correctly identify the base form
of the word in Irish. In the Irish word lists, only one of the
two possible mutated form was given per basic word form. In each
test, the basic form was given for each of the mutated forms.
In tests 1 and 2, the words were listed randomly. In other words,
the basic forms and the mutated forms did not occur in any particular
order within the list. In tests 3, 4, 5 and 6 all of the mutated
forms occurred at the beginning of the list and the basic forms
at the end of the list. The students were instructed not to go
back to earlier items in the test if they recognized a word once
they heard the base form. The differences in testing procedures
between the first two tests and the remaining four make it difficult
to compare results between them. Therefore the success rate for
mutated forms for tests 1 and 2 (73% and 89% respectively) are
not listed with the other results in the table below.
| Tests | Drilled mutations | Success rate on basic words | Success rate for mutated forms
(% of mutated form recognized of the basic words in column 3) |
| 1 | no | 63% | - |
| 2 | yes | 66% | - |
| 3 | no | 75% | 83% |
| 4 | yes | 59% | 77% |
| 5 | no | 63% | 87% |
| 6 | yes | 78% | 86% |
There appears to be a correlation between the success rate in
the basic words and the ability to recognize mutated forms of
known basic words. Specifically, it appears that when the students
are more familiar with the words, they are more likely to recognize
the mutated forms even if they have not previous been exposed
to the mutated forms (no drilled mutations). In test 4, for instance,
where the success rate for the basic forms was low, suggesting
a lower overall familiarity with the words in the list, there
was also a lower recognition rate for mutated forms.
Our results suggest that word-initial mutations in Irish represent
a major impediment to word recognition. Even after four months
of daily instruction in Irish, recognition failure of the mutated
forms continued to be quite high, almost 20% of the words were
failed to be recognized in their basic form. This 20% figure is
an average, which includes a number of students with essentially
perfect scores. Some students had failure rates as high as 80%.
If word recognition is a significant problem in simple word lists,
it can be expected to be all the more serious in rapid speech.
Since our test procedure treats initial word-sounds by class,
it is possible to examine whether some sounds are more easily
processed than others. If this is indeed the case, it will have
implications for both the learner and the teacher. We anticipated
that lenition, which causes the sound to shift from a stop to
its corresponding fricative, would be more difficult to reconcile
to the basic form than the effects of eclipsis, which involves
the switching from the feature [- voiced] to [+ voiced] or [-nasal]
to [+nasal]. Similarly, we anticipated that a relatively larger
difficulty in reconciliation when word-initial vowels were eclipsed,
(a consonant is inserted) and where the lenited /f/ disappears
completely and a vowel sound is now in word-initial position.
An additional difficulty in parsing was expected where the lenited
sound was one that is not found in this position in the first
language of the learner.
A preliminary analysis of our results suggests that in general,
lenited sounds (voicing change of the voiceless consonants) are
more easily recognized than eclipsed sounds (nasalization). This
was not predicted and requires further study in order to provide
a suitable explanation. Certain exceptions to this general pattern
were obvious, including the case of the broad /g/ which was almost
universally recognized. The statistics may have been skewed however
by the inclusion of some very well known words with distinctive
eclipsed forms, e.g. "grá" (love) which
becomes "ngrá" (pronounced "nraw").
Predictions made concerning the processing of the vowel sounds
seem to have been borne out. The recognition rates for the vowels
in general is lower than it is for the consonants. The recognition
rate for the eclipsed vowels is however higher in most cases than
for the vowels in the lenition environment. It is unclear what
is causing this since vowels do not lenite. One suggestion is
that while the vowel itself does not undergo a change, the possessive
adjective "do" contracts to "d'"
and attaches itself to the vowel-initial word. The resulting word
would appear to be one that begins with a /d/ sound and so students
who have learned the patterns of eclipsis may be attempting to
work back to a non-eclipsed form of a word beginning with /t/
(e.g "ár dteach" maps back to "teach"
" house"). Another possible explanation is that the
student will recognize the second person possessive adjective
as the trigger for lenition, may think that he recognizes the
word but because of the contracted "d'" doubts
himself and does not give an answer.
We conclude that word-initial mutations in Irish are a major impediment
to oral comprehension. Although our preliminary results are not
sufficiently sensitive to establish a correlation between the
drilling of mutated forms, and recognition success rates, it is
clear that some adjustment in normal teaching techniques is appropriate
to address the mutation problem. Our results hint that particular
attention may be appropriate in teaching eclipsed forms, and the
environment which causes contraction of consonant sounds where
lenition in not anticipated for vowels. Further research is planned
to determine more clearly which sounds are typically processed
correctly and which sounds are inherently difficult.
Christian Brothers (The), New Irish Grammar, Dublin: C.J.
Fallon
Duffield, Nigel, 1990, Movement and Mutation in Modern Irish
Papers from the Second Student Conference in Linguistics M.I.T.
31-45, M.I.T. Working Papers in Linguistics, VOL 12 edited by
Thomas Grenn and Sigal Uziel
Duffield Nigel, 1997 Canadian Journal of Linguistics 88-109 42
(1-2)
Frauenfelder, Uli H. and Lorraine Komisarjewsky. Eds. Spoken
Word Recognitoin. MIT press edition 1987.
Grijzenhout, Janet, 1995, Irish Consonant Mutation and Phonological
Theory, PhD Dissertation, OTS Dissertation Series
Gussman, Edmund. 1986, Autosegments, linked matrices, aand the
Irish lenition, in Linguistics across Historical and Geographical
Boundaries, ed. D Kastovsky and A. Szwedek, 891-907, Berlin,
Mouton de Gruyter
Institiúid Teangeolaíochta Éireann, The Linguistics
Institute of Ireland, Cogar, produced by Radio Telefís
Éireann, 1989
MacGabhann, Risteard, 1991, Cúrsa Closamhairc Gaeilge,
A Self-Instructional Course for Adults, Ogmios, Derry N. Ireland
Ó Báille, Ruaidhrí. Is Féidir Liom.
School and College Publishing, Dublin, 1995
Ó Dónaill, Niall, Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla,
Oifig an tSoláthair, Baile Átha Cliath, 1977
Ó Sé, Diarmuid and Josef Sheils, 1994, Teach
Yourself Irish, NTC Publishing Group Lincolnwood, (chicago)
Illinois
Rotenberg, Joel. 1978, The Syntax of Phonology, Doctoral Dissertation, MIT.
Ga dy dooar y Ghaelg baase myr çhengey theay
Vannin mysh keead blein er dy henney as cha row y chooid smoo
jeh ny Manninee coontey veg jee, ta sleih dy liooar ayns foayr
jee nish. Ta'n Ghaelg myr cooish reihyssagh ayns scoillyn Vannin
as ta possan-cloie Gaelgagh jannoo dy mie. Ta Reiltys Vannin arryltagh
dy chooney lesh y çhengey. Agh cha nel ee sauçhey
foastagh.
Manx, or Manx Gaelic is the native language (Refs. 1 & 2)
of the Isle of Man, or Mann, a quasi-autonomous miniature country
in the north Irish Sea between Ireland and Britain. Mann is governed
by its own ancient parliament, Tynwald, and is not part of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, nor is it
part of the European Union. The present population of Mann is
about 74,000, about half of whom were not born there.
1974 saw the death of the recognised last native speaker,
Ned Maddrell, of what might be called 'traditional Manx'. Linguists
duly pronounced Manx to be 'dead' (Ref. 3). However, while mourning
Ned's death, Manx language activists continued their efforts to
promote the native language of the Isle of Man.
In 1990, a Manx government-commissioned quality of life survey
showed that thirty-six percent of those interviewed were in favour
of Manx as an optional subject in schools in Mann. And in the
1991 census the number of those claiming to speak Manx was 643,
a significant increase on the previous census figure.
For a variety of reasons, the Council of Ministers of the Manx
Government decided to appoint a Manx Language Officer along with
two full-time peripatetic teachers of Manx. The language would
be offered as an option in schools. This meant that for the first
time ever Manx Gaelic was in the schools on something approaching
a regular basis, albeit about a hundred years after its demise
as a community language.
The Manx Language Officer (Brian Stowell) and the two teachers
(Peggy Carswell and Phil Kelly) took up their posts in January
1992. In the virtually complete absence of teaching material which
was suitable for children, the newly created Manx Language Unit
had to create courses from scratch. It was not known what the
response to an offer of Manx language tuition would be, but advisers
in the Manx Government's Education Department had assumed that
Manx would be taught in a similar way to instrumental music. School
pupils opting to learn to play the violin, say, often come out
of classes to be taught for twenty to thirty minutes per week
by a peripatetic violin teacher. Typically, two or three pupils
out of a group of twenty-five may be learning to play an instrument.
The Manx Language Unit, which was given a large degree of freedom
within the government's Education Department, decided to offer
thirty minutes of tuition to each pupil. This was thought sufficient
to give an effective taster course while not causing undue upsets
in schools. With reluctance, it was recognised that Manx could
not be offered to pupils aged between four/five and seven: when
consulted, infant teachers had expressed marked disquiet about
younger children leaving other classes to take Manx.
The instrumental music model was shown to be inappropriate when
parents were canvassed in May 1992 as to whether their children
wanted to study Manx. The numbers were much higher than had been
guessed at. About forty percent of those primary school children
aged between seven and eleven and an average of seven percent
of secondary school pupils (aged eleven to seventeen/eighteen)
wanted to take Manx. Out of a total school population of roughly
10,000, there were 1,949 potential students of the language -
more than two teachers and the Manx Language Officer could possibly
cope with. The Language Officer's job description had not included
teaching: his brief had been to establish optional Manx in the
schools and then carry out a wide range of duties promoting the
language in general. The very positive response to the offer of
Manx language tuition meant that he had to teach in the schools,
there being no prospect of appointing any more teachers.
Few teachers voiced outright opposition to the introduction of
Manx, but there was appreciable unease on the part of some teachers
about the advent of yet another subject in schools. Shortly beforehand,
the Isle of Man Department of Education had embarked on an ambitious
scheme of compulsory French for all primary school pupil aged
seven and over. This came on top of the imposition of the English
National Curriculum in Manx schools, causing considerable resentment
among teachers (and significant numbers of early retirements).
In spite of these negative factors, optional Manx was introduced
surprisingly smoothly. The Manx Language Unit observed primary
school French lessons in the spring and summer of 1992 to enable
them to teach Manx in a similar way - using the target language
and games and other activities. Because of the large demand for
Manx, arbitrary decisions had to be made which were educationally
undesirable. In larger primary schools, tuition had to be delayed
for many potential students of Manx. And in many cases, pupils
were limited to just two years of study of the language. For this
purpose, a two-year course called 'Bun Noa' ('New Base' or 'New
Meaning') was prepared. The course is divided into six modules,
one for each school term of roughly twelve weeks. For each module,
pupils are issued with booklets.
Formal Manx language tuition started in September 1992, with 1,141
primary school pupils and 314 secondary school pupils. In many
primary schools there were pupils with ages ranging from seven
to eleven in the one class (this did not cause appreciable problems.)
Overall, the numbers in the classes ranged from ten to thirty,
highlighting the fact that peripatetic Manx teaching could not
really be operated in the same way as peripatetic music teaching
with the numbers wanting to take Manx being so much higher. By
clever timetabling, staff in some schools avoided the undesirable
feature of pupils' leaving other classes to take Manx. But in
many cases, pupils had to face the often embarrassing routine
of informing teachers they were leaving to go to a Manx class.
This has been the major negative feature in the whole scheme of
Manx language tuition in schools. While most teachers have been
supportive, a minority have openly expressed their opposition
to having Manx in the schools. In spite of these and other difficulties,
almost all pupils took to Manx with great enthusiasm and enjoyment,
irrespective of whether they were from old established Manx families
or from recently arrived families.
Initially, secondary school pupils took the same course as those
in primary schools - Bun Noa. Later, a separate course
was developed for secondary schools. This is a conversation based
course called Bun-Choorse Gaelgagh (Basic Manx Course).
In secondary schools, the very full curriculum meant that there
were significant problems in introducing Manx, leading to a much
higher dropout rate than in primary schools. When parents realised
that many pupils were leaving other classes to take Manx, it often
happened that they persuaded their children to give up Manx, even
when Manx was timetabled to minimise clashes.
Nevertheless, in Manx terms, the introduction of optional Manx
Gaelic into schools has been a success. In January 1996, a move
to greatly increase the number of peripatetic teachers of Manx
was defeated by just one vote in Tynwald. Significantly, no politician
openly expressed opposition to the language in the preceding debate,
showing the realisation by politicians of the general popularity
of having Manx as an optional subject in the schools. A comprehensive
Education Department report on the future of the language was
received by Tynwald at this time.
In September 1996, Brian Stowell retired and Phil Kelly was appointed
as the Manx Language Officer. Another teacher of Manx (Catreeney
Craine) was recruited, increasing the staff of the government
Manx Language Unit to four (the Language Officer plus three full-time
teachers.)
In the first few years of the Manx language scheme in the schools,
the Manx Language Unit agreed to attempt to teach about one thousand
pupils per year under the tacit assumption that more teachers
of Manx would be appointed. This did not happen, so recruitment
was cut back to give the present figure of about eight hundred
pupils. The popularity of Manx shows no sign of declining, but
the future of the language in the schools remains very vulnerable
to changes in the political climate.
Until recently, Manx Gaelic was the only Celtic language in which
it was not possible to gain formal qualifications. In the early
1980's it was possible to take an Ordinary Level General Certificate
of Education (O-Level GCE) in Manx under the auspices of the English
examinations system. However, the academically inclined GCE O-Levels
(taken mainly by 16 year olds) were phased out and replaced by
General Certificates in Secondary Education (GCSE's) which, for
languages, are orientated towards conversation and the spoken
language. For various reasons, a GCSE in Manx Gaelic was not developed
to follow the GCE O-Level.
In 1997, a course leading to Teisht Chadjin Ghaelgagh (General
Certificate in Manx) was made available in secondary schools in
Mann and in adult evening classes in various locations round the
island, as well as to individuals taking it by distance learning
(some via the Internet). This qualification is equivalent to a
GCSE and is validated by a committee in association with the Manx
Government's Department of Education.
A course leading to Ard-Teisht Ghaelgagh (Higher Certificate
in Manx) is being prepared. This will be equivalent to an Advanced
Level GCE in the English system.
In February 1997, the officially approved Manx language playgroup
Mooinjer Veggey ('Little Folk') was formally opened by the President
of Tynwald, Charles Kerruish, in a disused schoolhouse at Braddan,
near Douglas. This important step for Manx was largely due to
the initiative of Phil Gawne, a prominent language activist. A
playgroup leader and assistants were recruited, it being most
important that their command of spoken Manx was good enough to
run the playgroup entirely through Manx.
Mooinjer Veggey caters for children aged between three and five
and operates between 9 am and 12.15 pm on weekdays in schools
terms. Under government regulations, up to ten children can attend
any one session. Parents pay by the hour, but external financial
assistance has been needed to get the playgroup under way. This
assistance has come from the Manx Heritage Foundation, a government
funded body which supports Manx culture.
Children attending Mooinjer Veggey take part in games and activities
through the medium of Manx, thereby gaining an understanding of
aspects of the spoken language. Although some of the children
originally attending the playgroup were essentially new native
speakers of Manx (they are being brought up through Manx as well
as English), most parents with children in Mooinjer Veggey know
little or no Manx.
Naturally, a demand has arisen from parents with children at Mooinjer Veggey for some form of continuity as regards Manx when their children leave the playgroup to attend primary school at the age of five. The Department of Education agreed to designate a school where parents could take their children for one half-day's schooling through Manx. This represents a tentative step towards Manx medium education, following in the footsteps of the movements in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and Brittany.
In 1997 a proposal was made by the committee of Yn Çheshaght
Ghailckagh (Manx Gaelic Society) that a part-time Manx Language
Development Officer be appointed to work on aspects of Manx not
involving the schools and the Department of Education. It had
been known since 1992 that the job description of that department's
language officer was too broad to be practicable, since the demand
for Manx tuition in the schools had proved much higher than had
been guessed at.
The Education Department's language officers (Brian Stowell followed
by Phil Kelly) had succeeded in fulfilling various wider functions,
such as some public relations work in Mann and outside, establishing
Manx language summer schools, making contact with the European
Bureau for Lesser Used Languages and presenting papers on Manx
at conferences. But there was clearly work for more than one Language
Officer.
Phil Gawne was duly appointed part-time Manx Language Development
Officer, being paid jointly under a three year contract by the
Manx Heritage Foundation and Manx National Heritage (the trading
name for the Manx Museum and National Trust). Phil Gawne's main
briefs are to look at language policy and planning in other countries
and to work for Manx in a way implied by the Manx Gaelic title
for ths job - 'Yn Greinneyder' ('The Encourager'). He
has strengthened links with language activists in Scotland, Ireland
and Wales, in particular with Finlay Mac Leod, a major driving
force behind the Gaelic medium education movement in Scotland.
This strengthening of links is complemented by the work of Phil
Kelly, the Education Department's language officer, in organising
attendance at Scottish Gaelic courses at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
for the Manx Language Unit, participation in international language
conferences, etc.
Before becoming Yn Greinneyder, Phil Gawne had initiated
the higly successful Feailley Ghaelgagh (Manx Language
Festival), a week long event of lectures, song and music now held
every November. The festival includes the annual Ned Maddrell
Lecture, named in honour of the last native speaker of traditional
Manx.
More recently, Yn Greinneyder has been instrumental in
enlarging Coonceil ny Gaelgey (Manx Gaelic Advisory Council).
This is a quasi-governmental body which was set up by Tynwald
in 1985 to supply the Manx translations of summaries of laws passed
by Tynwald, as well as titles of government departments, street
names, etc. In 1999 the membership of the council was increased
from three to eleven and the work of developing new words and
terms assigned to sub-groups.
Coonceil ny Gaelgey is chaired by Rev. Robert Thomson, who is,
overall, the leading academic authority on Manx Gaelic.
1. R.L. Thomson and A.J. Pilgrim, Outline of Manx Language
and Literature (Douglas 1998), ISBN 1-870029-04-6.
2. B. Stowell and D. Ó Breasláin, A Short History
of the Manx Language (An Clochán, Belfast 1996), ISBN
1-900286-02-5.
3. Broderick, George, Language Death in the Isle of Man. (Niemeyer, Tübingen, Germany, 1999), ISBN 3-484-30395-6).
This paper explores ideologies underlying the construction
of "neo Breton,"the 20th-c. "standardized"
form of Brittany's traditional Celtic language, considers the
benefits and losses of the establishment of this variety as the
standard one, and raises pedagogical questions and concerns for
its long-term viability.
'Language ideology' has emerged in recent years as a distinct
area of inquiry within a variety of disciplines in the social
sciences and humanities. Its appearance is timely for anyone working
in the context of minority languages and cultures, whether in
Europe or elsewhere, for the perspectives offered by this emergent
field have clear relevance for understanding issues pertaining
both to language planning efforts and to teaching of minority
languages. The purpose of this paper is to explore some aspects
of language ideology in Brittany, and to consider their impact
on present-day efforts to promote the learning and use of Breton
in the schools and in wider society.
There is probably no universally agreed upon definition for 'language
ideology'. As Woolard (1998:4) points out, there are several senses
in which this phrase is invoked by scholars concerned with issues
at the intersection between attitudinal, epistemological and aesthetic
stances on language, on the one hand, and with language praxis
on the other. For this paper, I am using 'language ideology/ideologies'
to refer to notions regarding linguistic distinctiveness, value,
"purity" and standardization, and the relation of these
to the realities of language use in Brittany today.
Modern spoken Breton consists of four major dialects that correspond,
grosso modo, to former dioceses boundaries. There are three northern
dialects - léonais, cornouaillais, and trégorrois
- that are closer structurally and phonologically to each other
than any of them is to the fourth, southern dialect known as vannetais.
In reality, the situation is far more complex, for each large
dialect area is itself comprised of numerous more localized subdialects,
and all field researchers in Brittany are familiar with the almost
legendary claim by native speakers that their Breton is "not
the same'" as the Breton spoken down the road, or over the
hills, at 10-15 kms. distance.
As a written language, Breton has been codified in several different
versions. Middle Breton (11th-16th c.) produced two written "standard"
languages based on the Breton used by the Carmelite and Franciscan
priests in the Tregor dialect area, especially around the Bay
of Morlaix; these became, in the early 17th c., the basis of the
Breton used in the Jesuit colleges of Quimper, in the cornouaillais
dialect area, and Vannes, in the vannetais dialect area
(Le Dû 1997). Following the French Revolution, the former
bishoprics of Brittany were reorganized as départements,
and a third written standard emerged for the newly formed Côtes-Du-Nord
- comprising the trégorrois dialect area (ibid.).
In spite of the anticlerical bias of the revolutionary government,
in Brittany, these three written standards were used principally
for the production of devotional materials for the common people.
In the 19th c., another sort of movement was launched in favor of written Breton. This came in the wake of the 'Celtomane' fervor of the mid 1800s (Dietler 1994), when certain Breton enthusiasts sought to establish Breton as the original human language and to assert the primacy (and superiority) of the Celtic 'race'. Numerous reforms in the orthography were introduced to normalize the orthographic representation of the initial consonant mutations and to eliminate a large number of French-derived words replacing them with native stock. Clearly operative during this epoch was the drive for purification and expurgation of French influence.
Language ideology of the Breton literati. As one Breton
linguist has observed (Le Dû 1997:423), the labors of the
19th-c. purists were not truly aimed at the construction of an
official standard language, a project that would only take shape
with the emergence of Breton nationalistic fervor and organizations
of the early 20th c. It was during the latter period that language
promoters would call for a "unified" Breton to serve
all the people. This would be difficult to achieve given the divergence
among dialects and especially the linguistic distance between
the southern dialect vannetais and the other three, and
in reality was never successful beyond positing certain spelling
reforms in 1941, including, the famous digraph ZH, which was to
be pronounced in the three northern dialects as [z] or [s] (depending
on position in word) and as [h] in the southern dialect. This
orthography was dubbed, because of the ZH innovation, 'zedacheg',
and was destined to become symbolically potent to subsequent generations.
The new cohort of reformers had in mind a rather complete overhaul
of Breton grammar and lexis, which were judged too deficient and
French influenced to serve as a proper basis for renovation. The
most renowned of the reformers, Roparz Hemon (1900-1978), was
forthcoming about their intentions to create "A brand new
language for Lower Brittany, simple and pure, in which you can
work with the truth more than in the old languages of the world"
(1972:52). Le Dû detects the influence of Esperanto in this
project (1997:424). But unlike the Esperantists, who wanted a
universal language to facilitate cross-cultural communication,
the Breton reformers had a much more focused goal in mind, for
they were ideologically committed, as nationalists, to create
"A literary language first, from 1925 to 1941. From 1941
on, a language of State" (ibid.:425).
The prevailing standard language today - neo Breton.
The construction of this "brand new language" of
a state-to-be was based on logic and abstraction. Hemon, an urban
Breton who learned the language as an adult, devoted the rest
of his life to perfecting the new literary language and to its
propagation via the publication of scholarly essays, reviews,
translations of world literature and the creation of a new secular
literature. The language on which he toiled was not strictly speaking
"brand new" but rather built on inherited forms of written
Breton , for which the process of dialect leveling and normalization
that had been going on since the 16th c. Thus, Hemon's 20th-c.
literary Breton could be described in part as a pan-dialectal
koine, with a bias toward léonais pronunciation
- for example, no palatalization of velar consonants before front
vowels, which is widespread in vannetais as well as certain
subdialects of cornouaillais. In addition, the structural
and linguistic differentiation of Breton vis-à-vis French
was emphasized by these reformers, with the goal of achieving
a purer "Celticity" in syntax and lexicon. At the same
time Breton was promoted for symbolic purposes in public domains
where it had not historically had much of a role. Finally, the
Romantic 19th-c. notion of one people=one language
was dusted off and given a new sheen in the context of 20th-c.
Brittany.
Since the 1970s Hemon's version of Breton has been taught at the
University of Rennes and in bilingual K-12 schools, of which there
are several dozen in Brittany. As a result it has become the principal
variety of the language learned by younger people, and this means
- given the current demographics of the native speaker population
of the language - that this is the variety with the best chance
of perduring in the 21st century.
Mari Jones has recently characterized neo Breton as a "xenolect,"
following Holm's definition of xenolects as "slightly foreignized
varieties spoken natively which are not creoles because they have
not undergone significant restructuring" (Holm 1988 quoted
in Jones 1998:323). The "slightly foreignized" features
presumably arise because neo Breton is being taught to learners
by adults who did not learn it as a first language and have learned
it imperfectly, which may imply influence of French word order,
simplification of the mutational system, and loss of varous tense/mode
distinctions. Jones observes that
The creation of the Neo-Breton xenolect may have repercussions
for the field of language death for it is possible that such a
variety...may represent the pre-terminal phase of some dying languages
in particular socio-political contexts (1998:323).
This could be true, though it is also very possible that the neo-Breton
xenolect would stabilize over time and, if learned by enough people
over several generations, would simply go its own way - no longer
a xenolect, but simply the way 21st century Bretons speak Breton;
perhaps it would not be very intelligible to 20th. c. native speakers
of Breton, but neither would it be comprehensible to French monolinguals.
Language ideology among the Breton people (in the 20th
c.). Long accustomed to a functional and status differentiation
between French as the H(igh) and Breton as the L(ow) language,
this diglossic relationship (Timm 1980) was scarcely contested
by the mass of the Breton speaking population, though arguably
attitudes about Breton pejorated at an increasing rate as the
century progressed through and beyond WW II. The efforts of the
literati, outlined above, to maintain and promote the language
began finding wide public acceptance in the 1960s, but probably
did not obtain adherence of noteworthy numbers of people (mainly
younger generations) until the late 1970s and early 1980s.
At the turn of the 21st c. popular support among the
middle classes for the promotion of Breton in the schools has
become widespread. Working class Bretons seem distinctly less
interested, while the older generations - including the great
bulk of native Breton speakers - mainly cleave to the diglossic
model and are faintly bemused by efforts to expand the functionality
of neo Breton. They may also be repelled by it, in part because
of the mismatch between their own Breton and the Breton that is
now heard in the media and from school children (see below).
Given its position as the L language in diglossia,
there was little impetus historically to develop pedagogical materials
for the teaching/learning of the language. This lacuna began to
be filled in by Hemon and his group in the 1940s and beyond, as
rudimentary teach-yourself books began to appear, as well as that
indispensable reference tool, a bilingual dictionary. More self-help
guides to Breton became available in the 1960s and 1970s, bolstered
by the technology then available of cassette tapes. Most of this
was material was targeted at adolescents (in terms of content
of dialogues) but was probably mainly studied by adults.
In the late 1970s, a new initiative of language promotion was
launched - Diwan. This began as a very modest effort on the part
of a handful of parents, teachers and students to provide bilingual
(Breton-French) instruction for very young children. Over the
years, this effort has expanded remarkably, moving from private
to semi-public status, and encompassing nearly 2000 students a
year in a network of K-12 schools located throughout Brittany.
Its ideology is premised on the idea of producing accomplished
bilinguals; this seems eminently sensible, but is this being achieved?
Here is where pedagogical intentions may founder on the shoals
of puristic language ideology, for there are non-trivial issues
of intelligibilitiy between the variety of Breton being taught
and propagated in the school system - the neo-Breton "xenolect"
discussed earlier - and the traditional Breton still being spoken
by native speakers. (There are similar issues with many of the
professional broadcasters.)
This problem is probably familiar to anyone working with the Celtic
languages, but it may be more acute for Breton than for Irish
or Welsh, inasmuch as the pool of native Breton speakers consists
almost exclusively of older people whose attitudes about Breton
are very different from those of the young cohorts learning it
as a second language. These older speakers accepted the ideology
they inherited from their parents and authorities - that Breton
was not suitable for wider society, that French was the only language
for social and educational advancement. Breton stubbornly remains
for them an L language, but with even more restricted functionality
here - mainly as the language for conversation and banter with
friends and close family of the same generation (or older).
These older cohorts of speakers who should, ideally, serve as community resources for learners aspiring to improve and perfect their Breton, remain instead outside the circle of pedagogy, which is, for its part, largely closed and self-perpetuating. There is probably self-exclusion by the native speakers from the process too: given the privileging of the academic world, in the eyes of a post-peasantry (which many of the older speakers represent), they are likely to judge their native Breton to be not as "good" as what the children now learn in school.
Still, it might be argued, languages change and the neo-Breton
that is emerging from the school children will simply be the Breton
of the future, and one should not worry overly whether or not
this version of Breton is comprehensible by older speakers, many
of whom will not live long into the 21st century. If
enough children of Brittany end up in Diwan or other bilingual
schools where they acquire a workable knowledge of neo Breton,
then this is a possible scenario. At present, though, this not
the case, as made clear in a poignant film released in Britanny
in May 1999, which followed the lives over two or three years
of several students who were the first to earn their "bacs"
in Breton-medium and bilingual schools. What we see from that
film, unfortunately, is that these young people, deeply committed
to Breton, find it difficult to maintain social relationships
in that language, in large measure because they are so diffusely
scattered through the population of Brittany. Yet, ironically,
encounters with native Breton speakers are scarcely more productive
(linguistically) than with French monolinguals.
It is altogether too easy for outsiders to critique the well-meaning
and indeed heroic efforts of language activists in Brittany (and
in other Celtic countries) to restore and promote their heritage
language, and I wish to make clear that any observations I make
here or elsewhere are meant only in a most positive way. There
have been both benefits and losses in the construction and propagation
of neo-Breton over the past century. These will be briefly described
here.
Benefits. The benefits of the development of neo Breton
are several: it affords a means of communicating in Breton across
traditional dialect areas; at least this is true of the written
variety. It has acquired symbolic value as a marker of Breton
identity, and has helped eradicate the centuries-old self-stigmatization
of Breton by its native speakers. As part of this, some sectors
of the public domain, previously closed to Breton, have opened
up. This is truest of education; Breton presence on TV and radio
are more than in the past, but still not great. The re-worked
lexicon - though still too puristic - has nonetheless brought
Breton into the modern world, as has the creation of a substantial
secular literature.
Losses. The linking of a divergent koiné variety
of Breton with a movement of linguistic restoration and the establishment
of a an elitist bretonnant literary tradition has had several
consequences:
Moreover, in every society, the universal aspects of human existence
are to be found, and we find them commented on in such expressive
language as proverbs and sayings. These are generally readily
comprehended in translation, and it is not uncommon to find quite
parallel expressions of this genre across languages and cultures.
Thus, it would have benefitted new generations of learners of
Breton had more figurative expressions been incorporated into
updated versions of Breton grammars and dictionaries. There are
pedagogical reasons for so doing: often the sayings are rhymed,
and this may facilitate the learning process. Perhaps originators
of sayings were aware on some level that rhyming could assist
children in learning the values and perspectives contained within
them. There are also linguistic lessons in sayings for a learner
of Breton, which shares with the other Celtic languages a complex
morphophonemic system in its initial consonant mutations, for
it is likely that repetition of proverbs and sayings provided
juvenile learners easily remembered models for these mutations;
their repetition could do the same for adult learners.
Language ideologies in Brittany in the past century have promoted
an emphasis on a form of Breton, the one currently being taught
as a second language, that is in many ways quite different from
the native, spoken forms of the language. Deliberately constructed
to avoid any appearance of French influence, the teaching of neo-Breton
has produced new cohorts of speakers who do not share many of
the same expessive and creative resources with the native speakers;
a sort of linguistic dissonance is the result when neo- and paleo-speakers
attempt to engage in conversation. I have suggested that more
attention might have been paid, and might still be paid, in the
construction of grammars and dictionaries to some traditional
genres in vernacular forms of the language - e.g., conversational
styles that incorporate more idioms, proverbs, and sayings to
help provide a bridge between the native and neo Breton speakers.
The conversational and age gap between younger and older speakers
may already be so great as to render the crossing of this bridge
impracticable or impossible. An unanswered question (and unanswerable
at present) is whether or not the neo-speakers will become sufficiently
numerous to propagate their own version of the language and to
promote, through time, its further elaboration as a set of vernaculars
as expressive and creative as the ones that are currently being
lost.
Dietler , M. (1994). "Our ancestors the Gauls": Archaeology,
ethnic nationalism and the manipulation of Celtic identity in
Modern Europe. American Anthropologist 96:584-605.
Hemon, R. (1972). Ur breizhad oc'h adkavout Breizh. Brest:
Al Liamm.
Le Dû, J. (1997). Le Breton au XXXe siècle: renaissance
ou création? Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie
49-50: 414-431.
Jones, M. (1998). Language Obsolescence and Revitalization.
Linguistic Change in Two Sociolinguistically Contrasting Welsh
Communities. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Timm, L. (1980). Bilingualism, diglossia, and language shift in
Brittany. International Journal of the Sociology of Language
25:29-41.
Woolard, K. (1998). Introduction: Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In B. Schieffelin, K. Woolard, & P. Kroskrity, eds., Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 3-47.
Astudiaeth ragarweiniol o ddulliau cyflwyno a dysgu
yn y Sector Addysg Bellach sef 16+ galwedigaethol ac academaidd
yng Nghymru. Manylir ar y cyd-destun dwyieithog ar draws y sectorau
er mwyn gosod y cyd-destun ieithyddol ar gyfer yr astudiaeth,
a rhestrir rhai o'r dulliau cyflwyno dwyieithog mewn ysgolion
uwchradd. Yna dadansoddir y sefyllfaoedd dysgu dwyieithog cadarnhaol
a welwyd gan gynnig argymhellion sy'n berthnasol i unrhyw wlad
lle defnyddir methodoleg ddysgu ddwyieithog i ymestyn y defnydd
o'r iaith leiafrifol.
This is an indication of language shift which has happened during
the second half of the twentieth century, whereby the education
system and the State rather than the hearth and home have increasingly
become guardians of the Welsh language.
This national figure of 2.31% fails to disclose the institutional
or geographical propensity. 38.4% of the 4419 students assessed
through the medium of Welsh came from one institution and 24.4%
from another institution.
Williams (1994) noted that 32% only of the classrooms he visited
during part 1 of his research in traditional bilingual secondary
schools adopted a loosely bilingual methodology. The situations
observed could be categorised as:
Within these situations, two common practices which undermined
any attempt at establishing a coherent policy were evident.
Category (6) above implies a more deliberate bilingual teaching
policy and the more successful teachers within this classification
demonstrate certain common characteristics in their planning and
teaching strategies. They:
(Williams, 1994 p 259)
The main aim of the study therefore was to identify and
disseminate good practice in bilingual delivery and learning within
the sector.
The main objectives were:
The study was ethnographic in nature, concentrating on what happens
usually and naturally in the classroom. No attempt was made to
manipulate the situation in any way or to interfere with lecturers'
normal teaching methods regarding presentation nor their use of
bilingualism.
The results are broadly divided into two sections; the first short
section addressess the conditions affecting bilingual setting
and the second more detailed section concentrates on the classification
and typology of teaching styles within each setting.
Individual lecturers had a tendency to interpret bilingual teaching
according to the linguistic conditions prevalent in the class
at any given time. Amongst these conditions were:
The observed situations were categorised into seven main types
of teaching settings, three of which were deemed to be positive.
For the purpose of this paper positive settings and features only
will be discussed.
There are many influences that can affect the success or failure
of bilingual teaching in any sector. Each of these should be considered
in the context of Further Education and any weak aspects should
be strengthened. The main considerations are noted below, together
with some recommendations for effective practice.
1 The educational philosophy which forms the basis of the
language medium policy should be transparent to members of staff
and students alike.
The purpose of bilingualism within the Further Education sector
should be established; either:
2 The attitude of lecturers is vital for the effective operation
of the policy.
If lecturers do not fully understand the aims of the institutional
policy, unfavourable conditions are created in the way that policy
is put into effect in the classroom. It is this lack of understanding,
rather than outright objection, that leads to negative thinking
and lack of respect for the value of a bilingual policy.
3 The attitude of students is a key factor in the success
of bilingual teaching.
In some classes, short-term considerations tended to outweigh
long-term issues. Students' unfavourable attitudes towards the
Welsh language because of previous educational background, a lack
of confidence when expressing themselves in Welsh and personal
prejudices were all evident. The accumulative effect was that
many students used English when completing written work. They
did not consider that there is an increasing demand both locally
and nationally for a bilingual workforce, and that their bilingualism
needed to be practised in order to develop. They were often willing
to use their bilingualism orally but not in writing.
4 The linguistic nature of a class can affect the governing
medium.
Where a class contained one or more students who had not been
educated under the local bilingual system, there was a marked
tendency for the language medium to change to English. The policy
adopted by a department or institution should govern; not the
linguistic nature of a particular class.
The aims of each bilingual class should include using and developing
a student's existing bilingual ability.
5 One of the major obstacles to successful bilingual teaching
is the lack of minority-language resources and materials.
The fact that most of the printed material used during the sessions
that were viewed for this study was in English affected the language
of discussion and/or terminology used by lecturers and students
alike. Where teaching material is available in the majority language
only, students who are following those courses in the minority
language are disadvantaged by their departments. Their work-load
is heavier as they have to translate their own notes and, in some
instances, devise their own terminology.
6 There is a need to consider the quality of language and
the use made of terminology.
A student who has chosen to study his topic entirely through the
medium of the minority language has a right to expect that that
language is used suitably and correctly, including an extensive
use of suitable terminology.
7 The adopted teaching and learning methodologies may influence
effectiveness.
If a lecturer keeps to a lecturer-centred methodology, where oral
knowledge transfer and concept explanation is the main teaching
method, the effort of maintaining bilingualism in the class will
become oppressive for the students. During the sessions viewed,
a student-centred approach with purposeful material provided in
both languages, proved to be a more successful and less oppressive
teaching strategy.
8 A lack of specific training for teaching in a bilingual setting
hampers professional development in this area.
There is a need for careful planning and presentation of an initial in-service training
scheme which prioritises the elements of teaching in the bilingual
setting outlined above. This could be done on a national basis
with a view to establishing a certificate or diploma qualification.
Lambert, W. E., 1974, Culture and Language as Factors in Learning
and Education. In F. E. Aboud & R. D. Meade (eds.) Cultural
Factors in Learning and Education. Bellingham, Washington:
5th Western Washington Symposium on Learning.
Welsh Office, 1997, Statistics For Education and Training:
Schools. Cardiff: Welsh Office/Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
Williams, C., 1994, Arfarniad o Ddulliau Dysgu ac Addysgu
yng Nghyd-destun Addysg Uwchradd Ddwyieithog. Unpublished
Ph.D. Thesis, University of Wales, Bangor.