Einde O'Callaghan wrote:
|J quoted:
|> Larry Swain wrote:
|>
|>> Hi,
|>>
|>> I'm trying to learn Old Irish. I have the Lehrmann book but am
finding
|>> it difficult going--not at all the way I'm used to learning a
language.
|>> Are there other good introductions to Old Irish out there that someone
|>> could suggest?
|>>
|
|I'm not certain waht you mean by Old Irish. Do you mean Irish with the
|old script that was phased out in the 1960s? Or do you mean Irish as
|written ebfore the spelling reform in teh 1940s? Or do you mean teh form
|of the language taht linguists call Old Irish, i.e. Irish as written and
|spoken before the Norman invasion in the 12th century?
If we understand Gallic to be the language encountered by Caesar before
he invaded the British Isles, Old Gaelic would have to be 400 hundred or
500 years later, presumably after the Roman empire fell. There are
surely identifiable sound ****fts that separate Old Gaelic of 500 AD
and Old Irish of 1100 AD, so my guess is that Larry must mean the
language spoken in Ireland before the time of the Reformation.
For those of us who already know Classical Latin, where can we find
a textbook that eases us into the *Gallic language family (where the
asterisk implies it is more or less unattested), and then into Old
Gaelic, before moving onto a mediaeval language like Old Irish?
|
