From the middle of the eighteenth century, as the penal laws were relaxed, and a greater social and economic mobility became possible for the native Irish, the more prosperous members of the Irish-speaking community began to adopt an Anglicized way of life and to take up English.
This increased during and after the Great Famine — The language was on the point of extinction. At the start of the eighteenth century scholars started to become interested in the language and in its literature. Many people understood that Spoken Irish was declining. This terminology was again used in the constitutions of and The Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, which was established in , managed to gain recognition for Irish at every level of the education system from primary school level to university.
Within a couple of years they managed to create a mass movement of support for the Irish language. A start was made to bringing the grammar of the written language into line with the spoken modern language. A result of these efforts was the Official Standard which the Government of Ireland published in Also its initial stage, called Archaic Irish and dated to the 6th and 7th century AD, is known only indirectly.
In fact almost the only Old Irish documents that were written down at the time they were composed, and thus reached us in their original form, are Irish glosses to Latin religious or grammatical texts that were copied and used by Irish monks in Continental European monasteries: such are e. Poetry, mainly allitterative in the oldest period, is partly found scattered in such manuscripts, partly inserted in larger prose texts which it integrates, or of which it might even have constituted the earliest core.
Most of the earlier Irish tales are in fact prosimetra -- mixtures of prose and verse. Their titles usually hint at the literary genre represented: e. An important group of stories is centered on the dynasty of the Ulaid in northeastern Ireland, supposed to have been ruled by a king Conchobar residing in the palace of Emain Macha identified with the archaeological site of Navan Fort near Armagh : Cu Chulainn is the main hero, and this group is usually referred to as the Ulster Cycle.
Other tales are centered on supernatural beings with magical powers that have been traced back to old Celtic deities; these fall into what is called the mythological group or Cycle. Sometimes an historical person, typically a king, is made the hero of a tale that is mostly pure legend; these stories comprise the historical group, although the boundary between history and legend cannot be fixed.
A fourth and comparatively later group of stories is centered on the mythical hero Finn mac Cumhaill and his followers, a fraternity of free-lancing warriors whose activities cut across tribal boundaries.
Yet other tales are adaptations of Classical texts to the insular vernacular world, and among these we find an Irish Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Achilleid, Pharsalia, Thebaid, a story of the Minotaur, of Hercules, and of the conquest of Troy.
Unlike previous attempts at conquest in Ireland, this one proved to be much more systematic and by Ireland was politically unified with Britain. Increasingly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Irish became more peripheral to the centers of economic and political power. Although it remained the first language of most of the population of Ireland, bilingualism was greatly on the increase.
In the nineteenth century, the cause of the language was not helped by famine and emigration and by the late in the century Ireland had become largely English-speaking, especially in urban areas. Gaelic itself came from a language spoken by people called the Gaels, who came from North Eastern Ulster a northern province in Ireland down to the islands of Caledonia and the northwestern coastlands of Ireland in the fifth century.
In BC, they were strong enough defeat Rome with its then-massive empire in full pomp. They travelled through Europe and left their mark on areas now known as France, England, Ireland and Scotland before they were eventually crushed by the Roman Empire. Relatively new archaeological evidence — a calendar in early Gaulic — suggests that the Gaels arrived in England as early as BC and BC as historians previously thought.
This suggests that the Celtic languages of which Gaelic is one has far deeper roots than previously thought. Though both came from the same source, Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are very distinct from each other. Each nation has its own dialect and vocabulary.
0コメント