[Ads-l] "Say Uncle" - slight antedating

[Wilson Gray]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 4:26 PM, Peter Reitan <pjreitan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> It's not clear whether anacol (or anacal) is related to "Uncle," but
> several texts, dictionaries, and an Irish grammar book between 1835 and
> 1915 spell it anacol.
>
>
> This comment from A Concise Old Irish Grammar and Reader, Julius Pokorny,
> Dublin, Hodges, Figgis and Co., 1914 (HathiTrust) may explain the confusion:
>
>
> "Enclitic vowels in open or closed syllables appear . . . between o
> coloured and neutral consonants or vice versa regularly as o, but sometimes
> as a.  e.g. feronn or ferann 'land' (fr. verono-), anacol 'protection.'"
>

Before the spelling of Irish was standardized, but WTF? Different strokes
for different folks. I prefer to follow my teacher, Seán Ó Coileáin, a
member of the Royal Irish Academy, who was, back in the '80's, professor of
Irish Studies and head of the Department of Celtic Studies at Harvard.

FWIW, he's a native-speaker of the non-standard, but preferred, Munster
dialect.

-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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