New books: SCottish Gaelic

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Scottish Gaelic

WILLIAM LAMB
University of Edinburgh
and Colaisde Bheinn na Faoghla

Scottish Gaelic (ScG), along with Irish and Manx, is a member of the Goidelic
branch of the Celtic family of Indo-European languages.  At its peak of
influence around 1000AD, it was undoubtedly the national language of Scotland,
but ever since, its fate has been one of gradual
decline.  Today, the Gaidhealtachd or Gaelic-speaking region is confined to the
islands off the west coast of the country, aside from small pockets dotted
throughout the northern and western Highlands. Although now spoken by only
slightly more than 1% (65,978) of the country's population, it has had a rich
influence on Scotland's history, toponymy, art, literature and national
folklore.
Scottish Gaelic has received much prior linguistic attention for its complex
phonology (one dialect distinguishing at least 5 different lateral
approximates), its system of consonant mutations, and its rich dialectal
variation.  However, relatively little has been published on its syntax.  It is
a dependent-marking, nominative-accusative VSO language .  The verbal system
tends to be agglutinating while the nominal system is somewhat fusional.
Pronominal forms are especially notable in this regard, with a large
proliferation of 'prepositional-pronouns' evincing different forms according to
person, number, and gender.  There are two genders (M&F), three numbers (Sing.,
Pl., and dual) and four cases extant in the language.  Stem modification and
suppletion are common morphological processes. Distinctions of mood, aspect, and
voice tend to be made periphrastically, employing a combination of verbal
particles, auxiliaries and 'verbal-nouns' that can function differently
depending upon their syntactic status.
Finally, the grammar ends with sections on discourse phenomena, interjections
and exclamations, the influence of English, and a full oral folktale with
interlinear translation.
        This new grammar is the most up-to-date one available on the language.
It includes many topics that have never, or only rarely, been dealt with in the
available literature, for example information structure, complex clause
formation, and descriptions of various types of discourse-related constructions.
 It has been informed by an ongoing corpus-based study of register variation in
the language, highlighting some of the initial differences that have been found
in this data set.  It is fully-referenced throughout for further information on
Gaelic grammar and sociolinguistics.  Useful for the language learner, it also
includes a glossary of the Gaelic words in the text and a statistically-derived
list of the 100 most frequent words in the language with definitions.

ISBN 3 89586 408 0.
Languages of the World/Materials 401.
Ca. 100pp. USD 40 / DM 64 / # 22.00. Sept. 2001.


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