Old Irish

[Larry Trask]

Rick Mc Callister writes:

>       I throw out some possibilities
>       Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was NOT the direct ancestor
>  of Gaelic? i.e that it held the same relationship to Gaeilge and Gaidhlig
>  that Classical Latin held to Romance?
>       Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was only a literary language?
>       Is it possible that WRITTEN Old Irish was the language of an elite
>  of Briton or Gaulish origin and did not represent the speech of the
>  majority?

Don't know.  But a philologist colleague did suggest to me once, years
ago, that literary Old Irish might have been to a significant extent an
artificial creation of the scribes, who delighted in introducing and
maintaining every possible complication, producing as a result something
which did not represent ordinary speech at any time in history.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk