LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.11.17 (05) [E]

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From: Críostóir Ó Ciardha <paada_please at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.11.17 (03) [E]


Dan Prohaska wrote:
"I've got an article on "The Dialects of Forth and Bargy - a lost Middle
English dialect" [...] I'll be in Vienna weekend after next - so I can check
for you then if you're still interested."

Regardless of Tom's response, I would be fascinated by any article - or
indeed anything - on either Yola or Fingalian, or both, from anyone.

Dan also wrote:
"ME /a:/ does not appear to have been raised and is spelt <aa>"

I doubt this. I mentioned Y. _caake_ 'cake' which does demonstrate the <aa>
spelling, but which also uses a prosthetic terminal <e> indicating, as in
general Englishes, internal vowel shift to [e:]. Due to the samples being
taken down by someone not acquainted with the International Phonetic
Alphabet, we can only guess at what sounds he actually heard. Given that
Yola - I am irritated that I cannot speak for Fingalian too - exhibits so
many characteristics of Westcountry English (particularly similarities
associated with Somerset speech), I think it best to use such varieties as
the phonemic template when we investigate what sound systems Yola may have
had. Certainly a research project proposing the true phonemics of Yola would
be extraordinarily worthwhile.

When I imagine what life was like for Yola speakers, I think of the Gower in
Wales, where an English-speaking colony maintained itself surrounded on
three sides by Celtic-speaking areas and on the other by the sea. I felt a
strong sense reading Ó Muirithe's samples that the people of Forth and
Bargy - probably less so for Fingal, which I will come to later - felt
utterly isolated, and were obsessed with sustaining their 'status aparte'
from the native Irish. This mentality was strong among English colonies in
Ireland during the Middle Ages and well into Tudor times, where a fear of
ethnic "degeneracy" prevailed amongst the settlers and their descendants - a
peril that only subsided with the ethnic reconfiguration of Ireland along
religious lines during the Reformation. Undoubtedly, the evidence for loans
from Irish in Yola is surprisingly small considering that the language was
set in an Irish-speaking area for its entire existence. (I submit tha t
_caules_ for _horses_ was borrowed because horses were recurrent trade items
among the native Irish and the Yola speakers, and that _caul / capall_
referred to a certain sort of horse much traded.)

I doubt Fingal was such an anxious, inward-looking place. It had been a
Norse heartland (_Fine Ghall_ means 'tribe of the foreigners', with the
foreigners here presumably referring to the Vikings), and the link between
the loss of Norse as common speech - if it ever was commonplace in the
area - and the uptake of Old / Middle English > Fingalian is unclear. I am
more inclined to reckon Fingalian developed out of a relatively isolated
pocket of Old / Middle English settlers in what was then the countryside of
the Pale, far enough from the ports to England and Gaelic Ireland to remain
linguistically conservative. By Georgian times Fingal was urban or
urbanising, and the district's unique language must have sunk to the level
of an in-group language among born-and-bred Fingalians. By the nineteenth
century it had ceased to be even that, and merged with the Hiberno-English
variant of the area, in much the same way (I presume) that Norn became
infiltrated by Scots to develop, over generations, into modern Shetlandic.

Go raibh maith agaibh,

Criostóir.

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