- In the present instance, the principal facts concerning the use of is have been extensively treated by Tomás O Máille in his Contributions to the History of the Verbs of Existence in Irish (Dundalk, 1911). However, when this scholar turns to Gaelic (pp. 55–6), taking his examples from traditional songs, he fails actually to show any of the facts of real interest.
- The Book of the Dean is a collection of poems, presumably all written in Irish rather than in Gaelic, copied in semi-phonetic script about 1515; the particularly visible scribal traits are extensive, and concern a great deal more than mere phonetics, unless it can be maintained that sentence- phonetics, and the whole system of prefixes and suffixes, are merely phonetic traits. I shall have occasion to refer to several details from the edition by T. M'Lauchlan (Edinburgh, 1862); E. Quiggin edited the phonetic text of a number of further poems (Cambridge, 1937).
- The 1767 edition (New Testament) may well be based in part on the Irish New Testament (my edition of the latter is by Bagster, London, 1828). It has been reprinted in essentially the same form, less a few “corrections,” for example, standardization of ciod (which is non- colloquial) for ciod and creud. I quote here from the Scottish original of 1767 and from the Irish of 1828.
- None of the grammars of Scottish Gaelic which I have used (e. g., MacLaren, MacBain, Nicolson) has any merits, either pedagogical, formal, orfor reference. I have not seen G. Calder's grammar. [It is of small value in the present connection. L.H.G.]
- The easy-going nature of Gaelic hardly permits one to distinguish between “good” and “bad” grammar; no system of schooling has attempted to create a class of constructions comparable to “I ain't got none”; on the other hand, no schooling has attempted to keep alive anything sounding like “lest those be they”. I may suggest that my speaker K considered many usages of my speaker P as “pompous,” and that L uses certain constructions which could reasonably be avoided with no loss, which the reader can locate for himself in examples 2 (ged a), 17 (t-), 22 (tha), etc.; these and many other similar vagaries are common to Manx (see my Manx-Gaelic Sentence Structure, Berkeley, 1945).
- In my study on the interrogative system in Gaelic (note 15), I took notes, from a speaker (R) from North Uist, whose phonetics and syntax are as different from those of a (also from North Uist) as if they were of a distinct dialect.
- My speaker P knew no English until the age of fourteen, when she left North Uist; she spent twenty years in a Gaelic-speaking community in Canada, and has been here for another twenty. She reads and writes fairly well, but knows no Gaelic by heart, except a few traditional songs.
- My speaker Lieft Kinnloch Bervie (Sutherlandshire) about twenty years ago; he is well educated, but neither reads nor writes Gaelic well.
- My speaker K left Nova Scotia five years ago, reads and writes quite well, knows nothing but songs by heart. She claims to have adopted Nova Scotian pronunciation in place of that of her parents, who spoke a Scottish dialect recognized as such.
- C. Borgstrø;m gives the paradigms, and a few notes on the use of is, in “The Dialect of Barra,” NTS 8 (1934), 195 sqq., and in “The Dialect of the Outer Hebrides,” ibid., supp. 1 (1940), pp. 115 sqq.
- Borgstrøm undoubtedly chose what he considered to be the commonest pronunciation of a given word; in so doing, he in many cases lost commonly recognized alternate pronunciations, along with all detail pertinent to sentence-phonetics. N. Holmer, in his “Studies on Argyllshire Gaelic,” Skrifter utgivna av K. Humanistiska Vétenskaps-Samfundet i Uppsala, 31 (1938). 3–231, phonemicized his results, losing even more, so much that whatever he may have had to say on the use of is is of no further value, just as most of what he reported on interrogative constructions is of small interest.
- Borgstrøm often defines a sound, to which he has assigned a specific and arbitrary phonetic symbol, as “more or less voiceless” or “covers an area between” (see Outer Hebrides, pp. 27, 72, etc.).
- Borgstrø;m claims (Outer Hebrides, p. 9) to have used International Phonetic Symbols “in the form in which [they] were adopted by E. C. Quiggin, A. Sommerfelt, and others”; this is far from the simple fact, for each of these men added any number of privately conceived symbols to fill in, in complicated fashion, the extra sounds needed. I point thia out lest it be said that my symbols depart from any standard system.
- Borgstrøm claims (Outer Hebrides, p. 14) that “unaccented vowels can only be simple and short.” Neither proposition is at all true; nor is the correlation of quantity of any significance outside pronouncing-dictionary lists of words.
- Sentence-phonetics, aside from mutation and other results visible in writing, have been all but completely ignored. Borgstrø;m (Barra, pp. 182–3) shows the use of [ä] before dhà (dhómh, etc.) and before the dative of definite nouns. In my article “The Interrogative System in Modera Scottish Gaelic,” UCPL (1945). 215 sqq., I showed that the pronoun e cannot stand before air or aig in oblique pronominal interrogation (hence one has co i air am bheil; or one uses another preposition for the same meaning: co e mu'm bheil; or one abandons the masculine pronoun: co air a tha); phonetics and syntax are surely related in this example. 'S è used before esan (exx. 20–1) requires either a glottal stop or a shift of accent, but before nouns it calls for no special treatment (ex. 22); tha before ann requires either apostrophization or shift of accent (ex. 26), but before nouns it calls for no special treatment, nor does it before innte. Details of this nature can hardly be set aside as immaterial.
- Appearance of [f] for an in speakers L and K is, to my knowledge, as yet not noted. L replaces the interrogative of all the forms of is by [f], but all other interrogative particles remain as an [än]; K uses [f] as the interrogative particle of the simple form is only, retaining an in the extended forms; use of [f] is, therefore, either general for all constructions using is, or limited to the category of emphatic inversion of non-substantival and non-adverbial constructions. Nasalization in [äng'] is dialectal (compare [änk'l and [äñk']); eclipse is found only in L and only by [m] ([mäX'l, [gäm'l, and in am bheil [m'ε]]).
- I find one occurence of [gäb'rl before a noun, suggesting the problem of note 16.
- An fheudar dhà falbh? “must he go?” is the normal construction (P: äN'etEr Jd f'alavl), but my speaker P once used am feudair e falbh? ([äv'εdärr ε f'alavl), a real verb, and perhaps a mere slip. This idea is more often given as am bheil aige ri falbh?
- 'S è appears before a pronoun in an example from the Book of the Dean (ed. M'Lauchlan, p. 21): is e esan a rinn (hence the present usage by 1515).
- Borgstrøm (Barra, p. 203) gives the example 'n è bàtaichean beaga th'annta? showing predication of a common noun. My four speakers do not know what this means, so completely strange is its form. It does not necessarily mean that my speakers are wrong or that Borgström is: Borgstrøm's language is, in large part, that of formal story-telling, in which, for example, the system of impersonal verb-endings takes an active part; these endings are likewise completely unknown to all my speakers, except rugadh mi “I was born”. Colloquial Gaelic, obviously, knows a considerable body of usages which must be specially labeled as traditional, but which are not actually used “in ordinary speech.
- Sia Sgialachdan, ed. J. L. Campbell (Edinburgh, 1939), p. 38. According to I. Moffatt-Pender (Is Ann [Glasgow, 19301, p. 6), this construction is used “when verbal emphasis is desired,” as, for example, is ann a tha a' bheinn àrd “the hill is really high.” In Borgstrø;m (Outer Hebrides, p. 252, etc.), 'S ann plus a relative clause has about the force of “and BO”: 's ann a thubhairt e gu “and so he said that.” In the Book of the Dean (ed. M'Lauchlan, p. 9) one finds is ann meaning “it is in that that.”
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