Is Gàidhlig Exceptional?

We had a conversation in a café in Dail Bheithe (Dalbeattie) yesterday which rather surprised us. We got into a conversation with someone at the next table who was learning Welsh. She was clearly thoroughly Scottish, so this was an interesting choice, although one also made by another acquaintance living here. It then turned out that a family at another table were actually Welsh and fluent in the language, and all of us ended up discussing various things about the surviving Celtic languages, particularly Gàidhlig and Welsh. One of the things they said about Welsh is that it’s “the hardest language”. This reminded me of how Japanese speakers are fond of saying that their language is hard and that the learner’s polite response to this is said to be to acknowledge it and say one is working hard on learning it. People seem to be proud of the idea that their native language, or one they associate with their heritage, is in some way difficult or special.

My knowledge of Welsh is very limited, more so than my knowledge of Gàidhlig, substantially because it isn’t really part of my heritage. There’s an argument that Welsh is the heritage of most White people with English ancestry because in a sense Welsh used to be the main language spoken in what would become England and being from Kent, there are plenty of “Welsh” placenames in the area such as Dover and Wye. However, one reason for me not even trying very much with Welsh is that when I read the chapter on it in ‘Language Made Plain’, Anthony Burgess pointed out that the initial consonants often changed according to their setting and grammatical context, and I found that so off-putting that I didn’t pursue it any further. In fact it’s quite common for languages to do this, particularly the surviving Celtic languages, which as far as I know all do it. From a practical perspective it makes it difficult to look words up in the dictionary when one hears them spoken.

Regarding Welsh in particular, English speakers in England and parts of Wales are often quite hostile to it, making the following comments:

• It hasn’t got any vowels. This is obviously nonsense and refers to the spelling using letters used for consonants in English, W and Y, being used for vowels in Welsh.
• It involves a lot of phlegm and spitting. I’m guessing this is about the voiceless consonants which are unusual in modern English, namely CH, LL and RH.
• It’s spelt impenetrably. This is deeply unfair. Welsh spelling is actually quite close to Old English spelling and is very close to being phonetic compared to English nowadays. One would be hard-pressed to find another Western European language with better spelling. Spanish, Basque and German are about on the same level. English, French, Faroese and the continental Scandinavian languages are decidedly not.

Earlier that day, we’d been wandering about what might be called the machair, although I’m not sure it counts as true machair as we live in the southwest, and it reminded me of the concept of the ionad as it was one of several examples of a border between two things being considered as a place in itself. Whether or not it was actually machair, it was definitely that, and I’ll come back to that. There were also what initially appeared to be large, smooth pebbles stranded along the shoreline among the plants, and we quickly realised they were jellyfish, Aurelia in fact, which gave me to wonder if they were osmotic conformers who couldn’t cope with the low salinity of the water. Coincidentally, the Welsh people in the café brought up the Welsh way of referring to jellyfish, which opened up a can of tentacles, because one nickname used appears to be “pysgod wibli-wobli”, which incidentally illustrates how very phonetic their spelling is. I’m not entirely convinced this is true because of the “popty ping” thing, which they also mentioned, but apparently that too is a nickname and not just a joke to be played upon the Sassenach (I’m vaguely aware of a Welsh word “Saesneg” but I’ve probably got it wrong so you’re stuck with the Gàidhlig there). The term for microwave oven is probably not problematic in Welsh, but it turns out one term for jellyfish definitely does need a euphemism because it’s “cont y môr”, which translates literally as “C-word of the sea”. Makes me think of vagina dentata, which in turn I usually associate with sea urchins myself.

Becoming curious about the Gàidhlig for jellyfish, I find the word “sgoldrach” and a further term “muir-tèachd” – “sea gel” – and “sgeith-ròin”, which seems to mean “puke hair”, and that does make sense to some degree, and even edges into offensive territory, which I’m guessing “cont y môr” is supposed to be as well. The Welsh term seems to have a double connotation in that it refers to the animal’s shape and probably also to its threatening character to humans, although that presumes that words for genitals are considered pejorative in Welsh, since apparently they aren’t in Gàidhlig, so I’m told.

All of that, then, has led to highly fruitful cogitation over the use of these words in Celtic languages, and their unfamiliarity to a Sassenach is very stimulating in this respect. However, I’m not quite finished with Welsh yet. One of the remarkable things about Welsh is that the oldest written records in the language are not from Wales but apparently from around here, what became southwest Scotland. They comprise poems attributed to Taliesin and Aneirin. Wikipedia provides the following picture of a page from the ninth century CE book, Llyfr Aneirin:

Impressed upon me as a non-speaker of Welsh, this looks very Welsh indeed to me, which I find rather surprising. I’d assumed that the Brittonic language spoken along much of the western part of Great Britain varied more than that, but to my eye this just looks like Welsh, even in its spelling, which I mention because I’ve seen archaic spellings of Welsh using the likes of LH instead of LL. However, maybe it isn’t Welsh. Cornish and Breton aren’t Welsh and my understanding was that Cumbric was the Brittonic language spoken here immediately before Gàidhlig arrived from Ireland and Man. Whatever the language was, it survives in the well-known counting rhymes used by shepherds, which resemble Welsh quite closely.

Before I leave the topic of Welsh for now, I want to point out that neither of the two people I know living locally who are learning it were aware that it used to be spoken here. They just decided to learn it anyway, and I wonder if that means there’s more to it than it seems. Is there something about this region which hints that it used to be Welsh-speaking? It’s hard not to be doubtful about that idea as it sounds supernatural. It is genuinely the case, though, that the placenames around here are sometimes Welsh, a notable example being Cummertrees, whose first two syllables may in fact have originally been something like “Cymru”. There also used to be a Welsh-speaking kingdom here called Rheged, which as far as I understand it stretched from Ayrshire to Ynys Môn (I’m probably wrong about that). Awareness of its existence made me feel slightly better when we went to Carlisle recently, which incidentally is Caerliwelydd in Welsh. Nonetheless, this is all ancient, well mediaeval, history.

Turning to Goidelic, i.e. Q-Celtic for the purposes of modern times, languages and their possible exceptionalism, there’s a second issue. Apparently some Goidelic speakers regard their speech as part of a continuum of the same language which Sassenachs perceive as separate. I’ve seen, and unfortunately forgotten, evidence that the Gàidhlig spoken in Galloway was close to Manx, which wouldn’t be surprising, but as few traces remain the version we’re learning is that of the Gaidhealtacht (sp?), insofar as that’s unified. I’ve also heard that Enya’s Irish is closer to Gàidhlig than more southerly Irish speakers’ because she’s from Donegal in Ulster. It actually seems like a pity to me that we’re not learning a reconstructed Galwegian Gàidhlig, as that would to some extent restore the continuum, but presumably resources and the reasons people learn it preclude this. So when I ask whether it’s exceptional, what do I mean by that? Am I talking about the extinct Galwegian Gàidhlig, the almost extinct but very similar Manx, Gàidhlig as spoken in the Gàidhealtachd (which I can’t spell, apparently) or the entire gamut of living and recently extinct Goidelic languages?

I suppose I mean three things, as applied to the style of speech I’m learning: vocabulary, phonetics and grammar. One of the issues with living Celtic languages appears to be an historical academic bias towards classical European languages, mainly Latin and Ancient Greek, and later to what’s been called “Standard Average European”, or SAE. This was apparently originally Benjamin Whorf’s idea, and it involves the hypothesis that European languages have tended to become more like each other due to being in constant close physical proximity, leading to common features in syntax, grammar, vocabulary and usage. Two examples of how this can perhaps surprisingly manifest itself are found in many terms in Tok Pisin, an English-based creole in New Guinea, which uses “gras bilong hed” to refer to “hair”, when this way of thinking of hair would never occur to most Europeans – “head grass”, and in dvandva compounds, where two words are combined with equal force and type of reference such as “mother-father” meaning “parents” rather than something like “maternal grandfather” as occurs in Swedish. We don’t even know we’re doing it. This leads us to become less aware of other possibilities or features in languages which are unlike these, which is basically a form of ethnocentrism. Another aspect of this, from Swedish, is /ɧ/, a sound almost unique to that language and with its own phonetic symbol, but at the same time the click sounds of Khoisan languages were for a long time analysed into separate letters when they were actually single sounds rightly represented by single, but different, letters.

And the situation with Celtic languages as spoken today is that they’re on the fringe of Europe, not in a pejorative way but in terms of being less influenced by other European languages and less likely to be pulled towards them. To a limited extent this is also seen with Icelandic, which along with Faroese is an outlier with respect to other Nordic languages in spite of being the one which has changed least in the last millennium or more. In both cases, social forces have failed to pull these languages into the general homogeneity. It’s also alleged that the standard system for representing speech sounds, the IPA or International Phonetic Alphabet, is actually not very adequate for transcribing Goidelic languages. Other stuff is going on with their pronunciation which is hard to set down on paper because the notation is missing. This is clearly manifested in the apparently perverse spelling, but there is a reason why it’s like this. My personal opinion is that it should be written using Cyrillic script, the alphabet used for Russian and various other languages, but this is obviously never going to happen. It is, though, notable that the Slavic languages too, particularly Russian, are on the margins of Europe and therefore less driven towards SAE.

Thus in this case it does actually seem to make sense that Gàidhlig, or whatever it is I’m learning, is an exceptional language and that the thoughts and experiences of the Gaels are less forced into a SAE filter. Goidelic languages are from “outside the empire” and the fact that they were the languages of barbarians is a potential point in their favour. There is also a paradoxical sense in which these ultimately Western European languages, Irish, Gàidhlig, Manx, Faroese and Icelandic, are among the least Standard Average European languages in Europe! The well-known Balkan Sprachbund in southeastern Europe also tends to differ radically from more centrally located languages, perhaps for similar reasons.

I can’t say I have sufficient grasp of the grammar to make sweeping and accurate statements about it, but one thing which is notable is that the older terminology used to describe it is often inappropriate. The words “infinitive”, “dative”, “subjunctive” and “aspiration” are all used to describe features of the grammar and in the last case also phonetics which really don’t apply to the language at all. They may for all I know represent some kind of historical feature in a much earlier stage of the Celtic languages, but they really don’t make sense any more and it’s probably better not to use them. As I’ve said though, my understanding of the grammar is quite poor.

Vocabulary is slightly better. I’ve already written about “ionad”, the word for place or centre (in the sense, for instance, of “leisure centre”), and due to that word being used in maths, in itself it’s enough to revolutionise my perception of reality. It also very much anchors the word in my mind: I’m always going to notice when someone says “ionad” from now on. It’s a very inefficient way to learn a language of course, but the words get properly learnt this way. This also means you have to be careful to get it at least roughly right, in order not to have to make a greater effort to unlearn them otherwise. But many words can be treated as meditations from which one attempts to distil the water of life. That doesn’t make Gàidhlig exceptional, except in the usual sense that every language is exceptional, but adopting that attitude towards it may help one get the most out of it.

Somewhere else on the internet, some guy running a Gàidhlig group in Baltimore Maryland has singled out a number of words for the learner’s consideration. I can’t help thinking that this is rather precious in a distinctly American way which attempts to romanticise the language inappropriately, but it’s still interesting. His post can be found here on WordPress. Nine words are involved: cèilidh, slàn, dùthchas, cliù, aiteal, smùirnean, crith, lannair and deò.

“Cèilidh” was familiar to me from the late 1970s CE, when my English teacher and year head was in a band called the Oyster Cèilidh Band, now just known as the Oysterband and closely connected to Fiddler’s Dram and their one-hit wonder ‘Day Trip To Bangor’. I had no idea it was Gàidhlig at the time, and it has of course been extensively used in English since. It actually came to me after my first attempt to learn the language was over. The word is linked to “visit”, although I think this has now been replaced by another word. The precise image it brings up in my mind is the very English but also universal experience of a social gathering in a village square in Chilham, Kent, with gaily attired folk dancing round a maypole, getting drunk, playing instruments and singing songs. It’s actually quite “hey nonny-nonny” for me, and although Morris dancing is also a Scottish tradition – Dannsa na clag as it’s known – the strong association I make with that is there too for me. I’m a Sassenach, what do you expect? Nonetheless, I think it makes perfect sense to transport the spirit of such an occasion to Scotland and make the appropriate associations. Cèile also means “partner” or “spouse”, so although that may be coincidence, the idea of “partnering”, perhaps in a dance or accompanying each other in music is suggested to me here. It also implies belonging.

“Slàn” is the root of slàinte or “health”, and this actually feels like a fairly prosaic and boring word. It isn’t that it doesn’t have interesting associations, this time with wholeness, unbrokenness and the wholesome, but that kind of association exists between words linked to health and completeness in all sorts of languages, so it’s interesting and it helps one remember it, but it doesn’t seem special to me.

“Dùthchas” provides more food for thought in this respect. It has various reasons such as “place of origin”, “homeland”, “heritage”, “heredity” and also refers to a legal form of inherited land tenure. Hence the connotation of “place” exists with this word in a similar way to the connection between that concept and “ionad”. I find this a little worrying because I can see it lending itself to fascistic and negatively nationalistic urges, but I also hope that’s not so big a problem here and there are positive ways of being patriotic, such as admiring tolerance and care for the vulnerable if those are strong traditions in a place. My own dùthchas is of course partly Scottish, as is that of the whole diaspora. I wouldn’t presume to be as Scottish as an actual Scot but this place is keen on adopting others as their own and I’m hoping to be able to aspire fairly to that. In legal terms, links have been made between the right of indigenous peoples to their land in countries with colonial history such as Australia and the US and rights to clan lands here. It’s also been described as expressing the idea that people belong to places rather than places to people.

“Cliù” means “reputation” and “renown”, also “praise”, and therefore also “character”. It expresses the idea that one is proud of being useful to a community. It’s apparently summed up in Iain Crichton’s essay on being a Gael, ‘Real People In A Real Place’. It seems to be about being perceived as more than a “character”, and escaping from the, I don’t know, mysticisation and mistification of Na h-Eileanan an Iar as a kind of misty and mysterious place at the end of the Earth, and the romanticisation of the Gael. It’s a little like the essay ‘For All Those Who Were Indian In A Former Life‘ in that it makes the outsider question how they approach the cultures of others. I fervently want to be an asset to this community, not in a proud way but just to have a good idea, and the motivation, to know how I can be the most value to the people who live here. I suppose that’s cliù.

Next comes a bit of a departure from the communal and social in the form of “aiteal”, which I can’t help noting is a lot easier to type than most of the other words here. This reveals the absence of a proper Gàidhlig keyboard layout for computers in general. On this Chromebook I have a dozen keyboard layout options, none of which are suitable for the language. Leaving all that aside though, “aiteal” can be translated as “glimpse”, “sprinkle”, “slight breeze”, “ray of sunshine” and “smidgeon”. Maybe a “breath”. It’s a hint of things to come or the hidden, a bit like the idea of an iceberg being mainly hidden below the surface.

“Smùirnean” also refers to a small thing, like an atom or a mote of dust, and it’s at this point that I feel the guy in Baltimore has kind of gone off on one. I think it’s okay to engage in this kind of thing to fix the concepts in one’s mind, but this is also an everyday, working language spoken by real people who share in the universals which are also part of us. Anyway, “smùirnean” has a more figurative meaning of an initial inkling about something, the start of a realisation. But then he goes on about “the interconnected nature of life” and I start to be reminded of ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and ‘Jonathan Livingstone Seagull’, but maybe it’s I who am failing to appreciate the authenticity of this take.

He does the same thing again with “crith”: tremble, be in a tremor, the ague, shaking, quaking, shivering. This to him conveys the transient nature of an apparently solid and reliable order of things, the way an earth tremor reveals that this apparently sturdy, steady and monumental land we all live on is ultimately anything but, and that we’re almost here on suffrance, or rather that the world is indifferent to us. It can also refer to the shimmering of a mirage, something I perhaps ignorantly assumed is not a common experience in the Gaidhealtachd, although there are certainly mirages here. Maybe the “Fata Morgana” is a frequent experience here. This is the appearance of a distorted, distant object beyond the horizon, often seen above ice, and it does in fact refer to Morgan Le Fay of the tales of King Arthur, although we’re not in the Brittonic realm here, or at least not any more. It could refer to a deceptive thin layer of moss floating on a bog which makes the ground appear more solid than it really is, or possibly the misleading nature of a heath with hidden crevices into which one’s foot might slip and be trapped, as is apparently the case in Clan McIntyre country, and I’m sure many other places. The world is in fact less stable and substantial than we tend to think of it, although it can be hard to live confidently without assuming that. This is true both in terms of the illusion of security many people have and more literally so in the fact that matter is almost entirely empty space, as is the Universe beyond this planet.

Next there’s “lannair”: “radiance”, “gleam”, the glitter of fish scales or swords. Again I feel the author, whose name is Richard Gwynallen incidentally, is somewhat romanticising things in referring to the glint of swords. It can refer to the inner gleam of light that appears in someone’s eyes which presages something to come, once again. There’s a definite theme in many of these words and it’s hard to tell whether this says more about our Richard or more about the language.

His last word is “deò”: breath, vital spark, ghost, spark of fire or ray of light, once again. He speaks of it as the moment where the water of a river slips into the sea and we humans become part of a greater whole.

I don’t know what to make of all this. It’s a personal view and it seems rather fanciful and poetic. Then again, maybe the language is primarily poetic. I’ve felt for a while that it’s almost meant to be sung rather than spoken, so maybe he has a point with all this. Comparing German, because of reading Heidegger and other philosophers in German, pretty much prosaic, ordinary things expressed in that language come across to me as somewhat philosophical in nature and in fact Heidegger was himself quite attached to the idea that the common folk’s use of terms made them more significant, therefore preferring terms like “Geworfenheit” and “zuhanden” to rather more classically-based language. It’s not advisable to go too far with this because he was a Nazi, something I’d like to come to terms with. Even so, the poetry and song composed in Gàidhlig could be a demonstration of how the language also tends to go in ordinary conversation, so maybe Richard Gwynallen is right.

In the end, then, maybe Gàidhlig and her sisters really are exceptional, substantially because they’ve not been squashed down into the homogeneity of SAE. Maybe Gàidhlig is the “Anti-Esperanto”, not only due to its small number of native speakers but also because there’s no rule to force it to follow. It seems quirky to the outsider, to the Sassenach and no doubt even to many Scots, but it has a freedom and spontaneity, the foam, froth and white water of a mountain burn or waves breaking on the white sand of a Hebridean beach, rather than the flatness and standardisation of the speech of central Europe. Maybe this is what we can get from it. And we need to let it flow over us and our ears, trying to swim in its relentless flood, and one day we will succeed.