GAYLICK, GAIDHLIG OR GAELIC? NON-GAELIC SPELLING-SYSTEMS OF THE GAELIC
WORLD
Donald E. Meek
It is a great pleasure
and a considerable honour for me to have been invited to give the Ned Maddrell
lecture here in Douglas in the Isle of Man.
Both the name and the voice of Ned Maddrell have been well known to me
since boyhood. I was brought up in the
Inner Hebridean island of Tiree, and for my community, as for many others,
Gaelic radio broadcasting was an essential part of life. It was through that medium that I became
familiar with Ned Maddrell. From time to
time Ned would be interviewed by Fred – Fred MacAulay, the Senior Gaelic
Producer of BBC Scotland. For a few
minutes I, and no doubt other Scottish Gaelic listeners, would be wrong-footed
by the dialect – but, as I imply, my ear soon tuned in, and I was able to
appreciate most of the interview. ‘Ned
and Fred’ had obviously gone through the Gaelic ‘dialect barrier’ with style
and aplomb, and were perfectly at ease with one another’s dialects. Of course, it was a phonological challenge
to become accustomed to ‘Gàidhlig Eilein Mhanainn’, as we called it, but it was
surmounted pretty easily – much more easily than the similar challenge with
Irish dialects. When I go to Ireland, it
takes me several days of extensive and intensive exposure to contemporary
spoken Irish to be reasonably comfortable, and also minimally communicative, in
Irish. Manx, by contrast, presented few
problems at the spoken level.
The problem with Manx
began at the written and printed level.
I remember well, in my mid-teens, buying teaching manuals of Manx, and
making several gallant attempts at writing the language. I would persevere for a while, and then
lapse in my efforts. In frustration, I
used to wonder why on earth the Manx had chosen such a strange spelling-system,
which was, to my mind at that stage, so totally out of step with the
orthography that I knew for Scottish Gaelic, and also for Irish. Later, in my studies at Glasgow University, I
became familiar with the rather disparaging views of T.F.O’Rahilly, and I
accepted broadly what I was taught, namely that the Manx were basically
unforgivable deviants, who had put
themselves outside the Pale of good Gaelic orthographic manners by choosing
such a rebarbative spelling-system, apparently based on English spelling
conventions of a certain period.
Obviously, I had a clear view of what a Gaelic spelling-system was, and,
as the Manx failed to conform to that system, they had somehow disenfranchised
themselves from Gaelic citizenship.
They were orthographic pariahs!
By the end of my time at
Glasgow University, however, I began to see things slightly differently. One of the reasons for this was that I was
becoming fascinated with the early sixteenth-century Gaelic manuscript, the
Book of the Dean of Lismore, which was written in a ‘non-Gaelic spelling
system’. It became, in due course, the subject of my research for my PhD,
awarded by the University of Glasgow in 1982, and examined (I am proud to say)
by the distinguished Manx scholar, Robert L. Thomson. I will say more about the Book of the Dean of
Lismore at a later stage of this lecture.
A more personal moment of
truth came when, in the course of some research on Gaelic proverbial lore in
1971, my late father presented me – unexpectedly – with some notebooks
containing a rich store of Tiree proverbs and proverbial sayings. The notebooks had been hidden away in an
outhouse, and it was only a ‘chance’ question (‘Has anyone gathered Tiree
proverbs?’) that unearthed the treasure.
These proverbs had been collected by great-uncle, Charles MacDonald, who
had been a shipwright, a fisherman and a merchant navy sailor in the course of
a long and active life. He had gathered
proverbs locally before 1920, and had employed my father, then (in the 1920s)
in his teens, as his scribe. What struck
me immediately was how curious the spelling-system was, and the number of
‘mistakes’ it contained, if measured by standard Scottish Gaelic conventions,
as taught in school. This was all the
more surprising, as my father was, for most of his life, a meticulous Gaelic
writer. He was a Baptist minister who
often wrote out his Gaelic sermons long-hand, before preaching them. His many notebooks and drafts survive, and
show that, in training for the ministry after 1930, he had also learned to
write Gaelic strictly according to accepted conventions. He had become a very precise practitioner of
normal Gaelic spelling, and a stickler for grammatical accuracy to boot. I found the ‘before and after’ scenarios
quite fascinating.
As I looked at my
father’s juvenile scribal efforts, it became clear that his early system was
one which certainly had an awareness of
‘proper’ Gaelic spelling, but which was ‘inaccurate’ in its
representation of the definite article, possessive pronouns and particularly
markers of phonological significance, such as preaspiration, palatalisation,
diphthongisation and eclipsis – the ‘inaccuracy’ reflecting the local dialect,
and thus accurate according to the ear. From time to time, the influence of
English spelling conventions was apparent.
I would classify this as ‘demotic’ spelling – one which reflected a
personalised approach, reaching out to convention, but compromising in various
phonological areas. A couple of examples
will be useful.
Is goarid [goirid]
meamhair an amadain (‘Short is
the memory of the fool’)
Is minig a thuairt
[thuit] an t-each ceathar casasnach (‘Often has the four-footed horse fallen’)
Is fearr a bhi mall na
bhi tuirich [tuilleadh] is clis (‘Better
to be slow than to be too precipitate’)
In the case of goarid and thuairt,
the young scribe is attempting to reproduce the strong palatalisation which is
a feature of the Gaelic dialect of Tiree.
The form thuairt is particularly
interesting, in that it shows that scribe has tried to mark strong
palatalisation of the final consonant group by thinking of the English word air,
and thus producing a hybrid spelling.
In the case of tuirich, the
scribe represents very fairly the local pronunciation of the standard Gaelic
form tuilleadh, which in Tiree is so strongly palatalised in its medial
and final consonants that these are transformed into other phonemes. In the case of casasnach, the spirant ‘s’ is so strong that it is projected
on to another, later consonant.
When I found this
remarkable home-produced document, it resonated with what I had begun to
perceive in the Book of the Dean of Lismore, and the manner in which the
scribes of that book had reproduced their own dialect as they recorded
classical Gaelic verse – recording it in a spelling-system based not on
mainstream Gaelic conventions, but on Middle and Early Modern Scots. More generally, however, I began to ‘join
the dots’, and it became at least a theory in my head that, since pretty well
1500, and probably long before, there had been a broadly ‘mainstream’ and
‘school-taught’ form of Gaelic spelling, and another, or others, which could be
partly linked to the mainstream, but which could deviate from it to various
degrees – some to quite astonishing degrees, to the extent of being totally
different and self-contained, and others more noticeably linked to the
mainstream, but diverging at points of dialectical significance.
This, then, became my
working theory. The Gaelic world, and
particularly Eastern Gaelic dialects, which included Scottish Gaelic and Manx,
had never been orthographically stable – or, to put things a little less
dramatically, they were not stable until a determining hand took hold of
spelling practice, and said ‘This is the way; walk ye in it’. There was a conventional core somewhere,
usually protected by, and known to, a scholarly elite, but outside that core
lay a great deal of variation. Sometimes
the ‘variation’ became the core of another system, and the conventional, elite-protected
form of spelling became ‘deviant’. This
is what, I think, happened in the case of Manx, and perhaps even what happened
in Gaelic Scotland. It depended to some
extent on whose hand was on the lever, and what power that hand had, relative
to politics, religion and other key matters, such as formal education. Over many years I have had no reason to
jettison this theory.
Let me now draw a couple of comparisons between Scottish
Gaelic and Manx, relative to who or what determines a ‘core’ spelling
system.
Top of the list comes the Christian religion. Instruction in the basic principles of
religious knowledge was a most important factor in determining what became the
accepted orthographic systems in both Man and Gaelic Scotland. In Scotland just before the Reformation,
there were clearly at least two distinct Gaelic spelling systems in
operation – that of the Dean of Lismore and his circle, and that of the
classically trained Gaelic scribes. In guaranteeing the ‘fixing’ of Gaelic
scribal conventions as the norm, we surely owe everything to John Carswell's
translation of Knox's Book of Common Order. Appearing as Foirm na nUrrnuidheadh in
1567, Carswell's translation employed the orthography of Classical Common
Gaelic, and it had the vital distinction of being the first printed book to be
published in Irish or Scottish Gaelic.
Carswell was evidently trained at a bardic school, and his book guaranteeed that, whatever happened in
manuscript or in ‘demotic’ scribal systems, the printed orthography of present
day Scottish Gaelic would be based ultimately on that of Classical Common
Gaelic. Had the scribes of the Book of
the Dean of Lismore beaten Carswell to the printing-press, we in Gaelic
Scotland might well have been writing our Gaelic in a manner not at all
dissimilar to your system in Man.
The power
of religious instruction in directing the orthographic development of a
language is paralleled, though not precisely, and in the opposite direction, in
the instance of Manx. Bishop Phillips' translation of the English Prayer Book
into Manx, completed c. 1610, adopted an orthography based on that of
English. Although this translation was
not, in fact, available in print until the nineteenth century, it evidently set
a trend, since the first Manx printed book, a bilingual version of Bishop
Wilson's Principles and Duties of Christianity, published in 1707, also
adopted an orthography based on English.
While the orthography employed in the translation of Wilson's Principles
differed from that of Phillips, and from that of subsequent Manx works, the
distinctive nature of Manx orthography was thereby confirmed. Religious instruction therefore ‘fixed’ the
spelling-systems of both Manx and Scottish Gaelic, but ‘fixed’ them in
different ways. What is absolutely
fascinating is that Gaelic Scotland was home to both of these ‘ways’ on the eve
of the Reformation, and that the ‘official’ balance might have moved one way or
the other. The Reformation settled what
was to be the ‘official’ orthographic system.
But what
happened at the ‘unofficial’ level? The
balance in Scottish Gaelic did continue to move ‘unofficially’, depending on
the scribe, and it did so right down to the early twentieth century, if not
later. Non-Gaelic spelling-systems have
appeared in Scottish Gaelic manuscripts long after the Book of the Dean of
Lismore. These include pre-eminently
the Fernaig Manuscript of the late seventeenth century, which has not yet been
edited or assessed as it ought to be.
Here the spelling-system is based on English. I am aware of an eighteenth-century specimen
of ‘demotic’ Scottish Gaelic spelling, and there may also be examples in the
nineteenth century.
A key
question which has to be faced at this point is, of course, ‘What is a Gaelic
spelling-system?’ The answer,
superficially, is easy. It is the system
hallowed by the practice and favour of the majority, and also by historical
ancestry as the system that has been in use since writing in Gaelic (of any
kind) began. What it plainly is not,
however, is the system that is sanctioned by ‘officialdom’, since this can
vary. Closer reflection on the evidence
may also lead us to the conclusion that there is no truly Gaelic
spelling-system. What we at the Scottish
and Irish ends of the continuum now recognise as ‘the Gaelic spelling-system’
derives from the Christian Latin tradition of these islands, honed and modified
by the bardic schools, and modified again as the vernacular language gained the
upper hand over the classical language and its literary conventions. Here again we encounter the ‘determining
hand’. There may be an accepted ‘Gaelic
system’, sanctioned by time and by authority, but that does not necessarily make
it ‘Gaelic’, one way or the other.
In relation to Manx, my
point is important. If we soften the
edges of what is, or is not, a ‘Gaelic spelling-system’, we may avoid the need
to place Manx within the ‘English league of nations’, so to speak, rather than
the ‘Gaelic league of nations’. Again,
if we recognise the variations, as well as the alternative systems of spelling,
which existed in Gaelic Scotland as late as the twentieth century, Manx may
become less of a ‘Cinderella’ and more of a natural Gael.
The case can be
strengthened still further by looking at parallel developments in the literary
as well as the linguistic histories of Scottish Gaelic and Manx, and most
notably the manner in which both forms of Gaelic have been deeply influenced by
the translation from English of Protestant religious texts. We may even consider a project which would
compare, in some detail, the orthographic system of the Book of the Dean of
Lismore and that of Manx.
It will soon become
apparent, I am sure, that both Man and Gaelic Scotland were responding, in
different but comparable ways, to the challenge of living alongside ‘bossy
linguistic neighbours’, namely English in the case of Man, and Scots in the
case of Gaelic. They were responding
to pressures, religious, political, social and literary.
Let me therefore turn to consider the Book of the Dean of
Lismore, and some of the arguments that I first advanced back in the
1980s. These summarise what I have said
in print elsewhere.
The
greatest difference between the Book of the Dean and most other manuscripts
containing Gaelic material lies in its orthography. The basis of the
orthography in the Book of the Dean has long been recognised to be that of
Middle Scots, the term usually applied to the stage in the development of Scots
- the vernacular language of the Scottish Lowlands - which had been attained by
c. 1400, and which persisted until c. 1560.
The scribes were evidently not ignorant of normal Gaelic orthography,
since characteristics of that orthography are fossilised in certain of their
spellings, and entire words occasionally appear in Gaelic form, where it would
have been possible for the scribes to produce alternative spellings more in
line with the basic patterns of their own method.
The degree
of scribal commitment to the Scots-based system is all the more striking when
one considers that the manuscript is probably the work of more than one
scribe, that it was compiled over a long
period, and that James MacGregor, whose name it bears, must have encountered
practitioners of "traditional" Gaelic orthography. The question of why the scribes utilised this
orthography must be asked, since it is integral to our understanding of the
manuscript.
Reasons
for employing the type of orthography found in the Book of the Dean are
suggested by a consideration of the linguistic situation in Scotland and the
relative status of the country's two main languages in the period in which the
manuscript was compiled. Gaelic was
regressing from the Lowlands, and coming to be identified with Ireland, while
Scots was gaining status.
"Inglis", a form of the Northern dialect of Anglo-Saxon, had
come to be known by 1494 by the more familiar name of "Scottis". At the same time, Scottish Gaelic, which had
once been known in official documents as "lingua Scotica", had come
to be called "lingua Hibernica", or "Erse" in Scots. From a Lowland viewpoint, therefore, Scottish
Gaelic was to be identified with Ireland rather than with Scotland in the
fifteenth century, and was mocked in certain Scottish literary circles.
As far
back as 1398, the Scottish parliament had endorsed the status of Inglis by
authorising its use as an alternative to Latin when recording Parliamentary
business, and it was thus of importance to Lowland central government. In promoting the use of Scots within the
Gaelic-speaking, Highland area, no influence was more potent than that of
Lowland central government. It used
clans sympathetic to government policy to promote its interests. The increasing
prestige of such clans was underpinned by documentation, principally charters
and bonds of manrent. The Campbells, in
particular, were careful to consolidate their position in this way, and their
expansion eastwards into Perthshire is witnessed by a substantial body of
bonds, dating back to 1488 and continuing well into the sixteenth century. These bonds were drawn up in Scots, and they
are now preserved in the Black Book of Taymouth.
It is of
great importance that these bonds contain evidence of the application to Gaelic
of a system of spelling which is similar to that in the Book of the Dean. This system is applied primarily to
place-names, personal names and surnames, but it also includes Gaelic
epithets. The practice is maintained
throughout this corpus, and it would appear to represent a deliberate policy by
the notaries who drew up the documents.
In some respects the system found in the Black Book bonds resembles the
orthographic treatment given to the effusions of the "bard owt of
Irland" in the Buke of the Howlat of c. 1450. In the case of the latter, however, the
composer desires a comic effect, and he was not himself a Gaelic speaker. The Black Book bonds, on the other hand, show
the application of Scots orthography to Gaelic in official documents, and the
notaries may have included men who were themselves Gaelic-speaking.
Equally
impressive evidence for the pervasiveness of Scots orthography in a Gaelic
context in this period is furnished by West Highland monumental sculpture. Here too, Gaelic personal names and surnames
have often been "Scotticised", with the occasional appearance of
epithets in similar form.
Chronologically, the monuments suggest that the method was much in vogue
after 1500, but that its beginnings may be traced well into the fifteenth
century, if not the fourteenth. While
the Black Book bonds are pre-eminently concerned with Perthshire, stone
monuments bearing "Scotticised" forms of Gaelic names occur in the
Hebrides and mainland Argyll. Indeed,
the inscriptions most heavily influenced by the conventions of Scots
orthography are found at Kilmichael Glassary in Mid Argyll. The settlement of families of Lowland origins
in the Gaelic-speaking area may well have been another important factor in
encouraging the extension of Scots orthography to Gaelic. In mainland Argyll, such settlement is not
surprising, given the strong Lowland affiliations of the dominant clan, the
Campbells.
The use of
"Scotticised" forms of Gaelic names on monumental sculpture is a
significant indication of the status of this orthographic trend. Clearly, such a convention was acceptable to
the nobility who commissioned the monuments.
Equally clearly, there existed men of letters who could supply
inscriptions of this kind, and who were familiar with the basic principles of
the type of orthography found in the Book of the Dean. This, together with the evidence of the Black
Book bonds, is sufficient to suggest that the orthography of the Book of the
Dean was not devised by its scribes.
While they may have helped to develop this orthographic style, it is
hard to believe that they invented it.
While the
orthography of the Book of the Dean is closely related in form to the examples
found in the Black Book bonds and on monumental sculpture, the scale on which
it is employed in the manuscript is obviously much greater. Apart from the Book of the Dean itself, we
lack evidence which might indicate at what precise time such orthography began
to be used extensively in Gaelic writing, or what stimulated such a
departure. Given the misfortunes which
have so severely reduced the number of Gaelic manuscripts surviving from the
Middle Ages, it would be foolish to emphasise the uniqueness of the Book of the
Dean, since other compilations of a similar nature may once have existed.
In
stimulating the emergence of a developed orthography based on Scots, such as
one finds in the Book of the Dean, it seems likely that the question of
linguistic status would have been all-important.
Let me now saw a word or two about the Fernaig Manuscript,
which has not been discussed in anything like the same amount of detail as the
Book of the Dean of Lismore. We are in
desperate need of a good critical edition of this manuscript.
Whereas
the Book of the Dean of Lismore belongs to central Perthshire, the Fernaig
Manuscript belongs to Wester Ross, a very different part of Gaelic
Scotland. It was compiled about 1688, by
Duncan MacRae of Inverinate. It consists
of two notebooks, and is a very substantial work in itself. The spelling-system is based on Scots or
contemporary Scottish English, but, like the Book of the Dean of Lismore, it
shows clearly that the scribe was familiar with the conventional spelling
system of Scottish Gaelic, which shows through from time to time.
The
Fernaig Manuscript contains a high proportion of religious verse, of a
contemplative nature, which reflects much on the vanities of human
existence. It also has some Jacobite
verse, and a couple of items translated from English. Gaelic-English bilingualism is therefore more
than apparent.
Some
general points of comparison between BDL and FM:
(1) Both
texts exist in manuscript and did not reach the printing-press. It is possible to argue that they were
personal manuscripts, and that the personal whim of the scribe explains the deviant orthography. But is this all a matter of coincidence? Was
there, in fact, a subliminal understanding that there were other ways of
spelling Gaelic, besides that which had become the conventional system?
(2) BDL belongs to a pre-Reformation Catholic
context. FM belongs to an Episcopal
context – Protestant, but not Presbyterian.
Was the influence of Scots and English more powerful in non-Presbyterian
contexts?
Was
Presbyterianism, with its strongly book-based biblical and catechetical
tradition, more resistant to this kind of orthography? Perhaps not, in certain contexts. I am aware of charms which have been written
in non-Gaelic orthography in the Kirk Session records of Rothesay, for example.
(3)
Neither BDL nor FM is ignorant of what has become conventional Gaelic
spelling. There thus seems to have been
an element of choice in each scribe’s decision to use a non-Gaelic spelling
system. The scribes had not simply
forgotten how to spell Gaelic, nor were they outside the Gaelic system
completely.
Finally, let me draw your attention to some significant
examples of non-Gaelic spelling that have come to light in Scotland since I
began my research on the Book of the Dean of Lismore.
(1) First,
in the early 1980s, my former colleague at Edinburgh, Ronald Black, became a
aware of a piece of Gaelic in the manuscript of the Murthly Hours, a
thirteenth-century Book of Hours which has recently (2000) been edited
splendidly by John Higgitt, and was once at Mount Stuart in the Isle of
Bute. Ronald Black has provided a most
interesting edition of this item as Appendix 6 in Higgitt’s published
volume. This is apparently a charm
which asks for God’s protective mercy.
The text
in the manuscript is very faded and rubbed, but its basic meaning and its
Scots-based orthographic system are not in doubt. It is remarkable that Ronald Black has been
able to restore it as effectively as he has.
(2)
Second, in 1991, a poem of five quatrains in mixed Gaelic-Scots
orthography, composed by a native of
north-east Scotland, James Grant, was discovered in a manuscript which was
purchased by the National Library of Scotland from an English dealer. It begins, ‘Labher rium a mhaiden óg’ (‘Speak
to me, young maiden’), and it is on a flyleaf of a notebook of legal
‘practicks’ to be dated c. 1582-91. As
Ronald Black notes, ‘It is followed by a religious poem of four quatrains, Comhar
me, (a) Mhic mo Dhe (‘Help me, O Son of my God’), written this time in
classical Gaelic script and orthography.’
Once
again, we have the curious mixing of Gaelic and Scots, showing itself most
evidently in the application of a Scots-based spelling system to Gaelic. Ronald Black comments further (1994):
‘It is a
little premature to say that this further example is evidence of a trend, but
what has been happening is clear. “Conventional” Gaelic manuscripts are readily
identifiable as such, and it would seem therefore that all that are extant have
come to light and been identified.
Gaelic items in non-Gaelic script and orthography, on the other hand,
are less easily identified, and it can be expected with some confidence that
discoveries will continue to be made as texts in unfamiliar languages are
submitted to specialists for examination.
It may even be that we will one day have to revise our view of which
tradition should be regarded as “conventional”.
This will depend on three developments: the appearance of still more
“unconventional” manuscripts; the codification of the orthographic system of
[the Book of the Dean of Lismore]; and the extent to which this spelling code
is found to unlock the secrets of other manuscripts. Even if no such developments were to take
place, however, it deserves to be pointed out that the sheer bulk of material
in [the Book of the Dean of Lismore], in comparison with the paucity of recognisably
Scottish material in other medieval Gaelic sources, entitles the Dean’s
orthography to recognition as the principal medium of transmission of the
Scottish Gaelic literature of the Middle Ages.’
Having
begun in the 1980s, as something of a lone voice, to argue the case for the
mainstream Gaelic significance of the Book of the Dean of Lismore, and
for the acceptability of its apparently outlandish orthography in terms of
wider Scottish practices, I am delighted with Ronald Black’s verdict.
However,
it also needs to be said that this, in my view, significantly alters the
standard view of the complexion of Gaelic orthography within the Eastern Gaelic
sector. We can no longer say that Manx
has a peculiar spelling-system which stands
all on its own, or that it is a despicable ‘deviant’ of some sort. Manx orthography may indeed have very specific features which
set it apart from other comparable orthographies, but I trust that you will
agree with me that it fits within a wider, and paradoxically very Gaelic,
pattern of non-Gaelic spelling-systems which is gradually becoming evident –
and, I trust, acceptable within scholarly orthodoxy.
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