| About the Irish language |
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Stran 1 od 3 Introduction Andragoški zavod Maribor - Ljudska univerza is the author and the coordinator of the Language Festival project. Together with the partners from the Netherlands, Germany, Check Republic, Slovakia and Hungary we applied for financing with EU programme Socrates - Lingua 1. The project received positive feedback and was accepted by European Commission to be implemented between October 2003 and October 2005. In the project we prepared and organised the Language Festival in Maribor from 29th September to 2nd October 2004, held book exhibition of minor European languages, produced a web site and books on chosen languages. The Festival hosted many experts who introduced 24 European languages to general public in 4 days not only at AZM-LU but also at many schools and other institutions. In April 2005 we held book exhibition where we presented books and other materials on 17 minor European languages at Maribor Faculty of Education. We finalised the activities by producing the web site you're using at the moments. Here you can find some information regarding language connected culture, basic characteristics of relevant languages and language survival kits. Website language is Slovenian. Also German and English versions are available. In time we hope to achieve English, German and Esperanto descriptions for all languages. This website is still very much alive and constantly expanding. We plan to add new languages as well. Promotionally the project enjoyed great success. In cooperation with Mediamix we created an innovative way of attracting the public and received many awards at advertising festivals. Socrates Lingua declared the Language Festival project one of 50 best examples of promoting languages. Info regarding promotion of the Festival is available on: http://www.mediamix.si/slo/News/2005junij02.html Melita Cimerman and Zlatko Tišljar. Author: Seán Ó Riain Introduction The Irish language is the national and first official language of Ireland, the other official language being English. Irish has been spoken in Ireland for over 2,500 years, and is the language from which most Irish placenames and surnames derive:
Irish is the ancestral language of the 70-million-strong Irish diaspora, and of most Scots, throughout the world. As regards Northern Ireland, the parties to the Belfast Agreement of 10 April 1998 agreed that the British Government will “take resolute action to promote the language”, both through recognising its status and providing financial assistance, in areas ranging from television and film to Irish-medium education. It is a treaty but not an official working language of the European Union and, as such, appears on all EU passports. On 14 July 2004 the Irish Government decided to seek EU official working language status for Irish. The Treaty of Amsterdam gave the right to Irish speakers to write to the EU institutions in Irish and to receive a reply in that language. Similarities between the Polish and Irish languages. The following comparison may also apply to Slovene and other Slavic languages, but I compare with Polish, as the Slavic language I know best. The distinction in Polish between ona jest and ona bywa (“she is” and “she habitually is” or “she is in the habit of being”), i.e. between the present and present habitual tenses, corresponds exactly to the Irish tá sí and bíonn sí. This distinction is not found verbally in English, French or German, but is present in other Celtic languages such as Welsh, Breton, Scottish Gaelic, and in other Slavic languages. There are effectively 3 forms of the verb “to be”, for example:
Both Polish and Irish have a fondness for palatalisation: the palatal quality of the consonant “n” in the Polish word strong>nie corresponds to the “n” of the Irish word níl, “there is not”. Finally a number of verbal endings, such as the first person singular, present tense, and the second person singular, past tense, are pronounced similarly in both languages:
Nature and Development of Irish Irish and its offshoots, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, constitute the Gaelic or Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages. Welsh, Cornish and Breton and the now extinct Gaulish (the language spoken in France, then called Gaul, before the country was invaded by Caesar’s Roman legions) form the Brythonic or Brittonic group, and all Celtic languages form part of the Indo-European family of languages. Related Celtic languages were spoken by the Galatians in Anatolia (modern Turkey) to whom St. Paul wrote his letters; and in the Polish Galicja and Spanish Galicia, giving some idea of the vast area peopled by the Celts in the pre-Christian era. Our earliest evidence for Irish is to be found in ogham inscriptions (a system of writing used mainly on stone or wood, based on vertical and slanted strokes corresponding to the Latin letters, and in the words of Professor David Greene dating from “a time not much before the fourth century A.D.”. The language is usually divided into the following periods: Old Irish AD c. 650-900, Middle Irish c. 900-c.1200, Early Modern Irish c. 1200 - c. 1600, Late Modern Irish c. 1600 - . From the Old Irish period until the 13th century the language underwent a prolonged period of regularization and simplification. Although they had existed in the language since earliest times, dialects do not come into view to any degree until the 17th century. This is because the literary standard language was common to the entire Gaelic-speaking area, which for over a thousand years consisted of all of Ireland, most of Scotland, and the Isle of Man. Irish migration to northern Britain had begun even before the Roman withdrawal in 410 A.D., but the process of Irish expansion gathered momentum after the establishment of the kingdom of Dál Riata around 500 A.D. In 843 A.D. Cineadh Mac Ailpin, king of the Irish-speaking people in northern Britain, gained accession to the kingship of the Picts, effectively becoming king of what we now call Scotland. Indeed the medieval Latin word “Scotus” meant simply an Irish speaker, as evidenced by the name of the 9th century philosopher at the court of Charles the Bald, Johannes Scotus Eriugena (Latin “born in Ireland”). |
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