Gaelic, a descendant of the Goidelic branch of Celtic and closely related to Irish, is the traditional language of the Scotti or Gaels, and became the historical language of the majority of Scotland after it replaced Cumbric, Pictish and Norse.
Gaelic began to decline in mainland Scotland by the beginning of the 13th century, and with this went a decline in its status as a national language.
Lowland Gaelic was spoken in the southern regions of Scotland prior to the introduction of Lowland Scots.
Gaelic is the traditional language of the Gaels, the Celtic ethnic group now mainly in the Scottish Highlands, and the historical language of most of Scotland; it having been the native language of the Scottish people and of Scotland upon its foundation.
Gaelic has a rich oral tradition (beul aithris), having been the language of the bardic culture of the Highland clans for several centuries.
The BBC also operates a Gaelic language radio station Radio nan Gaidheal (which regularly transmits joint broadcasts with its Irish counterpart Raidi na Gaeltachta), and there are also television programmes in the language on the BBC and on the ITV commercial channels, usually subtitled in English.
The language is usually referred to in English as Irish, and less often as Gaelic (IPA: /ˈgeɪlɪk/), or Irish Gaelic though the latter term is seldom used or preferred by the Irish themselves.
Use of the term Irish also avoids confusion with Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), and Manx Gaelic (Gaelg), the closely related languages spoken in Scotland and the Isle of Man, though the term Irish Gaelic is often used when the three languages and their relationship to one another are being discussed.
The features most unfamiliar to English speakers of the language are the orthography, the initial consonant mutations, the Verb Subject Object word order, and the use of two different forms for "to be".
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In some cases the Gaelic expletive is awanting, as in "garbh-chòmhrag", and the name Moran is, in the last line, substituted for the Gaelic description, "The swift son of Fithil, of bounding steps." These, however, are allowable liberties in such a case.
But the orthography which he himself uses is neither the bardic nor the phonetic, and is more uncouth than any orthography which the bards were in the habit of using.
Any reader who understands the Gaelic must allow, without hesitation, that while this is a free it is a fair rendering of the original; while he will be constrained to add that in point of force and elegance the Gaelic is superior to the English version.
Gaelicorthography is the set of spelling conventions used in Gaelic.
Gaelic has an alphabet of 18 letters (a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u) and therefore the presence of other letters (j, k, q, v, w, x, y, z) indicates a name that is not in Gaelicorthography.
Gaelic has influenced many names elsewhere in Scotland, but in those areas the recorded names are no longer in Gaelicorthography.
As nic is the Anglicized form of the Gaelic inghean mhic 'daughter of a son of'/'daughter of the Mac- family', it is clear of inghean uí 'daughter of a grandson of'/'daughter of the Ó- family' according to this precedent.
While elements from Gaelic and Norse may have been used in a single name, the name itself would be written either entirely in Gaelic or Norse, although the same name could have been written in either language depending on the context.
Lacking evidence either for a pattern of similar period Gaelic diminutives or for a period English form of which it could be a Gaelic spelling, we are unwilling to assume that it is a legitimate period form.
In the English — Gaelic section, for example, we have given the genitive and plural forms of Gaelic nouns and the verbal noun form of Gaelic verbs.
In considering the question of orthography, we were glad to receive advice from colleagues on the Board of Celtic Studies on general issues, but most specifically on the subject of lenition and genitives in noun phrases.
We believed that the time was right to relaunch GOC to the widest possible audience to achieve the greatest impact and consistency of orthography across all levels of the Gaelic educational system and this was a matter for the Scottish Qualifications Authority.
The proceedings of central and local government have of course been reported and discussed in Gaelic in the press and media over the years, but the choice and usage of technical vocabulary has not been commonly agreed or applied.
Part of the role of the project team has therefore been to seek to arrive at a corpus of formal terminology that should be acceptable as far as possible to Gaelic users across all media and in public life.
Gaelic is not a language that lacks diversity in general use, and it possesses a cultural richness in poetry and prose that dates back over many centuries.
In April 1976 the Board, at the request of its Gaelic Panel, set up a Sub-committee of the Panel to investigate the problem of Gaelicorthography insofar as it affected the Board's examinations.
The Panel is keenly aware that Gaelic is at present at an interesting stage of development, from a social and educational as well as from a linguistic point of view.
Its position was that diversity of usage and the state of Gaelic literacy at the present time both conspire to make the prescription of a singulary standard for all cases unrealistic.
The fact that Gaelic speakers were frequently ashamed of their mother tongue and did their best to abandon it in favor of English as soon as they could appears in many periodicals in the nineteenth century.
Gaelic is lacking in the terminology of every craft, and in each field of study and engineering that people developed in the last century.
Gaelic was reframed as a moral and cultural virtue and those who feigned to have forgotten their Gaelic could be accused of an ethical transgression, trading in a superior virtue for mere materialistic gain.
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This system or code was first published in 1981 by a sub-committee of the Gaelic Panel of what is now the Scottish Examining Board and has been employed in SCE examination papers since 1985 and has been compulsory for SCE candidates since 1988.
Although originally conceived merely as a response to the chaotic state of children's spelling, many of its principles are now being applied to publications outside the purely academic sector.
It's not likely that we will ever go back to the old spellings considering that the number of new writers of the Gaelic may already outnumber those who were trained to use the old conventions.
Grammatical lenition involves a "softening" of the initial consonant sound of words and is required by Gaelic grammar in certain situations.
[Note 2] This pronunciation change in Gaelic is sometimes indicated by a changed spelling as well, depending on specific period and the letter being lenited.
When Roman letters were first adapted for writing Gaelic (by the 6th century A.D.), lenition was shown for and by writing a dot (called a punctum delens in Latin) over the letter.
And somewere in amongst all of these Gaelic sits, with it's 18 letters and 29 or so consonants and 18 vowels.
Even though it may seem completely nuts to begin with, Gaelicorthography is actually a lot more phonemic than English, that is, there is a more regular and direct correlation between the letters and the way you say a word.
The problem was that Common Gaelic had two variants of every consonant - and this distinction was important because it changed the meaning of words.
As the documentation for the submission was all Irish, we have substituted the Gaelic form of the surname.
The second, is that the Gaelic byname is unlikely in the extreme to have been used with what is essentially an English name.
"The use of the Gaelic patronymic is inappropriate with an anglicization of the patronymic name." [the name was returned: note that this is may be anomalous as it is contrary to later acceptances in LsoAR of 1/91, 2/91, which allowed combinations such as nic Lowry, nic Andrew and nic Bryan] (LoAR 12/90 p.14).
