I'm back. Spent a week hanging out in Dublin with a two-day diversion up north to Belfast and the sleepy Northern Irish seaside town of
Newcastle.
Sleepy, that is, until about midnight Friday, when every teenager in County Down hits the local pub/bar/club. "It sounds like a Czech village disco," a friend commented last night when I described the scene. Similarities: The DJ yelling stuff into a microphone between songs (although I'd sooner understand an aspiring northern Bohemian dance floor MC then a Northern Irish one). Differences: The crowd was younger (largerly pre-20, I kid you not), they were more drunk, and the girls were a lot
more tarted up, if you can believe it, than they'd be here.
But that is neither here nor there. The real point of this post is the following oddball tidbit I just picked up from a recent article in
The Irish Times (it's available online
here, but a subscription is required; I have the paper version).
There is evidence, somewhere out there, that speakers of
Scots Gaelic and
Irish understood speakers of
Berber as late as the mid-19th century. This astounding assertion supports a thesis proposed by a Connemara fellow named
Bob Quinn that the Irish people contain as much North African stock as European.
On the surface, it sounds like one of killer facts that this blog increasingly thrives on. But you know, I'm skeptical.... I mean, come on, with enough effort on both sides, in many situations I'm sure I'd understand a speaker of Dravidian, depending on what we were trying to tell each other. That doesn't mean the languages are mutually intelligible.
The article, in any case, was a nice re-cap of Quinn's controversial (and unscholarly, as Quinn himself now admits) theory, and how in the eyes of critics, it's moved from the realm of outrageous quackery to that of grudging respect. Archeologist Barry Cunliff, who has the academic cred that Quinn lacks, claims in
Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500 that "this Irish language had evolved as a maritime language of western coastal areas of Europe, rather than as a result of continental 'Celtic' influences" (I'm quoting the Times article, not the book). Cunliff wrote the intro to the new edition of Quinn's book, which was originally published (and met with mockery) back in 1986.
The point, I guess, is that if I really wanted to understand what that Ulster DJ was yelling into the mike, I'd perhaps be better off studying Berber than an Indo-European language like Czech. Quinn's book is called
The Atlantean Irish: Ireland's Oriental and Maritime Heritage. If you ever come into a copy, please let me borrow it.
And oh yes. Don't forget to waste a few minutes with
this baffling site/blog. It appears to be dedicated to languages in development -- that is, spoken langauges that don't actually exist yet, such as
Intergermansk. Go ahead, you shan't be disappointed.
