Looking back on Ardtráthnóna over the past weeks there's a few clips of Erris speakers.

Pádraig Ó Gionnáin as Cill Ghallagáin:
https://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/html5/#/rnag/21548603

Pádraic S. Ó Murchadha, Clochar
https://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/html5/#/rnag/21553987

Mary John Tom Bhreathnach, Glais
https://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/html5/#/rnag/21556140

And a program recorded in Tuar Mhic Éadaigh:
https://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/html5/#/rnag/21524557


What's your initial reaction to the above? Do you hear a difference, for example, between Máirtín's beautiful Connemara Irish and the other speakers' Mayo dialects?

@ 0:33:48
"Bíonn sibhse ag gearradh siar na foclaí, an dtuigeann tú."

Ah that is very interesting Silmeth. I had read that Icelandic was closer to Old Norse but I was not aware that it had deviated more than the other Scandinavian languages phonetically. Why is that do you know? Because my assumptions on Munster are that contact with Norman French and English were what caused it's phonetic change, but as far as I'm aware Icelandic would never have been in such close contact with any languages that different from it. (Danish).



I do Suairc, you know, the difference isn't huge is it? The Mayo one pronounces the vowels in a way that is similar to the distinctive English Mayo accent vowels. And maybe a slightly more northern flavour to some of their words, though I'm no expert. Maybe they spoke a little clearer or something?

Maybe my ears aren't tuned into a lot of the difference, but besides accent and a slight difference in the vowels I didn't notice that big a difference at all.


(Bíonn sibhse ag gearradh siar na foclaí - Ye shorten ye're words - What is 'siar' doing in this sentence?)

I know only a little about the history of the Icelandic language, but the settlers of Iceland had one very significant non-Germanic linguistic influence, which was Irish and Scottish Gaelic, so perhaps that had some effect on their pronunciation of Old Norse. A significant number of the settlers were of Irish or Scottish ancestry, mostly women and slaves brought there by the Norse, and some of the Norse settlers would themselves have been of mixed heritage, since they intermarried with the Irish and Scots very early on. I've read that the average Icelander has about 25% Irish/Scottish ancestry as a result. Old Norse had a good bit of influence on Irish (mostly in vocabulary), so it makes sense that the reverse would also have been true (I know that the modern Icelandic language does have some Gaelic loanwords, in addition to whatever effect there may have been on pronunciation).

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

As for Old Norse vs modern Icelandic and other Scandinavian languages, Dr. Jackson Crawford made a great video about it: Old Norse and the Modern Scandinavian Languages (and a few more on related subjects: What's the "realistic" Viking language?, Old Icelandic vs. Old Norwegian, Old West Norse vs. Old East Norse, Earlier and Later Old Norse) – he compares features of modern languages with three dialects/periods of Old Norse (older eastern and western dialects, and later Old Icelandic, which is the best known, ’cause it’s the language of the written sagas).

As for the reason – well, all languages evolve, so it’s really not surprising that Icelandic did deviate phonetically. It is a bit surprising that it did not evolve as much grammatically, and that western Norwegian dialects did not evolve that much phonetically (although, they did have some sound changes too).

As CaoimhínSF wrote, Icelandic had a fairly big influence from Goidelic peoples, modern Icelandic for example has a progressive construction very similar to Irish (and somehow to English), but absent from Old Norse or any other Scandinavian languages (well, maybe present in Faroese?), eg. ‘I am burning your house’ would be ég er að brenna husið ðitt in Icelandic, lit. ‘I am to/towards burn your house’, syntactically somehow similar to táim ag loscadh do thí (I am at burning of your house) – this construction might be a grammatical borrowing from some Goidelic dialect. In Old Norse, depending on the dialect, this would be ek brenni hús þitt (west) or jak brenni þitt hús (east), modern Norwegian nynorsk eg brenner huset ditt, Swedish jag bränner ditt hus.

Phonetically modern Icelandic for example diphthongized long vowels (eg. á is /au/, æ is /aɪ/, é is /je/), merged old front /ø/ (i-umlaut of o) and back /ǫ/ (u-umlaut of a) into a single front vowel written ö, and changed ll (long /lː/?) to /tl/, while some western Norwegian dialects, as I believe (but am not certain, cannot quickly find a sensible source on that), retain single vowels and all retain /l/ and a distinction between front ø and back o. On the other hand, many Norwegian dialects do have palatalization of some consonants before front vowels, often more prevalent than Icelandic, similar to Swedish (eg. they palatalize older /skj/ and /sj/ to /ʃ/, /kj/ to /ç/), and also ones that do diphthongize old long vowels… So perhaps claiming that western Norwegian dialects are most conservative phonetically isn’t that accurate either. It also seems, Danish, on the other hand, has no palatalization (so retains /ski/, /s/, /k/, /g/, etc. before front vowels).

EDIT: so to make a tldr – Icelandic did innovate a lot in vowels and diphthongs, while not that much in consonants, Norwegian is much more conservative in vowels, while having palatalizations which changed consonants quite a lot.

Since Welsh and Irish both have a progressive construction but most Germanic languages do not, I often wonder whether the progressive construction entered English under the influence of the native Celtic languages, rather than the other way around, which is so often assumed.

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

I've always thought that likely, especially with the theory that Old English may have emerged from a creole created when the British and Anglo-Saxon populations merged. The use of the verb "do" in expressions like "I do have it" is also believed to have come from Brythonic. Recently, I read that the progressive form only emerged in Middle English. However, I can't help wondering whether it was there all along in one or more unwritten regional dialects in Anglo-Saxon England, and re-emerged as part of "proper" English as the influence of Norman French died away.

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

I think we're starting to discover more of these various "turn-around" influences in English.

Does French have a progressive construction?

No.

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).