grainne mhaol comes o'er the sea @caledfvvlch - Tumblr Blog

asking this here because I know some of my followers know much more about linguistics than I do: is there a reason why so many dead/older languages have noun cases/declensions, at least compared to modern languages?

caledfvvlch

@linguisticssystem @theeaumiel thank you for the explanations! I figured it had something to do with ease of speaking/writing, that's so interesting!!

asking this here because I know some of my followers know much more about linguistics than I do: is there a reason why so many dead/older languages have noun cases/declensions, at least compared to modern languages?

#or is it just that i mostly know modern languages that dont do this hmmm #linguistics #ancient languages #dead languages

daianotherday

Hmmm...

One of these things is not like the others.

#LMAO #im pretty sure ive come across this when looking for welsh lang music on spotify lol

wilderminds

I had the chance to see some of the Ogham stones on display at University College Cork! These pictures aren't the best, but they were so cool to see in person!

#rb from my main!

say what you want about songs with lots of talking/long introductions but the "and i was picked to kill a man like that!" intro to "James Connolly" when the Wolfe Tones sing it live is fun because you get to see a British soldier develop class consciousness in real time

#at this point i should be getting course credit for this blog i post abt irish music so much lol

it's always "oh come tell me, Sean O'Farrell, tell me why you hurry so" and never "oh come tell me, Sean O'Farrell, tell my why you worry so" 😔

#im taking a traditional irish music course this semester so im gonna be more insufferable than usual. i apologize #the rising of the moon #irish music

caledfvvlch

A look at contemporary Irish protest songs.

This is a really interesting RTE piece about the history of protest music in Ireland. It's about an hour long, I would really recommend it!

caledfvvlch

@astudiaethauceltaidd if you have a link to this or remember what the title is i'd love to listen to it! absolutely zero pressure though, i definitely don't keep track of everything i have to read/listen to for class lol

A look at contemporary Irish protest songs.

This is a really interesting RTE piece about the history of protest music in Ireland. It's about an hour long, I would really recommend it!

caledfvvlch

i'm taking a class on the mabinogion and the professor spent half of the first lecture mounting a full-throated defense of Lady Charlotte Guest

justasillynerd

Could you tell this memeber of the ignorant masses why she needed defending?

caledfvvlch

Yeah absolutely!! I'm by no means an expert on the Mabinogion but I've taken a few classes on it, here we go:

Lady Charlotte Guest was a wealthy noblewoman in Wales in the nineteenth century, as well as the wife of an industrialist. Upon her husband's death, she took over his work, and taught herself to read medieval Welsh. She's most famous for translating a collection of stories from the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, four of which are called the branches of the Mabinogi. Lady Charlotte Guest titled her translation the Mabinogion, as "on" is an ending that can be used to make a word plural in Welsh. (It's not the only way though! Welsh has a lot of ways to pluralize words and you kind of just get a feel for which one is correct as you encounter them)

It turns out that this is not the correct pluralization of "Mabinogi", and we still aren't totally certain what the word means. Many say it can be approximated by "Boyhood Tales", as "mab" is the word for "son". A lot of people fault Guest for mis-pluralizing the word, but it was a very reasonable assumption based on the information she had, and "Mabinogion" is the title that endures to this day because her translation was the first.

Lady Guest consulted other scholars of medieval Welsh when writing her translation, and for many years the academic consensus was that the other (male) scholars did the bulk of the translating and Lady Guest just slapped her name on the front. Her notes from the period wholly disprove this - this was my professor's main point in defending her.

castlescrumblingdown

Something that should be noted is..............look, okay, would I recommend her translation to anyone who’s interested in this stuff? No. I would not. It’s outdated, inaccurate, and VERY, VERY Victorian. There have been better translations made since hers, and it is the reason for the BANE OF MY EXISTENCE, which is people lumping pretty much all the Welsh prose texts in with the Mabinogi. (KING ARTHUR DOES NOT SHOW UP IN THE FOUR BRANCHES. HE. DOES. NOT. CULHWCH AC OLWEN IS NOT PART OF THE FOUR BRANCHES.)

BUT. But. That being said, perspective: She was working in the 19th century, without any of the resources that we have now, and the scope of her project was MASSIVE. To put it into perspective: As a Celticist who’s trained intensively for the last two years in Middle Welsh, with a fully prepared edition, glossary, and editor’s notes in front of me, I would do very well to get approximately 20 lines out of around..........600 or so of Pwyll done per week. Note: That is only the FIRST BRANCH of the Mabinogi. I had to do fifty lines of Brut y Brenhined this last week, relatively short because it was a two-column page, again, WITH a full edition, glossary, and notes, and that nearly killed me. I was working on overdrive for about three days to get it done, getting about 4-6 hours of sleep in 48 hours. Middle Welsh is actually quite meditative for me, most of the time, when my mind is in it, but it can be tedious, and parts of it don’t lend themselves well to English syntax. It’s the sort of thing I can do for about an hour or two and then have had enough for the week.

That’s not including other resources that are generally considered essential to studying Middle Welsh, like modern digitization of manuscripts, Simon Evans’ A Grammar of Middle Welsh, without any of our modern online dictionaries or glossaries that make dealing with the inconsistent orthography somewhat livable, without formally studying it. And she did that shit. For the ENTIRE MABINOGI, as well as a few other texts she lumped in. Honestly, a superhuman effort. I’m willing to say that I couldn’t do it. And, frankly, I’m not sure how many modern Celticists could, either. Not because we’re not good at our jobs, but because the landscape has changed SO MUCH since that time.

I feel like there’s this Thing that happens in Celtic studies in particular where we get SO HYPED UP on reminding people that THESE SOURCES ARE VERY OLD, DON’T USE THEM, that we kind of....gloss over exactly how monumental they were at the time. And we pat ourselves on the shoulders because we’re Real Scholars, we have better sources than people who would rely on *Charlotte Guest.* It’s EASY for us to talk shit, but could we have done the same in the exact same circumstances? And, you know what? How many people got into Welsh studies because of her translation? How many people went on to read the Mabinogi in the original Middle Welsh because she paved the way? I can say, on my end, that I wouldn’t be where I am now if it wasn’t for people translating the Irish texts out, because that was what got me hooked. I wouldn’t recommend Lady Gregory to anyone really looking into seriously studying Old Irish for the same reasons I wouldn’t recommend Lady Guest, but I can acknowledge that, if I was to do half as much for the field as they did, I would be successful beyond my wildest dreams. (Also, ngl, a part of me, however small, does wonder how we would treat them if they were done by aristocratic men as opposed to aristocratic women -- I’m not saying that’s the ONLY factor, I’m not saying it’s a CONSCIOUS factor, but I am saying that the way they’re often talked about is Silly Aristocratic Women Dabbling In Things They Didn’t Know About.)

(But also: For the sake of your local Celticist’s sanity, DO please use “Mabinogi” when talking about the Four Branches, “Mabinogion” when talking about Lady Guest’s, and remember that the Four Branches ARE the Mabinogi. I can respect her work while still wanting to tear my hair out at that particular bit of her legacy. I’m not going to come into anyone’s houses to beat them with a baseball bat, but it helps me to know what we’re talking about.)

caledfvvlch

@crudelydrawnswords you win best addition to this post LMAO

#im going to use this if i ever have the cause

caledfvvlch

i'm taking a class on the mabinogion and the professor spent half of the first lecture mounting a full-throated defense of Lady Charlotte Guest

justasillynerd

Could you tell this memeber of the ignorant masses why she needed defending?

caledfvvlch

Yeah absolutely!! I'm by no means an expert on the Mabinogion but I've taken a few classes on it, here we go:

Lady Charlotte Guest was a wealthy noblewoman in Wales in the nineteenth century, as well as the wife of an industrialist. Upon her husband's death, she took over his work, and taught herself to read medieval Welsh. She's most famous for translating a collection of stories from the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, four of which are called the branches of the Mabinogi. Lady Charlotte Guest titled her translation the Mabinogion, as "on" is an ending that can be used to make a word plural in Welsh. (It's not the only way though! Welsh has a lot of ways to pluralize words and you kind of just get a feel for which one is correct as you encounter them)

It turns out that this is not the correct pluralization of "Mabinogi", and we still aren't totally certain what the word means. Many say it can be approximated by "Boyhood Tales", as "mab" is the word for "son". A lot of people fault Guest for mis-pluralizing the word, but it was a very reasonable assumption based on the information she had, and "Mabinogion" is the title that endures to this day because her translation was the first.

Lady Guest consulted other scholars of medieval Welsh when writing her translation, and for many years the academic consensus was that the other (male) scholars did the bulk of the translating and Lady Guest just slapped her name on the front. Her notes from the period wholly disprove this - this was my professor's main point in defending her.

castlescrumblingdown

Something that should be noted is..............look, okay, would I recommend her translation to anyone who’s interested in this stuff? No. I would not. It’s outdated, inaccurate, and VERY, VERY Victorian. There have been better translations made since hers, and it is the reason for the BANE OF MY EXISTENCE, which is people lumping pretty much all the Welsh prose texts in with the Mabinogi. (KING ARTHUR DOES NOT SHOW UP IN THE FOUR BRANCHES. HE. DOES. NOT. CULHWCH AC OLWEN IS NOT PART OF THE FOUR BRANCHES.)

BUT. But. That being said, perspective: She was working in the 19th century, without any of the resources that we have now, and the scope of her project was MASSIVE. To put it into perspective: As a Celticist who’s trained intensively for the last two years in Middle Welsh, with a fully prepared edition, glossary, and editor’s notes in front of me, I would do very well to get approximately 20 lines out of around..........600 or so of Pwyll done per week. Note: That is only the FIRST BRANCH of the Mabinogi. I had to do fifty lines of Brut y Brenhined this last week, relatively short because it was a two-column page, again, WITH a full edition, glossary, and notes, and that nearly killed me. I was working on overdrive for about three days to get it done, getting about 4-6 hours of sleep in 48 hours. Middle Welsh is actually quite meditative for me, most of the time, when my mind is in it, but it can be tedious, and parts of it don’t lend themselves well to English syntax. It’s the sort of thing I can do for about an hour or two and then have had enough for the week.

That’s not including other resources that are generally considered essential to studying Middle Welsh, like modern digitization of manuscripts, Simon Evans’ A Grammar of Middle Welsh, without any of our modern online dictionaries or glossaries that make dealing with the inconsistent orthography somewhat livable, without formally studying it. And she did that shit. For the ENTIRE MABINOGI, as well as a few other texts she lumped in. Honestly, a superhuman effort. I’m willing to say that I couldn’t do it. And, frankly, I’m not sure how many modern Celticists could, either. Not because we’re not good at our jobs, but because the landscape has changed SO MUCH since that time.

I feel like there’s this Thing that happens in Celtic studies in particular where we get SO HYPED UP on reminding people that THESE SOURCES ARE VERY OLD, DON’T USE THEM, that we kind of....gloss over exactly how monumental they were at the time. And we pat ourselves on the shoulders because we’re Real Scholars, we have better sources than people who would rely on *Charlotte Guest.* It’s EASY for us to talk shit, but could we have done the same in the exact same circumstances? And, you know what? How many people got into Welsh studies because of her translation? How many people went on to read the Mabinogi in the original Middle Welsh because she paved the way? I can say, on my end, that I wouldn’t be where I am now if it wasn’t for people translating the Irish texts out, because that was what got me hooked. I wouldn’t recommend Lady Gregory to anyone really looking into seriously studying Old Irish for the same reasons I wouldn’t recommend Lady Guest, but I can acknowledge that, if I was to do half as much for the field as they did, I would be successful beyond my wildest dreams. (Also, ngl, a part of me, however small, does wonder how we would treat them if they were done by aristocratic men as opposed to aristocratic women -- I’m not saying that’s the ONLY factor, I’m not saying it’s a CONSCIOUS factor, but I am saying that the way they’re often talked about is Silly Aristocratic Women Dabbling In Things They Didn’t Know About.)

(But also: For the sake of your local Celticist’s sanity, DO please use “Mabinogi” when talking about the Four Branches, “Mabinogion” when talking about Lady Guest’s, and remember that the Four Branches ARE the Mabinogi. I can respect her work while still wanting to tear my hair out at that particular bit of her legacy. I’m not going to come into anyone’s houses to beat them with a baseball bat, but it helps me to know what we’re talking about.)

#EXCELLENT addition thank you!!#i was using 'mabinogion' bc the copy im using for that class is titled it but i should have touched on the title issue LOL

caledfvvlch

i'm taking a class on the mabinogion and the professor spent half of the first lecture mounting a full-throated defense of Lady Charlotte Guest

justasillynerd

Could you tell this memeber of the ignorant masses why she needed defending?

caledfvvlch

Yeah absolutely!! I'm by no means an expert on the Mabinogion but I've taken a few classes on it, here we go:

Lady Charlotte Guest was a wealthy noblewoman in Wales in the nineteenth century, as well as the wife of an industrialist. Upon her husband's death, she took over his work, and taught herself to read medieval Welsh. She's most famous for translating a collection of stories from the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, four of which are called the branches of the Mabinogi. Lady Charlotte Guest titled her translation the Mabinogion, as "on" is an ending that can be used to make a word plural in Welsh. (It's not the only way though! Welsh has a lot of ways to pluralize words and you kind of just get a feel for which one is correct as you encounter them)

It turns out that this is not the correct pluralization of "Mabinogi", and we still aren't totally certain what the word means. Many say it can be approximated by "Boyhood Tales", as "mab" is the word for "son". A lot of people fault Guest for mis-pluralizing the word, but it was a very reasonable assumption based on the information she had, and "Mabinogion" is the title that endures to this day because her translation was the first.

Lady Guest consulted other scholars of medieval Welsh when writing her translation, and for many years the academic consensus was that the other (male) scholars did the bulk of the translating and Lady Guest just slapped her name on the front. Her notes from the period wholly disprove this - this was my professor's main point in defending her.

#ty for giving me an excuse to talk abt the mabinogion!!#im always down for that lol #lady charlotte guest

*infomercial voice* have you ever taken Latin and thought "wow, i wish this class was harder and less useful"? well, if you have, Middle Irish is the class for you!

#less useful is obviously a relative term #i guess i mean for english speakers who dont want to specifically go into irish studies

nothing quite like my Middle Irish professor interrupting me as i'm stumbling through the reading to ask if I speak Welsh, in Welsh

#the fact that YOU CAN TELL im reading it like welsh... not good but very very funny