The Languages of Ireland

by Cronin, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781851826988
• ISBN10: 185182698X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-01
• Publisher: Four Courts Press

Summary

For over a thousand years Ireland has been a host to a surprising variety of languages and cultures. Every area of Irish life and cultural expression has been informed by this contact with diverse language groups. This book is an innovative collection of essays that for the first time assesses the multilingual and, by extension, multicultural inheritance of Ireland over two millennia. Leading scholars in language and translation studies from all over Ireland offer a comprehensive overview and accessible insight into the origins, development and intercultural fortunes of different languages on the island of Ireland from the early medieval period onwards. Among the languages and cultures presented in the volume are Irish, English, French, German, Ulster Scots, Ancient Greek and Latin. Contributors will also be situating the multilingual history of Ireland in terms of larger debates on globalization, the future of language diversity and the nature of diasporic cultures. The publication of this book is most timely as Ireland is faced with the challenges of a multicultural and multilingual society and the volume will be an important contribution to national self-understanding and cultural debate.

Table of Contents

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS	7	(2)
INTRODUCTION
Strangers to ourselves - the languages of Ireland	9	(16)
Michael Cronin and Cormac O'Cuilleanain
SECTION ONE: LANGUAGES IN IRELAND
1 Language interface in early Irish culture	25	(19)
Maria Tymoczko
2 The Latin language in early medieval Ireland	44	(13)
Jean-Michel Picard
3 The French language in medieval Ireland	57	(21)
Jean-Michel Picard
4 Translating Irelands: the English language in the Irish context	78	(15)
Terence Dolan
5 The eagle that never landed: uses and abuses of the German language in Ireland	93	(19)
Joachim Fischer
6 The historical presence of Ulster-Scots in Ireland	112	(15)
Philip Robinson
7 Irish - one of the languages of the world	127	(21)
Liam Mac Coil
8 Sign language interpreters: agents of social change in Ireland	148	(19)
Lorraine Leeson
SECTION TWO: IRELAND'S LANGUAGES AND CULTURAL CROSSOVER
9 Irish appropriation of Sophocles' Antigone and Philoctetes	167	(12)
Brian Arkins
10 French connections: twentieth-century Irish translations of French poets	179	(16)
Kathleen Shields
11 Memetics, metatranslation and cultural memory: the literary Imaginaires of Irish identity	195	(22)
Angela Ryan
12 Spaces between Irish worlds: travellers, translators and the new accelerators	217	(15)
Michael Cronin
INDEX	232