A.Z. Foreman | Three Medieval Irish Poems about Cold Weather, read in Old Irish and in English translation @a.z.foreman74 | Uploaded 1 year ago | Updated 3 hours ago
While I was working on some versions of Old Irish lyric poetry, it occurrec to me that I couldn't find a whole lot of careful audio-reconstructions of Old Irish. And, well, if you want a thing done you gotta do it your own self. So here you go. Though, granted, Old Irish is sort of at the periphery of my linguistic interest as a medievalist.
All the poems given here have commonly been assigned in the literature to some time arount the 9th century. The first ("Scél lem duibh") may possibly be older, or at least may have once existed in an older form. The second obviously cannot be any older than the 9th century, given its content and the circumstances of its attestation. There has been a suggestion that the last is in fact much later and may come from a 12th century composition.
The translations are, obviously, not literal renderings. (I refuse on general principle to present great Irish poetry in crummy pedantic English.)
I read the diphthong spelled "áe" as /ǝi/ here, as this is meant to reflect a state of the language after the merger of "classical" Old Irish /ai/ and /oi/. Since I was going for a mid-to-late 9th century feel, not doing so seemed like it might be a bit anachronistic, given that conflations of the two digraphs representing /ai/ and /oi/ is much older than that. Though what /ai/ and /oi/ end up merging *to* is not particularly clear. Given the later reflexes, a stage /ǝi/ seems like the best bet, and lots of scholarship assumes something like this as an intermediary before Middle Irish monophthongization to /ǝ:/ which produced various modern reflexes.
When it comes to the reconstruction the pronunciation of the fortis sonorants, the palatalized /R'/ poses a problem. No modern Goidelic language preserves all four rhotics distinctly. If I had to bet money on the realization of /R'/ it would actually be a fricative trill [r̝]. It has everything you'd really want for that purpose including massively raised tongue body. After finding that I wasn't the only one with this suspicion, and learning that none other than David Stifter had the same notion, I decided to go ahead and include a fricative trill in this reconstruction for the fortis palatalized rhotic.
If you liked this video and want to help me make more things like it, consider making a pledge at my patreon:
http://patreon.com/azforeman
There you can get access to subscriber only material, like my weekly readings of Shakespeare's sonnets, and also my readings of the King James Bible in 17th century English pronunciation
You can also follow me on twitter at @azforeman
Images of Stiftsbibliothek MS 904, as well as RIA MSs 25 E.23 and 23 P.12 used courtesy of the Irish Script On Screen project (School of Celtic Studies, DIAS) and the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland.
While I was working on some versions of Old Irish lyric poetry, it occurrec to me that I couldn't find a whole lot of careful audio-reconstructions of Old Irish. And, well, if you want a thing done you gotta do it your own self. So here you go. Though, granted, Old Irish is sort of at the periphery of my linguistic interest as a medievalist.
All the poems given here have commonly been assigned in the literature to some time arount the 9th century. The first ("Scél lem duibh") may possibly be older, or at least may have once existed in an older form. The second obviously cannot be any older than the 9th century, given its content and the circumstances of its attestation. There has been a suggestion that the last is in fact much later and may come from a 12th century composition.
The translations are, obviously, not literal renderings. (I refuse on general principle to present great Irish poetry in crummy pedantic English.)
I read the diphthong spelled "áe" as /ǝi/ here, as this is meant to reflect a state of the language after the merger of "classical" Old Irish /ai/ and /oi/. Since I was going for a mid-to-late 9th century feel, not doing so seemed like it might be a bit anachronistic, given that conflations of the two digraphs representing /ai/ and /oi/ is much older than that. Though what /ai/ and /oi/ end up merging *to* is not particularly clear. Given the later reflexes, a stage /ǝi/ seems like the best bet, and lots of scholarship assumes something like this as an intermediary before Middle Irish monophthongization to /ǝ:/ which produced various modern reflexes.
When it comes to the reconstruction the pronunciation of the fortis sonorants, the palatalized /R'/ poses a problem. No modern Goidelic language preserves all four rhotics distinctly. If I had to bet money on the realization of /R'/ it would actually be a fricative trill [r̝]. It has everything you'd really want for that purpose including massively raised tongue body. After finding that I wasn't the only one with this suspicion, and learning that none other than David Stifter had the same notion, I decided to go ahead and include a fricative trill in this reconstruction for the fortis palatalized rhotic.
If you liked this video and want to help me make more things like it, consider making a pledge at my patreon:
http://patreon.com/azforeman
There you can get access to subscriber only material, like my weekly readings of Shakespeare's sonnets, and also my readings of the King James Bible in 17th century English pronunciation
You can also follow me on twitter at @azforeman
Images of Stiftsbibliothek MS 904, as well as RIA MSs 25 E.23 and 23 P.12 used courtesy of the Irish Script On Screen project (School of Celtic Studies, DIAS) and the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland.
