Introduction

In the following pages I will present a number of brief discussions of points which are important to the study as a whole, but which do not naturally fit within the flow of the book proper. Some readers will not need to read any of these sections; others may find some of them useful.

Linguistic Terminology and Representation

This book is intended to be read by an audience with a wide range of interests and specialisations. With that in mind, only a limited number of linguistics-centred terms and symbols have been employed. I have not shied away from using these when necessary, however.

Most of these are concerned with pronunciation and involve the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). A useful interactive version of the alphabet can be found at <http://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/ipasounds/ ipa-chart-with-sounds/>. Spellings are represented by <p>, phonemic transcription by /p/ and phonetic by [ph]. The last is hardly ever used here and represents the minute transcription of pronunciation; phonemic implies the larger-scale building blocks which native speakers perceive their language is made up of. Thus, for native English speakers, the pronunciation difference between the first /p/ in <pulp> and the second is not meaningful (although it is in other languages, including Gaelic).

Language Relationship

All of the autochthonous languages of the Atlantic Archipelago are Indo-European in origin (as we will see this is also the case for those recorded languages no longer spoken, notwithstanding a small amount of debateable place-name evidence). Many – probably most – languages of recent immigration also derive from that family (exceptions include Chinese varieties and languages brought from Africa). All Indo-European languages are descended from an unrecorded proto-language, probably spoken by people living in the western Eurasian steppes some 6,000–7,000 years ago. We can make too much of this relationship, however. Celtic languages, such as Gaelic, are not close relatives of the Germanic languages, such as Scots. It would take a specialist, for instance, to recognise that the Gaelic word for ‘father’ (athir) and its Scots equivalent (faither or fadder, depending on the dialect) are actually, if you go back far enough, the same word.