Single Review on past events

What do an Irish pub in Konstanz and the Abbey of St. Gallen have in common? – asked Elliott Lash at the beginning of his talk on “Early Irish as a continental European language – Medieval Mobility and Comparative Syntax”. “There is a connection between Ireland and the continent, especially between Ireland and the Bodensee region that is found not only today but also in the past”, he explained.

Elliott Lash is interested in the history and development of Irish language, mainly in language change and comparative syntax. Old Irish was spoken and written in Ireland and Irish foundations in continental Europe from the 6th to 9th century and attested both in approximately 53 contemporary manuscripts written in the 8th and 9th centuries, as well as in later manuscripts copied during the Middle Irish and early Modern Irish periods (900-1200, 1200-1600 respectively). “My concentration today is on the contemporary texts and the contexts for the transmission of the manuscripts that they are found in”. There are Irish manuscripts in German libraries (Berlin, Dresden, Jena, Fulda, Würzburg, Karlsruhe, München), but also in Switzerland (Bern, Engelberg, Einsiedeln, Zürich, Sankt Gallen), Austria (Vienna, Sankt Paul in Lavanttal), France (St. Omer, Cambrai, Laon, Nancy, Paris, Orléans) and Italy (Turin, Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples).

The linguist differentiates several stages of Irish influence on the mainland: the Irish Perigrinatio period (mid-6th – late 7th centuries), the Carolingian Renaissance (mid-8th – late 9th centuries) and the Schottenklöster (late 11th – 12th centuries). “The last period left its mark in Konstanz in the name Schottenplatz and the street Schottenstraße, which marks the area associated with the Schottenkloster of St. Jacob which was founded in 1142. The other remnant of this Kloster is the Schottenkappelle in the district named Paradies”.

And finally, as consequence of the Tudor conquest of Ireland (1530s onward) many Irish people, known as the Wild Geese, fled to European mainland and joined the armies of catholic countries, such as Spain. “Starting in the 1580s, catholic Irish colleges began to be founded in various European cities to educate Irishmen unable to find catholic-based education in Ireland. After 1607, in which some major Irish noblemen left Ireland for France, an event known as the Flight of the Earls or the End of the Gaelic Order in Ireland, some of the Irish colleges also served as centres for the preservation of Irish language and culture. Most notable in this regard are the Four Masters of Louvain who produced the Annals of the Four Masters, a comprehensive history of Ireland up to the mid-17th century”.

During the Carolingian Renaissance many of the Irish texts that were later brought to Europe were produced. As examples, Elliott Lash presented the Codex Paulinus Wirziburgensis that was made in Ireland in the 8th century and brought to Würzburg in the 9th century. It contains the 13 epistles of Paul the Apostle in Latin, as well as around 3,000 glosses in early Irish and many in Latin; or the Codex Sangallensis, written in an Irish scriptorium around 845 and brought to the Abbey of Sankt Gallen soon afterwards. It contains the Institutiones Grammaticae (Foundation of Grammar) by Priscian of Caesarea, a 6th century Roman grammarian. Out of a total of 9,400 glosses, 3,478 are in early Irish.

To analyze these old texts the linguist uses different sources: digitized manuscripts (with background commentary) which are made available in collected archives and library collections, untagged corpora, digital editions with built-in concordance capabilities and digital editions with additional part-of-speech tagging. “Digitization helps to increase knowledge about previous states of any given language as well as facilitating research into language change”. But all of these resources also have a general problem: They are not searchable for syntactic information and only some are searchable for lexical information. This leads to low precision errors (too much data) and low recall errors (too little data).

To address these problems, the linguist developed the Parsed Old and Middle Irish Corpus (POMIC), which is a corpus of previously edited texts in Old and Middle Irish that have been annotated with linguistic information (morphology and syntax). POMIC provides easy access to a lot of data (approximately 2,500 sentences), so a more accurate and representative picture of the grammar can be obtained than by just collecting examples by hand. It currently contains 14 fully parsed and tagged texts from the 7th to 11th centuries and is hosted by the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. The corpus can be understood as a work in progress and future additions are envisioned which will include texts written at the end of the Middle Irish period (up to around 1200) as well as very early legal material that may, in some cases, be dated to the 7th century.