Text and Meaning: Contributions to a Revised Dictionary of Medieval Irish

In western Scotland and Ireland, Gaelic languages which are remnants of the ancient Celtic languages of these islands, continue to be spoken in an unbroken tradition down to the present day. There exists in Gaelic one of the oldest and richest vernacular literatures in the medieval world stretching back to the sixth century. A vast body of material has survived through the ages and is preserved in libraries in Ireland, Britain and continental Europe. It contains a wide range of material dating from the 7th to the 17th centuries including secular law texts, religious explorations of Heaven and Hell, accounts of the history of the world, exquisite poetry and a body of narrative tales unparalleled anywhere in the world. These texts are written in earlier forms of Gaelic and would be largely impenetrable even to modern Gaelic speakers without the work of generations of scholars who have edited, translated and interpreted the texts.

The primary tool for the interpretation of these texts has been the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of the Irish Language, which was published as 23 separate volumes starting in 1913 and ending in 1976. The completed dictionary runs to over 2000 pages and contains over 35,000 entries. It is the most authoritative and comprehensive dictionary of Irish and is widely considered of immense importance to Celtic and Irish scholarship around the world. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the Dictionary is now between 40 and 100 years old and many entries are well out of date. The proposed project will address this problem by examining 100 new textual editions that were not available to the original compilers of the Dictionary. In many cases these are texts that were completely unknown to the compilers while in other cases more recent and more authoritative editions have surpassed earlier efforts. The project will uncover previously unrecorded words, excise ghost words and suggest new or revised definitions, thereby providing scholars with a more comprehensive and authoritative source than was ever available before, and this will have significant impact on the quality of new textual scholarship for decades to come. In recent years, project staff have added words such as griogchan 'constellation', indladad 'pampering', and ainmesc 'alcohol free', to the Dictionary, as well as borrowings from French and English such as crosboga 'crossbow'. Research has also turned up occasional ironies, such as idirlion, the Modern Irish word for 'Internet', which is shown to have originally meant 'trap'.

The Dictionary was brought into the 21st century in 2007 with the publication, funded by the AHRC, of an electronic edition (www.dil.ie). This made it much more accessible to scholars working in all areas associated with medieval Ireland and Scotland including linguists, historians, textual scholars, archaeologists, folklorists, Indo-Europeanists, and scholars of comparative literature and religion. The new revised Dictionary will contain much new information on words relating to agriculture, medicine, law, music, religion and society that will be of particular interest to historians and archaeologists nationally and internationally, and will trace the origin and development of words over a period of a thousand years.

The Dictionary will be published online and a version will be made freely available for mobile devices. The general user will be able to subscribe to 'Word of the Day' which will introduce them to some of the more significant words and concepts in the early language. The rich vocabulary of the Dictionary is ripe for exploitation by creative writers and thinkers in the modern languages, and project staff will collaborate with authors, translators and terminologists to enable them to reinvigorate the vocabulary of the modern Gaelic languages, which suffered marginalisation and impoverishment in the 19th century, through active engagement with the earlier language.

The proposed project will provide a comprehensive view of the Gaelic languages of Ireland and Scotland from the seventh century to the seventeenth. In addition to its contribution to the scholarly study of the medieval language, it will constitute an unparalleled resource for the enrichment and understanding of the modern languages of these two countries.

The key, non-academic beneficiaries of this research will be writers and translators working in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, as well as language planners engaged in the creation of new terminology in the two languages. The general public in the UK, Ireland and overseas, whether they speak Gaelic or not, will also benefit directly and indirectly from the analysis proposed here.

The electronic Dictionary has enormous potential to contribute to the cultural life of the general public, challenge fixed ideas about Gaelic culture and raise the profile of the Gaelic literary and intellectual tradition. It has already proved to be of considerable interest worldwide with nearly 23000 hits on the site daily, over a third of which come from the US and a quarter from the UK and Ireland (see Case for Support fn. 1). The resource will be enhanced in this new project in order to make it more accessible to the general user (see Pathways to Impact). This enhancement will enable all users to trace the rich history of the language and its speakers stretching back over 1500 years. Changes in the vocabulary often point to interaction with neighbouring peoples including Anglo-Saxons, Welsh, Norse, Latin, Anglo-Norman French and English and reflects innovation as well as colonization. Innovations in vocabulary reflect and record changes in social organisation, religion, dress, medicine, education, music, agriculture, economic activity and much more, all of which can shed light on the lives and thoughts of Gaelic-speaking peoples. By communicating a history of the Gaelic world in terms of single words, we hope to convey something of the complexity and diversity of Gaelic cultural heritage to audiences that might expect to find only conservatism and tradition.

The demise of Gaelic aristocracies in the 17th and 18th centuries led to the gradual marginalisation and impoverishment of Gaelic-speaking peoples and their culture in Ireland and Scotland. This was inevitably accompanied by a loss of status for the languages which resulted in stunted growth in the lexicon and eventual decline. The languages now have varying degrees of state recognition in the three jurisdictions in which they remain (Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland), and sustained efforts have been made to modernise the languages and create terminology appropriate for modern life. Creative writers, translators and terminologists/lexicographers all have a role to play in the revitalisation of language through its vocabulary and the electronic Dictionary can contribute to this agenda by providing access to the rich storehouse of words that have fallen out of use. Through a collaborative programme we hope to empower writers and language planners to augment the expressiveness of the modern languages through an exploration of the continued relevance of historical terms and so to contribute to the sustainability of the languages in the face of increasing influence of English on the lexicon.