Irish Bardic Revolution & Its Letter Changes 1200 CE

Some of the Irish phrases which Christopher Nugent gave to Queen Elizabeth I around 1570.  This shows how the Irish letters and thus writing had changed from Druid Akkadian into Irish Celtic.

Transliteration

  1. Coner ea tu
  2. Taim go mash
  3. Go po mash agad
  4. In eolor, t gealug
  5. do lauairt
  6. Abair ladden
  7. Dia leriuean
  8. arona

Post Bardic Word Definitions From This List

  1. tu = you (straight from Latin)
  2. go = I ("for" in modern Irish)
  3. in = you? (formal)
  4. do = do ("for" in modern Irish)
  5. gealug = enlighten? ("bright" in modern Irish)
  6. eolor = direct ("direct" in modern Irish)
  7. abair = say (also modern Irish)
  8. lauairt = Irish
  9. ladden = Latin
  10. dia = God (straight from Latin, also modern Irish)
  11. leriuean = lend aid ("lends" in modern Irish)

So a person "does Irish" but "speaks Latin."

Reference

Shane Angland (June 2, 2012) Queen Elizabeth II and the Nugent Primer. Online at: http://anglandicus.blogspot.com/2012/06/queen-elizabeth-ii-and-nugent-primer.html

Anglo-Normans Take Over Ireland And Effectively Suppress Druid Culture

(November 18, 2024, updated December 25, 2024) In May 1169, Anglo-Norman mercenaries landed in Ireland at the request of Diarmait mac Murchada (Dermot MacMurragh) who was the deposed King of Leinster. He sought their help in regaining his kingship. They achieved this within weeks and raided neighboring kingdoms. This military intervention was sanctioned by King Henry II of England. In return, Diarmait had sworn loyalty to Henry and promised land to the Normans. 

In October 1171, King Henry landed with a large army to assert control over both the Anglo-Normans and the Irish. This intervention was supported by the Roman Catholic Church who saw it as a means of suppressing Druidry, suppressing the still fairly independent Irish Christian church, and way of gaining tax revenue.  

Henry granted Strongbow Leinster as a fiefdom, declared the Norse-Irish towns to be crown land, and arranged the synod of Cashel to take over the Irish church. Many Irish kings also submitted to him, likely in the hope that he would curb Norman expansion, but Henry granted the unconquered kingdom of Meath to Hugh de Lacy. After Henry's departure in 1172, fighting between the Normans and Irish continued. 

The 1175 Treaty of Windsor acknowledged Henry as overlord of the conquered territory and Ruaidrí as overlord of the remainder of Ireland, with Ruaidrí also swearing fealty to Henry. The treaty soon collapsed: Norman lords continued to invade Irish kingdoms and the Irish continued to attack the Normans. In 1177, Henry adopted a new policy. He declared his son John to be the "Lord of Ireland" (i.e. claiming the whole island) and authorised the Norman lords to conquer more land. The territory they held became the Lordship of Ireland, part of the Angevin Empire. The Normans' success has been attributed to military superiority and castle-building, the lack of a unified opposition from the Irish and the support of the church for Henry's intervention.

After this takeover of Ireland the Norman lords wanted to secure their lands by appearing Irish. It was then they started supporting local bards and marrying into noble Irish families. But the bards. by using Druid Akkadian phrases as names in their stories helped preserve the old ways in their tales while at the same time providing a deeper level of meaning to these stories to those listeners still familiar with the old ways.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_invasion_of_Ireland

Irish letters after the Bardic Revolution - 1570

Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) wanted to learn a few Irish phrases to learn at court.  Christopher Nugent, (1544–1602, born into Norman/Irish nobility in Ireland and appointed a Baron by Elizabeth), obliged her and wrote a manuscript outlining the history of the Irish language, its alphabet and a list of phrases with Latin and English translation. 
The top row gives the 27 letters of Irish alphabet at the time while the bottom list shows the Norman/English equivalents where they exist. The Irish alphabet is: A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R Š S T U V X Y Z , G2 Th Amen
The top row list has been simplified relative to the Druid Akkadian letters found in the 1100's version of the Lebor na hUidre shown in the Northern Lineage Rune Chart below.
The Akkadian runic letter "ayin" has become an /o/ while all the original /s/ type letters were replaced with the Latin S. The runic letter /p/ has become /f/ while the runic /r/ has become /p/. The runic letter /r/ now has the Latin form.
The runic letter /c/ has now become one of the /c/ sounds while another /c/ sound is represented by /k/ which is written as a Latin capital "B." which is probably mean to represent the sound of a modern /j/.

Reference

Shane Angland (June 2, 2012) Queen Elizabeth II and the Nugent Primer. Online at: http://anglandicus.blogspot.com/2012/06/queen-elizabeth-ii-and-nugent-primer.html

Lebor na hUidre MS 23 E 25 (Scanned images). Online at Irish Scripts Onscreen:  https://www.isos.dias.ie/RIA/RIA_MS_23_E_25.html#2

The 2 Written Irish Language Changes

(November 19, 2024) The letters of the Irish alphabet have undergone 2 major sound reassignments as it morphed from Druid Akkadian into modern Irish. The first was when the letters were adapted to local spoken Irish from Druid Akkadian shortly after the Normans conquered the country around 1175 CE. The second was the government sponsored reform which took place between 1947 and 1958.

The official standard name for Irish is Gaeilge. Before the 1947 t0 1958 spelling reform, this was spelled Gaedhilge. The language of the medieval Irish literature after the Bardic Revolution of was called Gaoidhealg. Old Irish Akkadian was Goídelc (Ga'u-IDu-ELu-Ku  meaning in Akkadian "breaking-through the channeling of the high-life-power's involvement." This indicates that when this writing was named it was thought to have magical powers.). 

The post-bardic Irish language which survived in rural parts of the country were different from each other (being locally derived) and different from the post-Norman medieval Irish of the literary texts. This modern reform merged the dialects and simplified its spelling and pronunciation. The reformed language was called the Caighdeán Oifigiúil, "the modern standard." The reform removed inter-dialectal silent letters, simplified some letter sequences, and modernized archaic spellings to reflect modern pronunciation. It also removed letters pronounced in some dialects but not in others. 

References

Ó Siadhail, M. (1981). Standard Irish Orthography: An Assessment. The Crane Bag, 5(2), 71–75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30060637

The 18 letters of traditional Irish from one surviving branch before the modern alphabet reform between 1947 and 1958. Compared to the Elizabethan era the alphabet had drastically shrunk indicating that much of the original Druid Akkadian derived Irish language had been lost.

Reference

Joyce, Patrick Weston (1878) A grammar of the Irish language for the use of schools. Online at: https://archive.org/details/grammarofirishla00joycrich/mode/2up?ref=ol