Seo pàirt dheth:
I say language but Gaelic isn't one, not really. Its vocabulary is tiny, with no form of saying yes or no and attuned to a distant, pre-techonological world. It's essentially a kind of rural patois, a bonsai idiolect; a way of specifying concepts central to a particular, highly codified way of life.
You might think for, for example, the the word sgriob is just a bad hand at scrabble; its actually the Gaelic word describing the tingle of anticipation felt in the upper lip before drinking whisky. The fact that Gaelic has a six-letter word for this while english has a twelve-word phrase reveals a lot about Gaelic ways and priorities. One of the classic pleasures of watching Gaelic television, in the days when it amounted to no more than shows such as Eorpa and Cuntas, was hearing a blizzard of - to the lowland ear - gibberish being punctuated by familiar words coined since mechanism and the discovery ofelectricity.'
Air a sgrìobhadh le fear ris an canar Allan Brown.
Bha teans ann cuideachd airson seann charaid a' chanain Micheal Fry:
"The Gaelic lobby is powerful in Scotland because there are a lot of fairy tales about the suppression of the the culture and how terribly fascist it all was," says historian and author Michael Fry. "The culture died out because the Gaels themselves did not want to maintain it. They all decided to emigrate and go where the weather was better. So, all this is kept going by a small circle of Gaelic-speaking intellectuals who want to create jobs for themselves."
Agus:
"You can drag corpses out of the grave and pump air into their lungs, but if they are already dead they will not survive, and that is how it is with Gaelic culture."
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