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The Celtic word *kaitos is one of the Celtic words appearing most widely in British place-names, and those names are correspondingly important to understanding the phonological history of the Brittonic languages, and how Brittonic words have been borrowed into English and Gaelic. Despite its frequency in English place-names, the word seems ...
Old Irish is the ancestor of all modern Goidelic languages: Modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx. A still older form of Irish is known as Primitive Irish. Fragments of Primitive Irish, mainly personal names, are known from inscriptions on stone written in the Ogham alphabet. The inscriptions date from about the 4th to the 6th centuries.
Scottish Gaelic (/ ˈ ɡ æ l ɪ k /, GAL-ik; endonym: Gàidhlig [ˈkaːlɪkʲ] ⓘ), also known as Scots Gaelic or simply Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland.
As English-speakers held all economic power outside the Highlands and most of it within the Gaidhealtachd, Gaelic monolingualism was fast becoming an economic hindrance. Men tended to learn English before women and children and Gaels tended to use English for economic transactions even if they weren't fluent in it.
Many surnames of Gaelic origin in Ireland and the other Celtic nations derive from ancestors' names, nicknames, or descriptive names.In the first group can be placed surnames such as MacMurrough and MacCarthy, derived from patronymics, or O'Brien and O'Grady, derived from ancestral names.
Irish political leaders, such as Daniel O'Connell (Domhnall Ó Conaill, himself a native speaker), were also critical of the language, seeing it as "backward", with English the language of the future. [28] Economic opportunities for most Irish people arose with the Second Industrial Revolution in the English-speaking British Empire and United ...
A fair number of Gaelic names were borrowed into English or Scots at different periods (e.g. Kenneth, Duncan, Donald, Malcolm, Calum, Lachlan, Alasdair, Iain, Eilidh), although it can sometimes be difficult to tell if the donor language was Irish or Scottish Gaelic (e.g. Deirdre, Rory, Kennedy, Bridget/Bride, Aiden).
The letters Cért, Gétal and Straif, transliterated as Q, NG (or GG) and Z, respectively, were known by the ancient scholastic Oghamists as foilceasta (questions) due to the obsolescence of their original pronunciations: the first two, /kʷ/ and /ɡʷ/, had merged with plain velars in Old Irish, and the third, probably /st/, merged with /s/.