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As the old Gaelic aristocracy was displaced or assimilated, the language lost its prestige and became primarily a peasant language, rather than one of education and government. The spread of the English language has resulted in a vast majority of people of Gaelic ancestry being unable to speak a Goidelic language.
(This is much like the situation in Old English but different from Ancient Greek whose shorter and longer diphthongs were bimoraic and trimoraic, respectively: /ai/ vs. /aːi/.) The inventory of Old Irish long vowels changed significantly over the Old Irish period, but the short vowels changed much less. The following short vowels existed:
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.
A huge wave of Gaelic immigration to Nova Scotia took place between 1815 and 1840, so large that by the mid-19th century Gaelic was the third most common language in Canada after English and French. It is estimated that there were 50,000 Gaelic speakers in Nova Scotia in 1901, more than one-sixth of all Gaelic-speakers in the world at the time ...
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 ...
Gaelic culture and society were centred around the fine (explained below). Gaelic Ireland had a rich oral culture and appreciation of deeper and intellectual pursuits. Filí and draoithe (druids) were held in high regard during Pagan times and orally passed down the history and traditions of their people. Later, many of their spiritual and ...
Gaelic, by itself, is sometimes used to refer to Scottish Gaelic, especially in Scotland, and therefore is ambiguous.Irish and Manx are sometimes referred to as Irish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic (as they are Goidelic or Gaelic languages), but the use of the word Gaelic is unnecessary because the terms Irish and Manx, when used to denote languages, always refer to those languages.
The hypothesis that the languages spoken in Gaul and Great Britain (Gaulish and the Brittonic languages) descended from a common ancestor, separate from the Celtic languages of Ireland, Spain, and Italy, is based on a number of linguistic innovations, principally the evolution of Proto-Celtic * /kʷ/ into /p/ (thus the name "P-Celtic").