The Breton Language Autobiography of Julien Godest (1905–13): Current Events and Cultural Archaism on the Eve of the 20th Century

Julien Godest (1849–33) was a farmer from Chapelle-Neuve and Callac in the Côtes-d’Armor (north-western Brittany). Unlike most of his fellow agricultural labourers, he was literate and, at some point between 1905–13, he wrote a 300-page autobiography in Breton. He had been solicited to undertake this task by François Jaffrennou (1879–1956), one of the key leaders of the Emsao movement. Godest began this long literary work to testify and to reflect upon his experiences and those of his brother during a crucial period of social, political, geographical, cultural and linguistic change at the end of the 19th century, a period that ushered in what historians define as the “modern age”.Rather than assume the existence of clearly defined cultural entities — for example, Breton or Celtic on the one hand and French on the other — the question of cultural and linguistic contacts raised by the theme of this colloquium induced me to read the text and analyse it in a way that is similar to the manner in which the author himself seems to have perceived his own identity, that is, via cultural change and other recurring events that punctuate his autobiography. In order to provide elements of a response, I shall concentrate on his experiences in the face of social and cultural change, in order to understand what he seems to perceive as fundamentally significant in his own culture. I shall then attempt to shed some light on the nature of this literary text. Finally, and perhaps paradoxically, I shall examine its value as a tool of cultural archaeology.

Fishing, Fishing Boats and Traditional Lore Based on Maritime Memorates Collected in the 19th and 20th Centuries in Ireland and Scotland

This paper will analyse and assess material contained in a corpus of maritime memorates, or stories of the sea, collected in Ireland and Scotland, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is based on the Ulster University research project ‘Stories of the Sea: A Typological Study of Maritime Memorates in Modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic Folklore Traditions’, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and aims to add to previous published studies on this subject, including Fomin and Mac Mathúna 2010, 2015, 2016. The focus of this paper is on matters relating to fishing, fishermen and their boats, in Ireland, especially on the Gaelic-speaking western seaboard, and to a lesser extent in Scotland, during the period under consideration. Most of the narrators and some of the collectors themselves were fishermen, and the close bond and shared beliefs and taboos between informant and collector serves to emphasise the personal nature of the accounts. The information gained from these stories is supplemented here by works of other writers and scholars on Irish vernacular boats and on the practice of fishing and the legends, taboos and other matters associated with it.

A Prague Poem on Purgation?: Five Languages in a Seventeenth Century Irish Manuscript

The history of the Irish Franciscans in continental Europe has been the subject of much scholarly investigation, which has focused mainly on the renowned Louvain college. Although the Irish Franciscans in Prague were less prolific than their Louvain compatriots, the Prague house, active for over 150 years, nevertheless produced many works, ranging from original theological treatises to copies of grammatical and historical texts, both in Latin and in the vernacular. This paper will examine a text from UCD Franciscan Collection MS A 32 f.5, a single paper folio which preserves the only known example of the Czech language in a Gaelic manuscript. The content of that folio sheds light on the relationships between the continental houses, and highlights the more quotidian and less-vaunted aspects of the lives and work of these exiled Irish men of God. The poem in question, entitled ‘Freagra ar et cætera Philip’ (An Answer to Philip’s Et Cætera, FCP hereafter), centres on the ‘evacuation’ difficulties of one Philip Ó Conaill, the hardship this has caused those in his company, and the advice given to Philip on how to cure his ailment. In literary terms, FCP exemplifies the strong interest of the Irish literati at all stages in so-called Rabelaisian humour, and burlesque literature. While the poem itself is unlikely to be added to the canon of Irish literature, nevertheless a number of aspects of its contents are intriguing, and invite investigation and restrained speculation as to the context of its production.

How to Say 'Road' in Irish: Towards Determining a Semantic Derivation of Item #67 (68) from the Swadesh List (Continental and Insular Celtic)

The main goal of the paper is to study Celtic (especially Goidelic) words denoting ‘road’, to collect ranked synonyms, to give motivated etymologies, to exercise a diachronic and comparative study of the use of the names of the ‘road’ in Old, Middle and Modern Irish and in Scottish Gaelic (including comparative data from Continental Celtic and Insular Brittonic languages) and to reveal and describe supposed Goidelic innovations (slige, belach, bóthar). The final aim is to introduce Goidelic data into the described scheme of semantic shift.

In Memoriam Professor Dr. Hildegard L. C. Tristram (1941–2020)

An obituary for the late Hildegard L. C. Tristram, Honorary Professor at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau

Dialectometry and Genetic Demography of Cystic Fibrosis. When Results Converge: The Case of Western Brittany

This article was born out of two separate approaches carried out independently of one another. The first dealt with genetic demography and the second with variational linguistics, aiming to study the population and language of Brittany from a certain perspective. In their recent study of the genetic history of France, Saint Pierre et al. show that Brittany “is substantially closer to the population from north-west Europe than to the north of France, in spite of both being equally geographically close” (2020: 863). They propose that the Bretons’ earliest ancestors could be the descendants of early Neolithic pastoralist nomads from the Steppes (SP) who would have arrived in Brittany (i.e. the ‘NW cluster’) via north-western Europe. The second hypothesis would support the idea of a more recent migration from northern Europe with high SP proportion, i.e., Celtic and/or Anglo-Saxon. Our initial hypothesis is that the convergences in linguistics and genetics may be explained by a unique historical event, namely, the Brittonic settlement of the Armorican peninsula from the 4th through at least the 7th centuries and perhaps as late as the 8th century. The application of linguistic distance measurements in the study of vernacular Breton varieties by means of a dialectometric analysis made it possible to observe clear correspondences between levels of linguistic similarity and the distribution of the genetic pools linked to cystic fibrosis. The convergence of our collective findings is most clearly manifested in the radical opposition of the north-western and the south-eastern zones of Breton-speaking Brittany in terms of the linguistic and genetic data. In our view, the scientific approach inherent to genetic and dialectometric research and the concordance of these data appear to not only reinforce many of the hypotheses advanced previously but to open new avenues for future research.

Name-Avoidance and Circumlocutory Terms in Modern Irish and Scottish Maritime Memorates

In 1942, Seán Ó Súilleabháin’s Handbook of Irish Folklore was produced for collectors of the Irish Folklore Commission. Among many things related to the Irish folklore tradition, the handbook included a section on ‘Fishing Lore’. This initial inquiry was followed by a questionnaire of a fuller scale distributed among the fishermen and members of coastal communities on ‘fishing beliefs’ by the Department of Irish Folklore at UCD in 1979 (see Ní Fhloinn 2018: 352–4 for further detail). Questions relevant to this paper included the following: • Are certain kinds of people or certain animals thought to bring bad luck to the fishermen? • Are people with certain surnames regarded as unlucky? • How do fishermen react to all of these? • What attitude do fishermen have towards red-haired people and red things in general? The answers have since been carefully documented by the Department of Irish Folklore. Most recently, results of research into a specific aspect of the occupational lore of Irish fishermen, “namely, the idea that it was unlucky to mention certain words and entities while at sea” (Ní Fhloinn 2018: 13) was published. Drawing upon Ní Fhloinn’s methodological framework, I would like to examine the corpus of maritime memorates collected by Ulster University’s Stories of the Sea project since 2010 drawing particular attention to various circumlocutory fishing terms and the fishermen’s sociocultural practice of name-avoidance.

Celtic Correspondences: Letters from Whitley Stokes to Adolphe Pictet and from Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville to Ernst Windisch

When Johann Caspar Zeuss laid the foundations of modern Celtic Philology with his Grammatica Celtica (1853), he had at least three immediate forerunners: the English physician and anthropologist James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848) with his book The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations (1831), the Swiss specialist in ballistics and amateur linguist Adolphe Pictet (1799–1875) with his essay ‘De l’affinité des langues celtiques avec le sanscrit’ (1836), and the German founding father of Comparative Philology Franz Bopp (1791–1867) with his treatise ‘Über die celtischen Sprachen vom Gesichtspunkt der vergleichenden Sprachforschung’ (1838). However, as Prichard had died as early as 1848 and Bopp had moved on to studying other branches of Indo-European, it was only Adolphe Pictet who continued his Celtic researches in the wake of Zeuss’ seminal work, publishing articles in scholarly periodicals and corresponding with fellow scholars in Ireland, Britain, France and Germany. For the last sixteen years of his life, Pictet exchanged letters with Whitley Stokes, who was just beginning to make his name in Celtic Philology at that time. While Pictet’s letters to Stokes have yet to be traced, 26 letters and two postcards from Stokes to Pictet are extant among the papers of Adolphe Pictet in the Library of Geneva. Among the papers of the German Celticist and Indologist Ernst Windisch (1844–1918), which are preserved in the Archive of the University of Leipzig, the most extensive collection of letters and postcards in the field of Celtic Studies is due to Kuno Meyer (1858–1919), who was among Windisch’s earliest, most faithful and most productive pupils. Next to this, the most extensive Celtic correspondence of Windisch appears to have been with his French colleague Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville (1827–1910), first professor of Celtic at the Collège de France and long-time editor of Révue celtique. Unlike Windisch, who was an Indo-Europeanist by training and continued to combine an interest in ancient Ireland with one in ancient India for most of his active academic career, d’Arbois de Jubainville was first and foremost an historian with a strong archaeological bent. Both men, however, shared a keen interest in the fabric of ancient civilisations and its reflection in literature. Between 1884 and 1907, more than fifty letters and postcards from d’Arbois to Windisch testify to the cordial relationship between the two scholars, who are among the most important founding fathers of Celtic Studies as an academic discipline in France and Germany. In this paper, I shall try to present an overview of these letters, pointing out in which ways and to which extent they reflect specific problems of research, the institutional setting of Celtic Studies in the decades around 1900, and the personality of the letter writers. In conclusion I shall address the question to what extent a comprehensive analysis and appraisal of as yet unpublished scholarly letters may contribute not only to a profounder understanding of the formation and early history of Celtic Studies, but also to an enhanced appreciation of its present situation.

In Memoriam Jean Le Dû (1938–2020)

An obituary for the late Jean Le Dû, Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Brittany

Introduction

Introduction to the Proceedings of the 9th International Colloquium of the Societas Celto-Slavica