Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/24

Rh which little is known for certain, except that they happened a very long time ago. These are:—

1. The Goidelic (or Gaelic), consisting of the three languages, or properly the three dialects, known as the Gaelic of Ireland, of the Scottish Highlands, and of the Isle of Man. It has been said, with some truth, that these three are as far apart as three dialects of the same language can well be, but are not sufficiently far apart to be counted as three distinct languages. Until the first half of the eighteenth century the written Gaelic of the Scottish Highlands differed from that of Ireland scarcely more than the written English of London differs from that of New York. Even now, though the use of the sixth and seventh century Latin minuscules, which people choose to call "Irish" letters, has been dropped in Scotland, any one who can read the one dialect will have little difficulty in reading the other. Manx adopted in the seventeenth century an attempted, but not very successful, phonetic spelling, based partly on Welsh and partly on English, and therefore looks on paper very different from its sister languages; but it takes a Gaelic-speaking Highlander of intelligence a very short time to get to understand spoken Manx, though spoken Irish (except the Ulster dialect) is more difficult to him. Possibly Pictish, if it was Celtic at all, which is uncertain, was of the Gaelic branch, for we find but little of any language difficulty when St. Columba and his fellow-missionaries, whose own speech certainly was Gaelic, were evangelising among the Picts. But the absence of such mention proves very little, for Christian missionaries, from Pentecost onwards, have not infrequently made light of the linguistic barrier, and we really know next to nothing about Pictish.

2. The Brythonic (or British), consisting of Welsh,