Page:Alexander Macbain - An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language.djvu/28

 iv. down, and also a few words of the ordinary speech have been recorded by the Classical writers. The language of Brittany came from Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, and it may have found remains in Brittany of the kindred Gaulish tongue. The Brittonic languages—Welsh, Cornish, and Breton—appear first in glosses as early as the eighth century. These glosses are marginal or super-linear translations into Celtic of words or phrases in the Latin texts contained in the MSS. so "glossed." The period of the glosses is known as the "Old" stage of the languages—Old Breton, Old Cornish, Old Welsh. Real literary works do not occur till the "Middle" period of these tongues, commencing with the twelfth century and ending with the sixteenth. Thereafter we have Modern or New Breton and Welsh as the case may be. In this work, New Breton and New Welsh are denoted simply by Breton and Welsh without any qualifying word.

The Gaelic languages—Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic—have a much closer connection with one another than the Brittonic languages. Till the Reformation and, indeed, for a century or more thereafter, the Irish and Scottish Gaelic had a common literary language, though the spoken tongues had diverged considerably, a divergence which can be traced even in the oldest of our Gaelic documents—the Book of Deer. In the eighteenth century Scottish Gaelic broke completely with the Irish and began a literary career of its own with a literary dialect that could be understood easily all over the Highlands and Isles. Manx is closely allied to Scottish Gaelic as it is to the Irish; it is, so far, a remnant of the Gaelic of the Kingdom of the Isles.

The oldest monuments of Gadelic literature are the Ogam inscriptions, which were cut on the stones marking the graves of men of the Gaelic race. They are found in South Ireland, Wales and Eastern Pictland as far as the Shetland Isles, and belong mostly to the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. The alphabet, which is formed on a proto-telegraphic system by so many strokes for each letter above, through, or below a stem line, is as follows:—