A brief and rough guide to the language groups of Ireland and Britain, specifically what does Bede mean, writing before 731, when he notes the use of five languages in Britain: English, British, Irish, Pictish and Latin (HE I.1)? Let's deal with the so-called Celtic group first: By British, Bede means what is now called Welsh in English, but this term could be expanded to encompass all the Brythonic/Brittonic languages, known to linguists as the P-Celtic group. Three British languages survive: Welsh, Cornish, and Breton; we have lost Cumbric, and ...

A certain, quite incidental, post has piqued a surprising amount of interest; thus, I'm reposting some points from previous posts over the years which may be of interest: a very brief and rough guide to the linguistic history of Britain and Ireland in the early middle ages ... The first English Historian, Bede (Old English: Bēda, c. 672-73 – 26 May 735), notes the use of five languages in Britain: English, British, Irish, Pictish and Latin (HE I. 1). Latin was the language of the Church.

Well, this is spectacularly misinformed. This is a map of early Irish monastic settlements in Britain and the continent during the early middle ages: not a period characterized by anti-Judaism (notwithstanding the likes of Agobard of Lyon: a splenetic bigot) and certainly not ...

https://twitter.com/hunkydory99/status/1869449396729040908

a feature of Irish monasticism, which put an unusually strong emphasis on the study of Hebrew (yes, really) as part of the three sacred languages (tres linguae sacrae). It's possible that one of the most influential (right down to Finnegans Wake) Hiberno-Latinists was Jewish.

A long thread on Joyce, the Limerick Boycott of 1904, and the shadow of the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903: 'The ostensibly insouciant badinage in Barney Kiernan’s on the subject of Bloom's putative infanticide echoes the charges that underpin the medieval catalogue of alleged ... ritual murder invoked by Creagh in Limerick that same year: "They slew St Stephen, the First Martyr, and St James the Apostle, and ever since as often as opportunity offered they did not hesitate to shed Christian blood, and that even in the meanest and most cruel manner ...

Ah, more Truths Universally Acknowledged about Ireland during WWII That Aren't Actually True. There is nothing new about disinformation. Anyone who bases polemical arguments which have little to do with being authentic to historical context, on press clippings should read this: difp.ie/volume-7/1945/…

'This ‘book of condolences’ myth is widespread: it is part of mainstream publicly-available accounts of Irish neutrality. For example, it appears in the first and highest ranked article in a Google search on “Irish neutrality”; it arises in tourist guides’ talks ... it is cited by secondary school students of history; it is a constant in public and political discourse in Ireland;and it is part of media discourse on Irish neutrality abroad. Its ubiquity is connected to the activities of a significant number of anti-neutrality academics ...