Week Five

Hello everyone! I hope you have enjoyed your week. 

This week, I have mostly been researching the history and background of Gaelic poetry. I found that Gaelic poetry is separated into two eras: The Classic and Modern eras. In the classic era,  which begins sometime around 800 A.D. and ends around 1730, poets were educated aristocrats that received a great amount of training in Gaelic language, phonetics, meter and history. The literary style was far more archaic than the vernacular of that current time, gearing it towards the more educated members of society. However, this began to change after shifts in government occurred and, possibly, because of contact with non-Gaelic speakers. The classic era bled into the beginning of the modern era, which was sometime around 1600 and was most prosperous between 1640 and 1830. In the modern era, poetry was less of a profession for educated aristocrats and started to represent every class in society. Poetry was written in layman terms and the poetic rules began to change. 

I met with the group researching Gaelic and found out that I have been scanning the poetry correctly and have indeed been finding words with hiatus. Hiatus words are, as a reminder, words that, to an English speaker, may sound like they have two syllables, but in fact have one syllable, according to a native Gaelic speaker. Hiatus words typically have a vowel, followed by a consonant (usually /b/, /d/, /g/, /m/, or /t/), followed by an /h/, and then another vowel. An example would be the word latha meaning, “day.”

I have started to struggle a bit with my own language. I’ve moved on to creating morphemes (words) and have found it to be rather difficult. There are so many possibilities and combinations I can make with all the vowels/consonants/sounds I have selected. It is a bit overwhelming. I also have to take syntax (grammar) into account while I am creating these words. I have come up with a complicated pronoun system which is not yet complete. I will elaborate on that next time. I am truly enjoying this process, though. It gives me a lot of joy to be able to work on creating a world of my own and I am so happy to have all of the support and help from my advisors at the school and at the U of A. I hope you all have a great week and, as always, thank you for reading!