HTY/POL 301 Career Prep and HTY 339: Historiographical Essays and HTY 499/POL 499 Senior Seminar: Gaelic

In this book, Aidan Doyle traces the history of the Irish language from the time of the Norman invasion at the end of the 12th century to independence in 1922, combining political, cultural, and linguistic history. The book is divided into seven main chapters that focus on a specific period in the history of the language; they each begin with a discussion of the external history and position of the Irish language in the period, before moving on to investigate theimportant internal changes that took place at that time. A History of the Irish Language makes available for the first time material that has previously been inaccessible to students and scholars whocannot read Irish, and will be a valuable resource not only for undergraduate students of the language, but for all those interested in Irish history and culture.

The Sound Structure of Modern Irish contains a comprehensive description of the phonology of Irish. Based on the main forms of the language, it offers an analysis of the segments and the processes in its sound system. Each section begins with a description of the area of phonology which is the subject - such as stress patterns, phonotactics, epenthesis or metathesis - and then proceeds to consider the special aspects of this subject from a theoretical and typological perspective. The book pays particular attention to key processes in the sound system of modern Irish. The two most important of these are palatalisation and initial mutation, phenomena which are central to Irish and the analysis of which has consequences for general phonological theory. The other main emphasis in the book is on a typological comparison of several different languages, all of which show palatalisation and/or initial mutation as part of their systems. The different forms of Celtic, Slavic languages, Romance dialects and languages along with languages such as Finnish, Fula, Nivkh and Southern Paiute are considered to find out how processes which are phonetic in origin (external sandhi) can become functionalised and integrated into the morphosyntactic system of a language.

    Today Ireland's population is rising, immigration outpaces emigration, most families have two or at most three children, and full-time farmers are in steady decline. But the opposite was true for more than a century, from the great famine of the 1840s until the 1960s. Between 1922 and 1966--most of the first fifty years after independence--the population of Ireland was falling, in the 1950s as rapidly as in the 1880s. Mary Daly's The Slow Failure examines not just the reasons for the decline, but the responses to it by politicians, academics, journalists, churchmen, and others who publicly agonized over their nation's "slow failure." Eager to reverse population decline but fearful that economic development would undermine Irish national identity, they fashioned statistical evidence to support ultimately fruitless policies to encourage large, rural farm families. Focusing on both Irish government and society, Daly places Ireland's population history in the mainstream history of independent Ireland.     Daly's research reveals how pastoral visions of an ideal Ireland made it virtually impossible to reverse the fall in population. Promoting large families, for example, contributed to late marriages, actually slowing population growth further. The crucial issue of emigration failed to attract serious government attention except during World War II; successive Irish governments refused to provide welfare services for emigrants, leaving that role to the Catholic Church. Daly takes these and other elements of an often-sad story, weaving them into essential reading for understanding modern Irish history