Ozish, the language of the Land of Oz
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History The Gaelic language of the 1800s and Ozish are one and the same. A few definitions first. English as spoken by the Irish I shall call AngloIrish. As spoken by the Scottish, AngloScottish. The modern form of Gaelic in Ireland I'll call Irish and the modern form of Gaelic in Scotland, Scottish. Gaelic in Ireland and Scotland in the 1800s I'll call Ozish and Gaelic previous to 1800 I'll call Gaelic and also use the word Gaelic as a generic whenever.Gaelic previous to 1600 was essentially the same in Ireland, Scotland, Man, Aran, the Hebrides and any of the 100s of islands in the British isles where Gaelic was spoken. Mind, the total population of some of those islands was the same as it is today. One man and a whole bunch of sheep. Local differences existed but everybody was pretty much mutually intelligible. There was a thriving Gaelic literature in Ireland. A lot of manuscripts produced and passed around and a fair amount of printed books published. Nothing much elsewhere. Literacy rate below 1% but that was about par. In the 1600s Gaelic was starting to become irrelevant. English and Latin were the languages useful to the literate class. English was useful to the peasant class too, for communication with the literate class. By 1700 the percentage of Gaelic speakers in Ireland and the Gaelic portions of Scotland have been estimated to be about 80%. By 1800 that was down to 20% and the literati no longer spoke Gaelic at all. Only peasants and folks from the far boonies spoke Gaelic. Literate people did produce some dictionaries and grammars but they didn't actually speak the language. During the 1800s the language dropped some grammar and became Ozish. Still much the same in Ireland and the Gaelic portions of Scotland but by a peculiar morph of attitude, the Saxon inhabitants of most of Scotland decided that they were Gaelic. You can read about this in the last bit of Macaulay's history of England. Most of the clan tartans and for that matter, most of the clans were invented at this time and people who would have punched you right in the mouth for calling them Gaelic 20 years earlier were now wearing kilts and going hoot mon. Well, so to speak. Quite a few Gaelic words were introduced into AngloScottish at this time. By 1900 Ozish had gone extinct. That is, at roughly that time the last children were born who grew up speaking Ozish in the family and with their peers. The last of them died sometime in the 1970s or so. For patriotic and romantic reasons etc, a strong movement to save the language arose in the late 1800s in Ireland but the children of people who spoke Ozish refused to learn the pronunciation as being foreign sounds. They were of the opinion that speaking Gaelic with an AngloIrish accent was as close as could be expected. As far as learning the ins and outs of correct grammar... Over a period of about 50 years, that is 1900 to 1950, Irish came into existence. Kind of the equivalent of pidgin English. Oldsters hollered about it but it did no good. In Scotland the situation was worse. The only speakers of Ozish spoke it with what the Scots considered an AngloIrish accent so they were having none of it. Scottish as resuscitated in Scotland is pronounced with an AngloScottish accent and the grammar is both archaisized and simplified to an extreme degree. Presently there is somewhat of an upsurge in Ireland to speak Irish and it is estimated that somewhere aound 3% of the population can hold a simple conversation and somewhere under 1% consider themselves fluent. |
copyright 2007 by Boq Aru