A preliminary assessment of the Survey of the Gaelic :: Scottish Gaelic dialectology

Scottish Celtic emphasisology A preliminary assessment of the Survey of the GaelicDialects of ScotlandBetween 1994 and 1997, the put down questionnaires of the Survey of theGaelic Dialects of Scotland were published as a five-volume series (O Dochartaigh 1994-97), faceing peg phonetic transcriptions of over 200 speakers responding to a fortypagequestionnaire. This publication marks the coming of a project of nearly fiftyyears duration the main body of the interviews took place between 1950 and 1970across much of the Scottish mainland as well as the Western Isles. In many cases, someof the in truth last Gaelic speakers in a particular region were interviewed, and we thereof havetranscribed materialand some audio recordingsof dialects that are at a time practicallyextinct. Naturally, the historic quality of these transcribed and audio records rendersthem all the much valuable for close study.This paper will assess the current responsibility of Scottish Gaelic dialect study, w ith aparticular focus on the Surveys current and future contributions. Designed in 1950 byKenneth Jackson to elicit data in spurting phonetic and phonological questions of some(prenominal)regional and historical interest, the original Survey focused on orthoepy variation,providing limited information on morphology (although see especially OMaolalaigh1999), and virtually none on syntactic variation or lexical choice. With thepublication of the Surveys raw data in the form of unanalyzed narrow transcriptions, itis appropriate now to ascertain what we can produce from the published material.However, in the approximately 50 years since the fieldpiece of work for the Survey wasbegun, methods, goals, and principles of dialect study have changed dramatically (cf.Kretzschmar 1996) furthermore, advances in media technologies have enabled linguiststo analyze and to present data in compelling new ways (cf. Kretzschmar & Konopka1996). In new years there has been an important move towards a d iscipline-wideagreement on best practices for dialect study, language data management, and thepresentation of data and psycho abstract (cf. Methods XI Conference on Methods inDialectology, August 2002, Joensuu, Finland the E-MELD website and affiliated workthe Linguistic Data Archiving Project at CNRS, etc). The presentation will arguewith a discussion of desiderata for Scottish Gaelic dialect study, and for the presentationand analysis of Gaelic dialect data.