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Biff and whiff, baker’s fog and lu’sknikn, pie social and milling frolic – these are just a few examples of the distinctive language of Cape Breton Island, where a puck is a forceful blow and a Cape Breton pork pie is filled with dates, not pork. The first regional dictionary devoted to the island’s linguistic and cultural history, the Dictionary of Cape Breton English is a fascinating record of the island’s rich vocabulary. Dictionary entries include supporting quotations culled from the editors’ extensive interviews with Cape Bretoners and considerable study of regional variation, as well as definitions, selected pronunciations, parts of speech, variant forms, related words, sources, and notes, giving the reader in-depth information on every aspect of Cape Breton culture. A substantial and long-awaited work of linguistic research that captures Cape Breton’s social, economic, and cultural life through the island’s language, the Dictionary of Cape Breton English can be read with interest by Backlanders, Bay byes, and those from away alike.

No detailed description available for \"A Grammar of Modern Breton\".

No detailed description available for \"A Handbook of Modern Spoken Breton\".

No detailed description available for \"A Grammar of Modern Breton\".

Among Canada’s pioneer poets John MacLean is uniquely Am Bàrd MacGilleathan. His ‘The Gloomy Forest’ gave an eloquent account of tree-felling challenges facing Highland settlers. MacLean’s background in fertile Tiree, where his bardic skills developed, was very different. This paper focuses on a friendship between the bard and a priest, Colin Grant, who shared his knowledge of clan-based society. The friendship flourished in an area of Nova Scotia where faith communities met. Protestants from the northern Highlands put down roots in Pictou while Catholics from further west settled in Antigonish and Cape Breton. The personal friendship reflected a period of shared Gaelic culture when clergy were in short supply. Scripture in Gaelic helped to establish Calvinist values, while Catholic belief and practice continued to draw on an imaginative folk-culture. The bard’s praise-poetry for the priest followed him to death, but MacLean turned to spiritual verse as faith communities drew apart.

There is general agreement in the burgeoning literature on the subject that translation plays a key role in minority languages, fulfilling a variety of functions, including bolstering the literary canon. This leads to a prevalent assumption that this veritable entails a dependence on translation that renders minority languages ‘weak’. Following a theoretical review of the literature and a brief presentation of the languages, this paper discusses the results of a study based on a broad-based, original dataset representative of the wide range of literature currently available in Breton and Welsh. The paper concludes that a portrayal of minority language literary systems as ‘weak’ is overly simplistic and fails to address and attempt to explain the factors underpinning the complex and often contradictory dynamics played by translation both within and between such languages. Hi ha un acord general en els estudis, que van proliferant, que expliquen el paper clau de la traducció en les llengües minoritàries: hi compleix una varietat de funcions, incloent-hi reforçar el cànon literari. Això fa assumir predominantment que aquest fet comporta realment una dependència de la traducció que fa que les llengües minoritàries siguin «febles». Després de revisar teòricament aquests estudis i de presentar breument les llengües, en aquest article es discuteixen els resultats d’un estudi basat en un conjunt de dades original i ampli que representa un bon ventall de literatura actualment disponible en bretó i gal·lès. L’article arriba a la conclusió que representar els sistemes literaris de llengües minoritàries com a «febles» és massa simplista i no aborda ni intenta explicar els factors que sustenten la dinàmica complexa i sovint contradictòria de la traducció tant dins com entre aquestes llengües.

This work explores the coupling of person-split nominative objects with anomalous subjects (Jahnsson’s Rule (JR), Person-Case Constraint (PCC)). In Breton, split-nominative objects spread from an Icelandic-like combination with oblique subjects of unaccusatives, to Finnish-like combinations with subjects of transitives in constructions like the imperative, and then retreated piecewise. These changes admit of externalist sources, such as frequency entrenchment and analogy over clitic forms, but are bounded by persistent coupling of split-nominative objects with anomalous subjects, and disfavour external sources for it like ambiguity avoidance. An approach is set out through constraints on φ-dependencies, their relationship to case and licensing, and their interaction with grammaticalisable partial φ-specification, building on other work on JR/PCC. The anomalies of the restricting subject are analysed as person-only specification, and extended from quirky obliques to pronouns minimal in absence of number + n/N: imperative pro and human impersonals. The ineffability or accusative of the restricted persons is analysed through the integration of dependent case into Φ/Case theory but apparent syntactic variation is modelled through externalisation.

Un exemplaire imprimé de la Vulgate, datant de 1513, et conservé à la Médiathèque de Quimper, porte une série de notes manuscrites en moyen-breton qui énumèrent, entre autres, des offices célébrés en 1576 par le chapelain de Bozloy - la chapelle de Bozloy en Pleudaniel appartenant sans doute à François du Camera, qui a laissé sa marque de propriété sur l'imprimé.

Language documentation faces a persistent and pervasive problem: How much material is enough to represent a language fully? How much text would we need to sample the full phoneme inventory of a language? In the phonetic/phonemic domain, what proportion of the phoneme inventory can we expect to sample in a text of a given length? Answering these questions in a quantifiable way is tricky, but asking them is necessary. The cumulative collection of Illustrative Texts published in the Illustration series in this journal over more than four decades (mostly renditions of the ‘North Wind and the Sun’) gives us an ideal dataset for pursuing these questions. Here we investigate a tractable subset of the above questions, namely: What proportion of a language’s phoneme inventory do these texts enable us to recover, in the minimal sense of having at least one allophone of each phoneme? We find that, even with this low bar, only three languages (Modern Greek, Shipibo and the Treger dialect of Breton) attest all phonemes in these texts. Unsurprisingly, these languages sit at the low end of phoneme inventory sizes (respectively 23, 24 and 36 phonemes). We then estimate the rate at which phonemes are sampled in the Illustrative Texts and extrapolate to see how much text it might take to display a language’s full inventory. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for linguistics in its quest to represent the world’s phonetic diversity, and for JIPA in its design requirements for Illustrations and in particular whether supplementary panphonic texts should be included.

In this paper, I will discuss double plural marking found in various language mixing pairs such as Ewe English, Hiaki Spanish, Bantu English, Bantu French and Greek Turkish. I will contrast this double marking, a case of multiple exponence, to better studied cases of double marking of plurality in languages such as Amharic and Breton. I will argue that double marking can be treated uniformly as an instance of split plurality and offer an analysis thereof within the framework of Distributed Morphology. I will then discuss why the plural, as opposed to other numbers, and why language mixing favor doubling. I will argue that double marking is favored in the context of the plural as plurality is manifold, being associated with two semantic primitives in the universal functional spine. Language mixing situations have been argued to show analyticity and thus double marking is favored in those.