TL;DRAbstract
At the end of the sixteenth century, when Trinity College was founded, the relative sociolinguistic status of Irish and English was, allowing for obvious differences of scale, comparable to the relative status of French and English at the end of the twentieth century. English was the language of a more powerful polity, and increasingly a knowledge of it was being recognized as necessary for any Irish speaker who entertained ambitions beyond his own language community. And, even within the Irish-speaking com munity itself, those who had once held positions of social pres tige were being quickly diminished by their ignorance of the lan guage of those who were gaining political power in Ireland. Yet vestiges of an older cultural self-assurance continued to be found in Irish-speaking society. For example, Aodh Mor O Neill, who led the Ulster resistance to the Elizabethan conquest, though he certainly knew English well, wrote or dictated most of his surviv ing dispatches in Irish, even when
Chat with Paper
AI Agents for this Paper
At the end of the sixteenth century, when Trinity College was founded, the relative sociolinguistic status of Irish and English was, allowing for obvious differences of scale, comparable to the relative status of French and English at the end of the twentieth century. English was the language of a more powerful polity, and increasingly a knowledge of it was being recognized as necessary for any Irish speaker who entertained ambitions beyond his own language community. And, even within the Irish-speaking com munity itself, those who had once held positions of social pres tige were being quickly diminished by their ignorance of the lan guage of those who were gaining political power in Ireland. Yet vestiges of an older cultural self-assurance continued to be found in Irish-speaking society. For example, Aodh Mor O Neill, who led the Ulster resistance to the Elizabethan conquest, though he certainly knew English well, wrote or dictated most of his surviv ing dispatches in Irish, even when
Keywords
Chat
Click to start Chat