Hello folks,
just a quick note to offer some moral support
I am the first person to fully resurrect a moribund dialect of Scottish Gaelic (Cowal) and raise the first generation of new native speakers (I have four children). Luckily of course I had hours of archive recordings to work with and two native speakers of neighbouring dialects, which is of course like night and day compared to what you guys are trying to achieve here!
I think it's just wonderful and I am brimming over with respect. An "intellectual venture" it may still be, but there's so much ambition in evidence at the site to do everything possible to bring it on as far as it can go. Great to see and so good also to see how strictly you are working from what you know and are adopting nothing until you have done everything possible to eliminate reasonable doubt. I recognise the instinct however to do this without scuppering the possibility of the language seeing use in the meantime. I cannot count the times I revised and revised again forms which I had taken on and later had to alter, even just slightly! But that's the road we walk. To really take on something like this is not the sort of thing you do by halves!
The odd thing is that although I grew up in Cowal and speak the language of what I feel to be my home, my initial research into a moribund dialect was into that of Caithness, because my mother's people came from there to a man, Scots speakers from Bower and Watten and Gaelic speakers from Latheron and Dunbeath. I am tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed and my heritage is full of Gunns, Stevens and Barnies. I found very little in the way of recordings however and very little of any other evidence and so was initially put off. I went home to Cowal for the first time in ten years and was hit with a powerful dose of nostalgia which I had not expected and the rest is history.
I have been to the website here a few times over the last few years and have watched it grow, but due to my work with Gaelic, I never felt able to contribute anything. I still don't in an active sense, as we have moved into the next phase of the project on Cowal -taking it to the rest of Mid-Argyll and on into the rest of Scotland, providing infrastructure and support for those wishing to learn something other than 'Mid-Minch' Standard (Western Isles / Skye) Gaelic. DROITSEACH -you can find it on Facebook. All posts are bilingual....
But.... I intend to hover regularly and am finding Norn easy enough to pick up from having spent this evening pouring over the first six lessons, approximating general intonation from what I know of Norwegian. I am not daft enough to say that I will delve wholesale into it for the moment -know thyself!
but if at some stage the tuition side of things develops at the site or otherwise, I would very much like to be a hobby-learner, like the good few people to whom I have taught Gaelic on and off who will perhaps never get past the basics because of a lack of time/commitment, but who enjoy it thoroughly all the same!
I believe there will be a good portion of words which can be picked out from especially Lewis Gaelic which would be of use:
sgudal : rubbish (sgudal?)
slaodach : slow (sluda?)
tobhta : a ruin (toft?)
You probably have all of these anyway (I know you have 'tobhta', but haven't checked your dictionary for the others), but Oftedal gives a list of Norse borrowings in the back of his book 'The Gaelic of Leurbost' some of which might be of use.
All the very best for 2013 here at Nynorn!
Slàn leibh air an àm!
(health be with you for now)
-
Àdhamh
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