Rachel Carpenter

“Whichever way you throw me, I will stand”: the official motto of the Isle of Man perfectly describes the Celtic languages, their histories, their present endangered and/or revived statuses, and captures the general attitude of Celtic speakers towards their languages. One such speaker and a ...

The role of heroine in Vietnamese and Chinese cultures is defined differently in different time periods as values and norms are redefined in response to both internal and external influences on Vietnamese and Chinese society, including war, famine, economic recessions, and political movements. The traditional role of the woman in both Vietnamese and Chinese cultures is that of the filial daughter and submissive wife; however, in times of social upheaval the “traditional lady” (Tai 1992: 88-113) is permitted to morph into a heroine. Such heroines of both China and Vietnam are women that deviate from the conventional image of the ideal female for socially acceptable reasons.  Through exploring how Vietnamese and Chinese heroines are constructed in history as well as in literature this paper will reveal how ordinary women become extraordinary heroines.

All humans use language to forge a connection to their surroundings. One method of forging such a connection is through the mechanism of naming. Place-names, once given, acquire culturally and socially significant meanings through their association with stories (historical or fictional in nature) as well as through the navigation of the natural landscape, with the giving of directions becoming reliant on familiarity with area place-names.  The act of naming can then be manipulated by incoming cultural groups or even by other more dominant groups within the same culture to assert their dominance over the original inhabitants of an area. In the course of this term paper, three examples of such occurrences will be presented and discussed. The Isle of Man serves as the first case study- demonstrating the effects of Norse settlers and the influence of the modern English-dominant United Kingdom. The Isle of Lewis, under the same influences as the Isle of Man is also considered. The third case study is much closer to home (at least for me) - that of the renaming of roads by the United States government in Pennsylvania in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These brief case studies will be used to explore the possible circumstances in which naming has been used to assert cultural, linguistic, or social dominance through the obliteration of original appellations as well as the possible outcomes of episodes of renaming.

Mac, mac, mac, mab, mab, mab- all mean ‘son’, inis, innis, hinjey, enez, ynys, enys - all mean ‘island.’ Anyone can see the similarities within these two cognate sets from orthographic similarity alone. This is because Irish, Scottish, Manx, Breton, Welsh, and Cornish are related. As the six remaining Celtic languages, they unsurprisingly share similarities in their phonetics, phonology, semantics, morphology, and syntax. However, the exact relationship between these languages and their predecessors has long been disputed in Celtic linguistics. Even today, the battle continues between two firmly-entrenched camps of scholars- those who favor the traditional P-Celtic and Q-Celtic divisions of the Celtic family tree, and those who support the unification of the Brythonic and Goidelic branches of the tree under Insular Celtic, with this latter idea being the Insular Celtic hypothesis. While much reconstructive work has been done, and much evidence has been brought forth, both for and against the existence of Insular Celtic, no one scholar has attempted a phonetic reconstruction of this hypothesized proto-language from its six modern descendents. In the pages that follow, I will introduce you to the Celtic languages; explore the controversy surrounding the structure of the Celtic family tree; and present a partial phonetic reconstruction of Insular Celtic through the application of the comparative method as outlined by Lyle Campbell (2006) to self-collected data from the summers of 2009 and 2010 in my efforts to offer you a novel perspective on an on-going debate in the field of historical Celtic linguistics.