Euro
British Pound
Product Description
Solid in three colour paper cover with titles to spine. Some notes , minor underlining and emendations internally.
First edition was 1966, issued as part of the Irish Life and Culture series, and printed by the Three Candles Press for the Cultural Relations Committee ( as far as I can ascertain, simultaneous with the hardcover edition) This is a 1972 reprint.
A history of the language, as well as placing in into a comparative European context, discussing origins, development and grammer/ word order / phonology and much more.
This excellent overview of the Irish language fills a gap no other book can fill. It demonstrates and explains so many peculiarities of Irish that would otherwise baffle the novice student: particles, grammatical mutations or lenition of initial consonants, irregularities of spelling or pronunciation, etc. The book also discusses many unexpected parallels of Irish to other languages, even non-Indo-European ones such as Semitic (Hebrew / Arabic) or even Finno-Ugric (Hungarian). These latter parallels derive from the prehistoric continental Celtic tongue of invaders merging with the long subsumed language of Ireland's original 'pre celtic' inhabitants, whatever it was. The depth of scholarship demonstrates the author's familiarity with a wide variety of language families.
