ABSTRACT

Among the principal Celtic languages, Irish is conspicuous for the paucity of printed production between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Various explanations have been advanced for this by Irish scholars and historians. Among them number suggestions that, since printing was an urban phenomenon, and since towns in Ireland were largely English-speaking, printers therefore lacked the necessary language skills. This paper evaluates such explanations through an exploration of printing in Ireland of texts in Celtic languages other than Irish. More was printed in Welsh than in Irish in Dublin in the 1740s and 1760s, while two substantial collections of poetry in Scottish Gaelic were printed in Cork and Galway around 1800. The paper concludes that Irish printers could work in different languages, and their supposed lack of linguistic skills was not therefore a major factor in preventing the production of printed Irish.

摘要

在凯尔特语的主要语言中，爱尔兰人对17世纪至19世纪间印刷品的匮乏尤为突出。爱尔兰学者和历史学家对此提出了各种解释。在这些建议中，有许多建议认为，由于印刷是一种城市现象，并且由于爱尔兰的城镇大多是讲英语的，因此印刷商缺乏必要的语言技能。本文通过对爱尔兰以外的其他凯尔特语文字的印刷研究来评估这种解释。在1740年代和1760年代，威尔士人印刷的文字比都柏林的爱尔兰人印刷的要多，而约于1800年左右在科克和戈尔韦印刷了苏格兰盖尔语的两大诗集。该论文得出的结论是，爱尔兰的印刷商可以使用不同的语言，