Argues that the diversity of titles used for the Hebridean rulers (and others) during this period is a literary device and is not interpreted politically.
Argues that legal roscad and saga retoiric are one same style of prose, and criticises J. Carney's opinion of their age and origin. Includes a transcript of a fragment of ‘rhetorics’ from Táin bó Cuailnge recension I (based on LU 5423-5427), with notes and tentative translation.
Discusses semantically differentiated set of reflexes for PIE *med- ‘announce, pronounce’ (cf. OIr. midithur ‘judge’); also PIE root *bherH- ‘dicere, medd', which yielded OIr. as-beir ‘says’, and the phrase *brneHti brHtun ‘pronounce a pronouncement’ > ‘judge (a judgement)', which gave in Irish berid breith and Welsh barnu brawd.
Includes a short history of Scottish Gaelic radio broadcasting. Linguistic features of News-speak discussed include the lexicon, borrowing, calques, neologism and semantic expansion, glossing, the genitive, orthography, syntax (noun phrase construction and passive forms), dialects, accents, and the ‘intonational full-stop’.
Argues that in Old Irish narrative prose the alternation between preterite and present tense is used to characterize the events as more and less important respectively from the author’s point of view.
Tristram (Hildegard L. C.): Tense and time in early Irish narrative.
IBS-V, 32. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 1983. 40 pp.
Studies the use of the historical present in Middle Irish texts.
Rev. by
Johan Corthals, in Kratylos 30 (1985), pp. 206-207.
Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel, in ZCP 42 (1987), pp. 397-400.
Brian Ó Cuív, in Celtica 18 (1986), p. 222.
Karl Horst Schmidt, in IF 91 (1986), pp. 401-403.