I grew up in the highlands and we weren’t taught Gaelic. It was one of the things the British tried to stamp out after Culloden. :/ I’d have loved to have learned it.
I have a friend I worked with in China 20 years ago from Caithness, and it was wonderful to hear how she & the community were really pushing the Gaelic throughout the Wick- John O Groats region, really making an effort to bring it back! She's only in her 40's now too, so there is a push for the youth to learn it, and I believe they do an entire stream of Gaelic at Wick High School too!
10:40 I was born in 1977 in Edinburgh, so went to primary ('elementary' for my American cousins) school at essentially the same time that is being depicted here for Jemmy. Gaelic was never mentioned AT ALL in any of my classes. It's an almost dead language, with about roughly 1% of the population being conversant in it; the majority of them being up in the sparsely populated north west of the country, as well as the islands of the Outer Hebrides. My late grandmother was brought up by _her_ grandmother and she said that whenever the adults wanted to say something in secret around the kids, they'd lapse into Gaelic at those times. Another useless piece of trivia for you: Although part of the UK, all the individual British countries had a slightly different TV schedule back then and BBC Scotland aired a children's programme called Dotaman (you can see some episodes on RU-vid) that was entirely in Gaelic. It was unintentionally hilarious, because there are loads of Gaelic words that sound like English swear words. So even though I never understood what was going on, I used to watch with joy as Donnie Macleod sang happy songs with choruses peppered with "sh*ts" and "f*cks". Great days.😄
Hi again Imon! Thank you for another Outlander-reaction. What Bree found on the tunnel was like a reflection (or a kind of wave) of a portal (maybe underwater, in the dam). In fact in one of the first books they imply that perhaps in Lake Ness there is a similar portal and that probably the Loch Ness Monster is nothing more than some kind of prehistoric animal that every so often crosses the low portal the lake. I send you a big Colombian hug.
I always loved Sinead O'Connor back in the day! I hate to say this is not my favorite version of the theme song. I personally prefer the very first season.
Especially the more provincial Scots leaned away from the Gaelic because "city folks" and highly educated Brits considered it uncouth, old fashioned and uneducated for a long time. It came to the point of nearly being an extinct language like most of the American Native languages. Fortunately, in the middle 20th century old languages gained a lot of interest by scholars and antiquarians and they began searching for remnants and speech habits of old languages and their impacts on current speech. The Irish made it nearly a patriotic mandate to learn the old Irish Gaelic by the 1970's. Catrina Balf (Claire) can speak it, though it is moderately different than the Scot version. Schools used to mightily discourage its use and now many offer to teach it. Jem's teacher is still of the old thought that speaking Gaelic proves you're low class.
