No Great Mischief. Alistair MacLeod
To be honest the first baseline question I had in regard to this book was - Are the Irish Celtic or Gaelic?
Celtic is subgroup of the Indo-European language family. Gaelic is a language belonging to this group. To be more precise, Gaelic actually refers to a group of three close related Insular Celtic languages: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx.
And others would argue that the British ethnicities of English, Welsh and Scottish are therefore clearly distinct from Gaelic Irish, however they do all fall into a wider “Anglo-Celtic” ethnogenetic supergroup.
My favorite English -based language experience occurred in London when I lived in Madrid and worked for John Ryan. I had been trying to land a London-based client and this looked like the opportunity. It was a multi-national bank located through-out Great Britain. The kick-off meeting was attended by a dozen regional bankers, couple of guys from corporate, and my two assistants; one who was himself a brit and the other from MN. We sat at a round conference table and the participants were energized and engaged and soon realized we had a very real linguistics issue. With my Spanish clients they knew it was a second language and they were very patient with me and supported and enabled my getting eye contact to facilitate, my reading lips, them speaking distinctly and me carefully following the conversation. Not so easy this day in London.
"Dialects are linguistic varieties which may differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling and grammar. ... The major native dialects of English are often divided by linguists into three general categories: the British Isles dialects, those of North America, and those of Australasia.”
The combination of differences in pronunciation and use of local words may make some English dialects almost unintelligible to speakers from other regions. This WAS happening to me. There is a discernible difference between an accent and a dialect. An accent is “a way of pronouncing a language.” This is interesting because it means that everyone in the world, no matter the language, has an accent. To not have an accent means to not pronounce anything at all. So BAH to those Utah California Minnesotan who claim to have none . A dialect is “a particular form of language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group”. So between, dialect and accent, there are myriad variability. How many English dialects are there that are recognizable from one another? Specifically, the language experts declare there are 160 distinct English dialects throughout the world; England has the most amount of distinct dialects with 29 different ones (not including dialects from Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Man, or the Channel Islands). My friends and I counted 15 present in our conference room; of which I could readily understand perhaps 9. The resulting cacophony lost me - I had been taking notes but begged off to my assistant and had him take charge of note taking because he could understand most everyone. It was a great lesson to me that day about listening, understanding differences, and how what seemed to be the same, could vastly differ.
Back to the book. I wasn’t enjoying it to begin with with as it was feeling too morose and burdened with painful family anxieties encumbered with trying to lift me by those same notions of family. There’s probably more levity in the book than I could catch on to, but the story grew on me and as it did, ultimately became hard to putdown. Loyal dogs? Anti-Quebec characters? Perhaps not my favorite themes; nonetheless a great read of a hard scrabble life of a disrupted group from the Scottish Highlands who mix with other French and some English Canadians doing whatever work they can.
The motif for the humans is that the past is always relevant to the present moment. And, as with all family history, the novel is laced with tragedy and death.
