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Gaelic Scotland is one of the world's great treasure-houses of song. This work is an anthology of music and lyrics from the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands. It provides an introduction to Gaelic tradition, musical transcriptions, and English translations. It portrays the social and historical background of the songs.
A face is nothing without its history. Gavin and Emma live in Manhattan. She's a musician. He works in Artificial Intelligence. He's good at his job. Scarily good. He's researching human features to make more realistic mask-bots - non-human 'carers' for elderly people. When his enquiry turns personal he's forced to ask whether his own life is an artificial mask. Delving into family stories and his roots in the Highlands of Scotland, he embarks on a quest to discover his own true face, 'uniquely sprung from all the faces that had been'. He returns to England to look after his Grampa. Travels. Reads old documents. Visits ruins. Borrows, plagiarises and invents. But when Emma tells him his proper work is to make a story out of glass and steel, not memory and straw, which path will he choose? What's the best story he can give her? A novel about the struggle for freedom and personal identity; what it means to be human. It fuses the glass and steel of our increasingly controlled algorithmic world with the memory and straw of our forebears' world controlled by traditions and taboos, the seasons and the elements.
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Archie has lived on a small island off the Scottish coast his entire life. After decades without a job and without a break from his selfish wife, Archie packs his bag and leaves to find the hole where the North Wind originates, as the old stories claim. He meets many strange and wonderful characters along the way, including the beautiful deaf Jewel, Yukon Joe and Sergio the expert potato-peeler. Seeking to find his way in the world, and driven by the ancient stories he grew up with on the island, Archie faces many dangers in his quest for knowledge.
A precious golden souvinier has disappered from Kismuil Castle in the Island of Barra. The historic brooch was given as a gift by the Chief of Clanranald to MacNeil of Barra in the 16th century. Or perhaps it was treasure found from a shipwrecked galleon from the Spanish Armada... The local constable, P.C. Murdo set outs to find who dunnit. He has seven suspects, but in his search for the truth of the theft discovers that suspicion and prejudice make poor detectives. Help comes from smart officers from the mainland, whose most difficult challenge is Murdo himself. In this short, humorous novel mystery and psychology are lightly mixed, revealing that folk's actions and characters are as contradictory as they are complex. PC Murdo would find himself at home in both Whisky Galore and in Para Handy. The novel is a compassionate examination of how attitudes predicate actions which make or break communities.
Angus Watson's Essential Gaelic-English and English-Gaelic dictionaries are well-established as one of the leading dictionaries of the Gaelic language. This combined dictionary is ideal for learners of Gaelic at all levels, and its generous coverage of vocabulary from fields such as business and IT makes it a valuable tool for all those who require an up-to-date reference work. It contains a large amount of explanatory material, numerous examples of usage and idiomatic phrases and expressions. Many registers and styles are sampled, from the familiar (and occasionally the vulgar) to the formal and the literary. Cross-references draw the user to related words and expressions, and Scots equivalents are provided for a number of headwords.
John Bannerman (1932-2008) saw the history of Scotland from a Gaelic perspective, and his outstanding scholarship made that perspective impossible to ignore. As a historian, his natural home was the era between the Romans and the twelfth century when the Scottish kingdom first began to take shape, but he also wrote extensively on the MacDonald Lordship of the Isles in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, while his work on the Beatons, the notable Gaelic medical kindred, reached into the early eighteenth century. Across this long millennium, Bannerman ranged and wrote with authority and insight on what he termed the 'kin-based society', with special emphasis upon its church and culture, an...
The relationship between language and music has much in common - rhythm, structure, sound, metaphor. Exploring the phenomena of song and performance, this book presents a sociolinguistic model for analysing them. Based on ethnomusicologist John Blacking's contention that any song performed communally is a 'folk song' regardless of its generic origins, it argues that folk song to a far greater extent than other song genres displays 'communal' or 'inclusive' types of performance. The defining feature of folk song as a multi-modal instantiation of music and language is its participatory nature, making it ideal for sociolinguistic analysis. In this sense, a folk song is the product of specific types of developing social interaction whose major purpose is the construction of a temporally and locally based community. Through repeated instantiations, this can lead to disparate communities of practice, which, over time, develop sociocultural registers and a communal stance towards aspects of meaningful events in everyday lives that become typical of a discourse community.