Norman Maclean: BBC Tribute

If you didn’t catch the broadcast on BBC Alba, here’s a link to their programme on Norman on the iPlayer. 28 days left to watch!

“Tormod – Na Bheachd Fhèin/Norman – In His Own Words”

Norman Maclean – if he turns up!

There’s a treat in store for anyone who’s seen and liked Norman Maclean‘s work on Island Voices (or elsewhere). Norman is starting his own blog – “If he turns up” – and is inviting readers to give it a shot. It will consist of slices from his newest title, not yet published – “A Half-Breed Looks Back”.

“I’ll do this on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays until I have evidence, one way or another, that there is measurable demand for my stuff. Please share with anyone who may be turned on by my ramblings about slum life in 50s Glasgow, undergraduate lowlights and a veteran entertainer’s return to the Hebrides.”

Here’s his first post – Ready, Steady, Go!

Nach sgaoil sibh an naidheachd seo, a chàirdean!

Norman Maclean’s World in a Week

On consecutive days in the last week of April Gordon Wells recorded a series of Gaelic conversations with famed writer and entertainer Norman Maclean, in which Norman spoke reflectively of his memories and impressions of Gaelic life in Glasgow and the Hebrides from the middle of the Twentieth Century up to the present day.

The five videos, ranging between 35 and 55 minutes in length, will soon be posted online starting on Monday, 7th November. Word for word transcriptions will be made available simultaneously on Clilstore, enabling instant one-click vocabulary checking for Gaelic learners*. All in all there are 27,000 words and over three and a half hours of listening material in this collection, forming a unique new resource for serious study by learners and researchers. But Norman is a master raconteur, and there are plenty songs, jokes, and stories along the way. So, while it’s certainly an education, entertainment galore is also guaranteed for the more casual listener!

Over the week the conversations ranged over a wide variety of topics. In broad terms, however, each day had a different central focus:

Monday	Sinnsireachd
Tuesday	Foghlam
Wednesday	Coimhearsnachdan
Thursday	Cruthachalachd
Friday	Gàidhlig

For the latest information on the release dates for these videos you can subscribe for e-mail notifications in the side panel, or try following Island Voices on Facebook.

The “Saoghal Thormoid” project is a collaboration between Soillse, the inter-university research partnership which supported the recordings through its Small Research Fund, and Guthan nan Eilean (Island Voices). All recordings are free to access.

Update: All recordings in both the “Saoghal Thormoid” and “Sgeulachdan Thormoid” collections are now available on the “Norman Maclean” page.

*Clilstore also provides links to automatic Google Translate versions via the “unit info” tab. While machine translation from Gaelic to English is still at a very rudimentary stage, these versions can give at least an impression of the gist of the conversations for those viewers who have yet to start learning the language of Eden…

Norman Maclean: Òran do Sgoilearan Chàirinis

Norman Maclean’s grandfather (also Norman – Tormod Ailein) was lost at sea in the First World War, when Norman’s mother was still young.

In another contribution to the “An fheadhainn tha laighe sàmhach” project, Mary Morrison arranged for Norman to visit Sgoil Chàirinis, where his mother was a pupil, to recite this specially composed Gaelic song, and help the children learn to sing it.

In the video clip below Norman gives a crystal clear rendition of the words.

With his kind agreement, a written version is also made available on Clilstore so you can listen and read at the same time. Click on this link – Unit 2307 – to go to the transcription.

Norman Maclean and Am Pàipear

Seo an treas eisimpleir de stuthan ùra airson Guthan nan Eilean. Tha an t-ùghdar Tormod MacGill-Eain a’ bruidhinn ri Eairdsidh MacAoidh a sgrìobh pìos fada mu dheidhinn sa Phàipeir.

In the piece above writer and entertainer Norman Maclean talks in Gaelic about how he came back to live in Uist. In the piece below he talks in English about creative writing, and refers to some of the issues with which he has struggled.

As with all Island Voices materials the full package will include word-for-word transcripts of all interviews, and short documentary clips in both Gaelic and English giving a plain language introduction to the full Am Pàipear story.

Norman’s World – In Print!

 

For all that the Guthan nan Eilean project is about recording “Island Voices”, and so capturing and curating speech, there are those who still prefer to read – and not just online but off paper. With that in mind, the Soillse-supported “Saoghal Thormoid” series featuring Norman Maclean in conversation with Gordon Wells has now been made available in printable format.

This document, “Saoghal Thormoid – Norman Maclean: Synopses and Transcripts“, contains a verbatim written version of all the recordings in the series, and is free to download. Complementing the transcripts are the brief synopses of each day’s discussion previously published online.

What’s additionally new, however, is the Foreword by Conchúr Ó Giollagáin, Director of Soillse and Gaelic Research Professor at the University of the Highlands and Islands, in which he maps out the significance of Norman’s lifelong contribution to Gaelic culture, and the potential for research and recovery that work of this nature embodies.

“Tormod’s life is an acknowledgement of the cultural wealth of Gaelic society, and by virtue of this archive, he represents an ambassador to its future.” Give it a read!

Jamiekan ina Wielz

Select any video clip named in this landscape poster, or use the phone-friendly portrait layout.

Island Voices is extending its “language capture and curation” model, with CIALL support, to new contexts, new genres, and new languages, including the recording of aspects of UK-based Jamaican language use. Gaelic enthusiasts can rest assured this development does not represent a move away from our key linguistic interest in the Outer Hebrides! Far from it, as we engage with other language communities near and far, new opportunities are created for fresh spoken material in video format in Gaelic (and English – and other languages).

We recently filmed Jamaica-born, but London-raised, artist and poet Audrey West at her home in Wales. (Keen followers may well recognise Audrey from her previous contribution to our “Talking Points with Norman Maclean” debates.) We have now created Island Voices-style short video clips in the familiar “documentary” and “interview” formats, while adding a third category of “recitation”, newly included to capture Audrey’s poetry. These films are all listed in the poster above. You can click for either landscape or portrait versions to access live links to any and all of the videos created,

We’re also indebted to Dr Joseph Farquharson from the University of the West Indies Jamaican Language Unit (another Talking Points contributor!), for overseeing the creation of the documentary script in the institutionally approved Cassidy-JLU orthography. Joseph and the JLU team have been extremely busy recently, also providing expert advice to Kingsley Ben-Adir and other cast and production team members for the “Bob Marley: One Love” biopic. As one commenter(!) put it, this YouTube discussion provides “really interesting insights into how skilled linguistic, particularly phonetic, analysis and description can percolate beyond academia and deliver practical applied impact. Bravo JLU!”

This system has enabled regularised subtitling of the clip on sound linguistic principles. Ironically, as YouTube/Google Translate does not recognise Jamaican as a language, we have paradoxically been forced to label the language used in the Jamaican documentary as “English” in order to be able to add the proper Cassidy-JLU subtitles which underline its separate status! We can confidently predict that the YouTube auto-translate function, which we normally commend, is going to struggle with this!

Our aim, in due course, will be to also create a Clilstore transcript incorporating the new Custom Dictionary tool, along similar lines to previous contributions from the Jamaican Language Unit.

We have been demonstrating for some time through “Other Tongues” that the re-purposing in different languages of documentary work in our local community context can be accomplished relatively easily and simply. And we most recently illustrated this at scale with the Children’s Parliament in Barra film. The wider point is that this can be a 2-way street, or perhaps a multi-lane spaghetti junction! With Audrey’s documentary we’ve started with a film made originally in Jamaican and, in a reversal of previous examples, worked up a Gaelic version from it. Not only that, we’ve got Welsh and English versions too!

As hinted in our Duncan Ban MacIntyre piece, “Jamaican in Wales” is just the first of a short series of collections in similar style that explore new fields for Island Voices, including poetic expression, and in “displaced” or “exile” contexts. This is work in progress, with more to come from other island geographies.

Di stuori stil a gwaan. Jos laik Bob Marley se, “Wi faawad in dis jenarieshun chrayomfantli!”

Maithili Film: Taigh Chearsabhagh

Under his pen name ‘Nachiketa’, poet and professor Udaya Narayana Singh presents his Maithili version of the Island Voices film about the Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre:

एखन अहाँ लोकनि जे तथ्य-चित्र देखै जा रहल छी, ततय स्कॉटलैंड केर आउटर हेब्रिड्स मे स्थित उत्तरी उइस्ट के पूर्वी भाग मे लोचमैडी मे जे संग्रहालय आ’ कला केंद्र अछि – जकर नाम भेल ‘थइ ख्यैर्सवाग़ संग्रहालय एवं कला केंद्र’ – तकर एकटा वर्णन मैथिली मे प्रस्तुत करै जा रहल छी हम – उदय नारायण सिंह ‘नचिकेता’.

Close followers of Island Voices’ collaborative work with colleges and universities in Scotland and overseas will already be familiar with Udaya’s voice and aspects of his work, from his many contributions to Mediating Multilingualism and Talking Points (with Norman Maclean). But it’s a special pleasure now to hear him actually voicing the language of his father, about and for which he has written and spoken so extensively and authoritatively on various other platforms. As part of our “Sharing Gaelic Voices” theme, we’re delighted to here add Maithili to our Other Tongues collection!

Here is the Maithili version of the Island Voices documentary on Taigh Chearsabhagh, North Uist, translated and narrated by Professor Udaya Narayana Singh – ‘Nachiketa’. YouTube’s Closed Caption subtitles are also enabled, so you can read the Maithili text as you listen (if you wish), or you can choose instead to read automatically generated translations into many other languages.

A Clilstore unit has also been created here: http://multidict.net/cs/11337. On this platform the embedded video is shown alongside a scrollable text which allows you to click on any word you don’t know to access an online dictionary translation.

Edits, Updates, Additions, Improvements

Bliadhn’ Ùr Mhath and Happy New Year to Island Voices followers wherever you are!

The changeover from 2022 to 2023 coincides with a number of changes to the WordPress site.

We’ve updated the Research/Reports page by including the talk on ‘Guth Thormoid: the “Island Voice” of Norman Maclean’ for the University of Arizona Celtic Linguistics group.

We’ve updated and improved the Other Tongues page by adding Di Nyuuzpiepa to the Jamaican selection, prompting us to also de-clutter the page by creating subsections for languages with multiple films (Basque, Hindi, Jamaican, Urdu).

We’ve added a new page for the Aire air Sunnd project so you can find all related posts in one place – with more to come in 2023…

And we’ve re-edited and updated the About page to reflect latest developments.

We’re still pretty comfortable in our overall somewhat retro skin, but have indulged in one further cosmetic improvement – no more adverts!

Simply refreshed, we look forward to 2023, hoping for all good things for us all!