Gráinne Ní Chathail

Gráinne Ní Chathail was born in transit, aboard one of the six arks of the Currach Fleet, into a language her people could read better than they could speak. She grew up to be one of the linguists who rebuilt it.

Known History

• Born aboard one of the six arks during the crossing. The record gives neither the hull nor the year. The Fleet departed the Solar System between about 2561 and 2589 UCSD, and the crossing took generations.
• Came of age at or near landfall, among the households that had kept spoken Irish on purpose while the written language survived almost whole.
• Worked with the Union's linguists on the rebuilding of the spoken language: from the attested texts and grammars, from the comparative method against the Fleet's other Celtic languages, and from internal reconstruction where nothing else reached.
• The Union's register credits her with the principle that made Union Irish regular: where the record has a gap, fill it with the rule, not with the exception the rule had worn into. The Survey Archive holds that credit from the register's public summary, received after re-contact, and keeps no second copy of the register itself.

Character Notes

The Archive knows her the way it knows most of the Union's history: as the Union chose to tell it. Which of Union Irish's forms are inheritance and which are reconstruction is a question the Union's own register answers. The same is true of how much of the rebuilding was hers, and how much the register's credit gathers into one name what many hands did. This page does not try to answer either question.

What the credit says is clear enough. A reconstruction has two honest choices at every gap: guess at the irregular form the old language probably had, or state the rule and let the language be regular there. The first produces something that sounds old and cannot be checked. The second produces something a speaker of the arks' century would find familiar and not identical, which is the relation the Union intends. The register says she argued for the second, and the language is the evidence that the argument was won.

The record gives no date of death, and places her on no particular world of the Union.

See also

• The Celtic Union of Planets, for the crossing and the rebuilding of the language
• The Generation-Ark Era
• The Canonical Glossary, which sets out the record's rules for the Union's Irish