The Survival of Gaelic

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

The writer of the editorial "Welsh Rarebit" in yesterday's CRIMSON seems to be under the impression that the Celtic culture and languages are dead, for he says: "A purely academic and scholastic survival of dialects and traditions is worth little." I can not speak from personal experience as to the Gaelic of the Scottish Highlands but I do know that Welsh is very much alive. I know two proofs of this: first, there is a Welsh newspaper the "Baner ar Amseran Cymon" of which I have a copy and, second, the children talk Welsh. As long as the children talk a language, that language is still a live one, not dead nor artificially fostered for patriotic reasons. If the situation is the same in northern Scotland and the Western Isles, as I understand it is, the University of Inverness will be well justified. W. N. Snell, 1G.

(Editor's Note: The editorial did not mean to imply that the Celtic culture is dead. Its point was that if, as the press report suggested, the University of Inverness was to be founded mainly to preserve a dying language, it would serve no valuable function. It was from this point of view that the sentence quoted above was written.)