As most long time readers know I generally screen to at least a cursory level comments by people who have not posted before. Except for purposes of entertainment only I won't publish Creationist comments. Naturally some comments are offensive, but a surprising number I just don't let through are "not-even-wrong" or "too-stupid-to-understand-the-original-post" class. But yesterday a comment was in the mod queue which really confused me. My initial instinct was to spam it, but I was moderately intrigued, so I let it through. In response to my assertion of having read material which indicated that Gaelic was the language of the Irish peasantry before 1800, Paul Crowley asserted:
What you have read is quite wrong. It is a common misconception (especially in Ireland) based on wishful nationalistic thinking. Farmers and peasants do not drop their native language and learn to speak another without extreme compulsion. While there was some pressure, ...
