Leibniz and Eckhart on the Irish language

Abstract

THE SCHOLARLY STUDY OF IRISH on the Continent began with J. C. Zeuss's Grammatica Celtica in 1853, but long before his time continental scholars, the early philologists and linguists, had shown some interest in the Irish language. For a German scholar, Irish was a name on the linguistic map of Europe at least since Konrad Gessner's Mithridates (1555). The actual information about Irish in this catalogue of the then known ancient and modern languages of the world, however, was still rather limited: Gessner says with reference to Miinster's Cosmographia (1st edition, 1544 that Irish is a separate language of its own and related to the point of identity with the Gaelic language of the Scottish highlands and islands: