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Show Early Irish Missionaries in Germany Able to Make Themselves Understood only books of that date are Gospels and other devotional works in Latin, with glosses or marginal notes in Gaelic, never in German. It is well known that the pre-German pre-German population of' the Rhine and Danube valleys was Celtic. Professor Pro-fessor Menke-GIuckerfs hypothesis is that when the conquering Germanic Ger-manic tribes moved in, they made themselves into an aristocratic class of masters, under whom the descendants of the original owners of the land lived as an Inferior class, speaking their own language. Only after the rise of a dynasty of Frank-ish Frank-ish Christian kings who sought closer contact with Rome, he says, did the common use of the Celtic language, and with it the predominant predom-inant influence of Irish missionaries, die out among the mass of the populace. Irish missionaries who came to central Germany from the Sixth to the Eighth century, bringing the gospel that St. Patrick had carried car-ried to them still earlier, had no difficulty in making themselves understood. un-derstood. That there were plenty of people in Germany at that time who spoke a Celtic language very similar to ancient Gaelic is the belief be-lief of Prof. Emil Menke-Gluckert of the Dresden Technical college, notes a writer in the Kansas City Star. , . Evidence is scrappy and scattered, scat-tered, but in Professor Menke-Gluckert's Menke-Gluckert's opinion sufficient. There are numerous place-names in cen-tral cen-tral and western Germany that can be traced to a Celtic origin. A record rec-ord of a notable sermon by a preacher named Gallus includes the statement that afterwards it was "Sretcd" to a German-speak-ing audience at Constance by another an-other priest; if Gallus b. spoken German, the scrv.ces of an inter-preter inter-preter would not have been needed. A telling pomt, the German scientist scien-tist feels, is the total absence of any Ce c-German dictionaries or SMX?t bS?. developed in L7 rn -ssionary effort The |
