RESEARCHERS of the future will be able to tune into dialects of Irish which are now extinct, if a project which brings together physicists and Irish scholars bears fruit.
A folklore archive in UG, collected by Prof Tomas O Maille during the 1930s and 1940s, includes speech from native speakers in Sligo and Leitrim.
The speech was recorded on fragile wax cylinders that are slowly disintegrating and the machines used to play them are obsolete. But the recordings can be saved using laser technology, according to the current issue of Technology Ireland.
A team led by Dr Mike Redfern, an experimental physicist at UCG, plans to use the technology to salvage the recordings.