Gaelic

“ The question, Gaelic or no Gaelic, has, we fear, been too long treated in a sentimental point of view. For example, we see it fervently argued that Highlanders should be able to understand and relish the ancient Gaelic poetry, as if an acquaintanceship with a few old songs and ballads were a primary concern in life. Poor people nailed to a sterile soil by their hereditary ignorance of English, are to be congratulated for their knowledge of some poem which the world at large never heard of, and does not care about! ”

“ The term Gaelic means Modern Gaelic.
Scottish Gaelic is written on the orthographic lines of Modern Irish, which in its turn represents the orthography of Old Irish. The greatest departure from ancient methods consists in the insistence now upon the rule of "Broad to broad and small to small." That is to say, a consonant must be flanked by vowels of the same quality, the "broad" being a, o, u, and the "small" e and i. Gaelic itself has fallen much away from the inflexional fulness of Old Irish. ”

“ But we had scarcely gone by the first Highlandman, when another darted out upon us from a by-path, and again broke the sabbath of the woods and waters; and then another followed, so that the morning ride by the Bras d'Or was fringed with Gaelic. Now I have heard many languages in my time, and know how to appreciate the luxurious Greek, the stately Latin, the mellifluous Chinese, the epithetical Sclavic, the soft Italian, the rich Castilian, the sprightly French, sonorous German, and good old English, but candor compels me to say, that I do not think much of the Gaelic. ”

“ Gaelic belongs to the Celtic group of languages, and the Celtic is itself a branch of the Indo-European or Aryan family of speech; for it has been found that the languages of Europe (with the exception of Turkish, Hungarian, Basque, and Ugro-Finnish) , and those of Asia from the Caucasus to Ceylon,1 resemble each other in grammar and vocabulary to such an extent that they must all be considered as descended from one parent or original tongue. This parent tongue is variously called the Aryan, Indo-European, Indo-Germanic, and even the Indo-Celtic language. ”

“ It may be doubted whether, for practical purposes, the Gaelic will ever come again into general use. But the concerted endeavour by a whole nation to win back its ancient, wellnigh forgotten speech is a most interesting social phenomenon. At all events, both by direct translations of the Gaelic hero epics and by original work in which the Gaelic spirit is transfused through English ballad and other verse forms, a lost kingdom of romance has been recovered and a bright green thread of Celtic poetry runs through the British anthology of the century. ”

“ If it had not been for Scandinavian burnings and plunderings, mediæval Gaelic literature would, even now, be so immense that it would command the respect of the world at large. Those who say that the bulk of mediæval Gaelic writings has come down to us—and there are those that have the unspeakable hardihood to say so—must be classed as very prejudiced, or very ignorant of Irish history. ”

“ Still, the English spoken by three-fourths of the people of Ireland is largely influenced by Gaelic idioms, for most of those expressions which surprise Englishmen are really translations from that Irish which was the language of the speaker's father, grandfather, or great-grandfather—according to the part of the country you may be in—and there have perpetuated themselves, even in districts where you will scarce find a trace of an Irish word. There are, however, also hundreds of Gaelic idioms not reproduced in the English spoken by the people, and it is difficult to render these fitly. ”

“ The Gaelic languages—Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic—have a much closer connection with one another than the Brittonic languages. Till the Reformation and, indeed, for a century or more thereafter, the Irish and Scottish Gaelic had a common literary language, though the spoken tongues had diverged considerably, a divergence which can be traced even in the oldest of our Gaelic documents—the Book of Deer. ”

“ If this be so—and no writer possessed of ordinary common sense can reasonably dispute it—the teaching of Gaelic in our Highland schools can be discussed only as a question of secondary importance; unless we can show that it is through the native language of the scholars that we can best appeal to their intelligence; and, that while giving Gaelic its proper place in our system of Highland education, we can also show that we are taking a more direct and more natural course, in the end, to secure a more intelligent and vastly superior English education. ”

“ To those who wish for an uniformity of speech over the whole kingdom, it may not be impertinent to suggest one remark. The more that the human mind is enlightened, the more desirous it becomes of farther acquisitions in knowledge. The only channel through which the rudiments of knowledge can be conveyed to the mind of a remote Highlander is the Gaelic language. By learning to read and to understand what he reads, in his native tongue, an appetite is generated for those stores of science which are accessible to him only through the medium of the English language. ”

“ The want of the simple Present Tense is a striking point of resemblance between the Gaelic and the Hebrew verb.
I am indebted to a learned and ingenious correspondent for the following important remark; that the want of the simple Present Tense in all the British dialects of the Celtic, in common with the Hebrew, while the Irish has assumed that Tense, furnishes a strong presumption that the Irish is a dialect of later growth; that the British Gaelic is its parent tongue; and consequently that Britain is the mother country of Ireland. ”

“ The passage in question runs as follows:—"But there is one great disadvantage which we, the Gael of Scotland and Ireland, labour under, beyond the rest of the world, that our Gaelic language has never yet been printed, as the language of every other race of men has been; and we labour under a disadvantage which is still greater than every other disadvantage, that we have not the Holy Bible printed in Gaelic, as it has been printed in Latin and English, and in every other language, and also that we have never yet had any account printed of the antiquities of our country, or of our ancestors ”

“ Among the intelligent natives of the Highlands, it is well known that the Gaelic language contains a quantity of poetry, which, how difficult soever to transfuse into other tongues and idioms, never fails to touch the heart, and excite enthusiastic feelings. ”

“ But it is a shame. For the Gaelic is a most expressive language; and all the subtlety and grace of the original escape when you come down to a literal rendering in English. Besides, what skill have I in such things? If you like, I will send it to the editor of the Celtic Magazine, and ask him to get it properly translated—he has printed some of Mrs. Armour's pieces before now—in Gaelic, of course——"
"I want your version—none other," she said, imperatively. ”

“ Towards the close of the eighteenth century, when translations of Gaelic poetry brought the genius of the Celtic spirit in contact with the intellectual forces of modern Europe, many who hitherto despised our Gaelic literature, began to look into this neglected field. ”

“ Why, it was the best service I could render to Celtic philology to present a pure vocabulary of the Scottish dialect of Gadelic; the talk of the impossibility of "redding the marches" between Irish and Gaelic may be Celtic patriotism, but it is not science. ”

“ The Gaels occupied Ireland as a conquering and dominant people. During the early centuries of their occupation, whatever language or languages had been spoken in Ireland before them completely disappeared as languages, leaving no doubt some traces behind in the names of places, etc., and probably also influencing to some degree the Gaelic language itself. But for a long time there was nothing like a complete fusion of the old and the new population. ”

“ The homogeneity which is so marked a feature of Gaelic is lacking in Welsh literature, and whilst the one community has preserved the traditional romance with marvellous fulness and accuracy, the other has allowed it to perish almost utterly. ”

“ Gaelic is the household language still, where the father and mother are old, or where the grand-parents live with the rising generation; but English is the language of business, of the newspapers, and of all the new books that find their way among the people. It is fast becoming the language in which public worship is conducted too. There are very few books in the Gaelic. ”

“ The question of the Gaelic Revival seems to be really a form of the eternal question of the interdependence of the practical and the ideal in Ireland. Their true relation to each other is one of the hardest lessons the student of our problems has to learn. ”

“ The sound of ao differs materially in the two Dialects, the Southern having the sound opener than the Northern Dialect.13 The Southern Dialect is practically the literary language.
Modern Gaelic has far more borrowed words than Irish at any stage of its existence. The languages borrowed from have been mainly English (Scottish) and Norse. Nearly all the loan-words taken directly from Latin belong to the Middle or Old period of Gaelic and Irish; and they belong to the domain of the Church and the learned and other secular work in which the monks and the rest of the clergy engaged. ”

“ I have heard it maintained by some zealots, whom I greatly esteem, that Gaelic is a highly moral language, that the use of it conduces to purity of life and thought, and that everyone would be improved in tone by contact with its roots. ”

“ From this source sprung up a religious literature, which, commencing in the written or Irish Gaelic, gradually approached nearer and nearer to the spoken dialect of the country, and, accompanied by the preaching of the clergy in the vernacular dialect, tended to preserve and stereotype the language spoken in the Highlands in its native form and idiom. ”

“ England is still to-day the land of the Saxons to the Gael, and its inhabitants are the "Sassenachs"; the Irishman persists in disregarding the coming of the Angles. We may talk of the extinction of the Gaelic tongue, but in his poetry, as in every place-name of stream or hill or townland all over the country, it is about us still. In the poetry we are back in Gaelic Ireland; the old tribal distinctions, the old clan names, meet us on every page. What does the modern man know of Leth Cuinn or Leth Mogha, the ancient divisions of the North and South, or of the stories which gave them birth? ”

“ With the results of the labor of two such men before him, the student of Irish history, though unacquainted with Gaelic, and beyond the reach of the original documents, has now no excuse for not becoming as familiar with Gaelic historical and archæological lore as with those of the other races of the Old World. He will be rewarded, also, in his studies, by the contemplation of a system of civilization without a parallel in the records of any other nation of which we have a knowledge ”

“ The Gaelic movement has brought to the surface sentiments and thoughts which had been developed in Gaelic Ireland through hundreds of years, and which no repression had been able to obliterate altogether, but which still remained as a latent spiritual inheritance in the mind. ”

“ For centuries—we do not know how many—before the Norman invasion, the inhabitants had spoken Gaelic. The absence of political unity, the ceaseless wars and forays, must all have tended to fuse the population and obliterate original differences much more than a settled state of society. Yet they exist. The differences in folk-lore are not greater than other differences. Ethnologists know that the so-called Gaelic race is really a compound one, containing in addition to the true Celtic (Aryan) element probably two that are not Aryan—a Mongolian or Finnish element, and an Iberian element. ”

“ Since all mental training in Ireland is directed by powers both foreign and hostile to everything Gaelic, the moment a man leaves the sphere of that class which uses Gaelic as an every-day language, and which clings to the ancient ideas of the people, everything which he left behind seems to him valueless, senseless, and vulgar ”

“ But even these are sometimes found, as in the familiar phrases, 'the people came in their hundreds.' 'You are in your thousands' [here at the meeting] , which is an exact reproduction of the Gaelic phrase in the Irish classical story:—Atá sibh in bhur n-ealaibh, 'Ye are swans' (lit. 'Ye are in your swans') .
When mere existence is predicated, the Gaelic ann (in it, i.e. 'in existence') is used, as atá sneachta ann, 'there is snow'; lit. 'there is snow there,' or 'there is snow in it,' i.e. in existence. The ann should be left blank in English translation, i.e. having no proper representative. ”

“ This I hold to be the vital lesson the folk-lorist may learn from considering the relations of Gaelic folk-tale and Gaelic romance (using the latter term in the sense of story with a conscious genesis) : that romance, to live and propagate itself among the folk, must follow certain rules, satisfy certain conceptions of life, conform to certain conventions. The Irish bards and story-tellers had little difficulty, I take it, in doing this; they had not outgrown the creed of their countrymen, they were in substantial touch with the intellectual and artistic laws that govern their subject-matter. ”

“ It is perhaps too late, however, to urge now even so slight an alteration as this in the Orthography of the Gaelic, which ought rather to be held as fixed beyond the reach of innovation, by the happy diffusion of the Gaelic Scriptures over the Highlands. ”