Irish English

“ The works of the one, are read and admired wherever the language in which they are written extends, the name and writings of the other are wholly unknown, except to the solitary Irish scholar, who may happen to pore over the mouldering manuscripts in which these disjecta membra are preserved. But such has been the fate of Ireland. Its native genius, learning, and talents, have been doomed to languish in obscurity. ”

“ Notwithstanding all that English laws have done to blot Irish history, the Irish people, in the Irish language, still hold their own.
That is why England has tried hard to kill the Irish language. Some of my readers may think she is encouraging the cultivation of it now. She is not; she doesn’t mean it; her heart is not in the professions she is making, no more than was the heart of my hen blackbird Gladstone in the professions about home rule that he was making for Ireland for the past twenty years. ”

“ Do not the Irish look down on the English? Have I not heard ridicule directed to their ‘mincing talk,’ to their ‘cutting away’ of words, to their drawl, their airs, their notions, the whole tirade ending, ‘But what else can be expected from foreigners?’ Going down to the lower orders, it is generally supposed few Englishmen ever sound an ‘H’ in its place, or fail to put one in where it is not wanted. ”

“ What it may do in the future, if Irish again becomes a tongue of literature in lofty poetry, lies on the knees of the gods. I wish it well, but such a development seems now too late. The Irish genius, if it is to speak in drama, in narrative poetry or in an epic, must speak, if it is to influence or to charm the world beyond the Irish shore, in a world-language like English, and of international as well as of Irish humanity. ”

“ There are thousands upon thousands of houses all over Ireland to-day where the old people invariably use Irish in addressing the children, and the children as invariably answer in English, the children understanding Irish but not speaking it, the parents understanding their children’s English but unable to use it themselves. ”

“ The one egregious thing which the reading of English history teaches is the English historian’s palpable inability to be candid and unbiased when he comes to deal with Ireland and the Irish. With the true-born Englishman this innate prejudice against his neighboring island and her people comes to him as a heritage of many ages. ”

“ And so the native Irish people learned to speak Elizabethan English—the very language used by Shakespeare; and in a very considerable degree the old Gaelic people and those of English descent retain it to this day. For our people are very conservative in retaining old customs and forms of speech. Many words accordingly that are discarded as old-fashioned—or dead and gone—in England, are still flourishing—alive and well—in Ireland. ”

“ This custom, which is as old as our race in Ireland, is remembered in our present-day speech, whether Irish or Anglo-Irish; for the man who courageously and successfully defends any cause or any position, either by actual fighting or by speeches or written articles, is 'the man in the gap.' Of the old Irish chiefs Thomas Davis writes ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now that Ireland is supposedly prospering at the hands of a solicitous foster-mother, the “Board of Agriculture,” the demand for Irish products and the interest in Irish art and history are undoubtedly increasing. So, too, the interest in Irish literature, in the abstract; but the Irish tongue itself has a poor chance for popularity.
It is well to recall that the mass of the Irish people speak the English tongue alone, a tenth part, perhaps, being able to speak both Gaelic and English, with but a very few who know Gaelic alone. ”

“ The Irish, though speaking the English tongue and living under laws foreign to the instincts of the people, are a nation apart from the English, hating intensely the tie that binds them, out of sympathy with English ideas, ambitions, religions, and methods ”

“ So much for the dialect of our illiterates, the lingua rustica. Let us now consider the Irish dialect which is another fruitful source of vulgarisms with a pedigree. A moment’s reflection will suffice to convince the reader that this speech is very closely allied in origin with the English brought to America by the early settlers.
It is well known that the English language, as spoken by the Irish, has a peculiarity of utterance commonly called “the Irish brogue” and differs materially from standard English. ”

“ The Irish are every whit as fond of fine language as the English middle class. When in 1871 all the Roman Catholic Prelates in Ire­land put forth a lengthy demand for education on sound Ultramontane principles, they spoke of the thing that scholars call a ‘hearty welcome’ as an ‘ovation.’ The Irish clergy of the old pattern never learnt stuff such as this at Douai or Salamanca. ”

“ I should also like to call attention to the illogical position of men who drop their own language to speak English, of men who [Pg 119] translate their euphonious Irish names into English monosyllables, of men who read English books, and know nothing about Gaelic literature, nevertheless protesting as a matter of sentiment that they hate the country which at every hand’s turn they rush to imitate. ”

“ But this is not all; for even the Saxon and Norman colonists, notwithstanding these laws, melted down into the Irish, and adopted all their ways and language. For centuries upon centuries Irish was spoken by men of all bloods in Ireland, and English was unknown, save to a few citizens and nobles of the Pale. 'Tis only within a very late period that the majority of the people learned English. ”

“ Yet the Irish are a still greater puzzle in this respect; for they are poorer; their land is in the English latitude; and nevertheless the poetical feeling is far more common and more eloquent among them, than with either of their neighbours. Their fertility of fancy and readiness of expression render them, in fact, very like a southern people ”

“ The translation used in Ireland has not the same literary beauty, and if we are to find anything to take its place we must find it in that idiom of the poor, which mingles so much of the same vocabulary with turns of phrase that have come out of Gaelic. Even Irish writers of considerable powers of thought seem to have no better standard of English than a schoolmaster’s ideal of correctness. ”

“ This is exactly true of spots in Ireland, and after his experiences in Donegal, Sir Patrick Keenan drew up the following memorial:—"1. That the Irish-speaking people ought to be taught the Irish language grammatically, and that school books in Irish should be prepared for the purpose. 2. That English should be taught to all Irish-speaking children through the medium of the Irish. 3. That if this system be pursued the people will be very soon better educated than they are now, or possibly can be for many generations upon the present system. ”

“ But in many other ways we show our tendency to this wordy overflow—still deriving our mannerism from the Irish language—that is to say, from modern and middle Irish. For in very old Irish—of the tenth, eleventh, and earlier centuries for instance, the tendency is the very reverse. In the specimens of this very old language that have come down to us, the words and phrases are so closely packed, that it is impossible to translate them either into English or Latin by an equal number of words. ”

“ First.—My own memory is a storehouse both of idiom and vocabulary; for the good reason that from childhood to early manhood I spoke—like those among whom I lived—the rich dialect {vi}of Limerick and Cork—and indeed to some extent speak it still in the colloquial language of everyday life.
I have also drawn pretty largely on our Anglo-Irish Folk Songs of which I have a great collection, partly in my memory and partly on printed sheets; for they often faithfully reflect our Dialect. ”

“ In these essays he gives with unsurpassed vigour the thoughts of a powerful mind on themes of special interest; and as they do not pretend to be exhaustive the writer’s weaknesses are not brought into prominence. The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1872-1874) was, next to the great History, his largest work. But Irish history has been and [Pg 131] is the source of so much passion that the present generation is no favourable time for either writing or criticising such a work. ”

“ Modern Irish literature is treated with a brevity and an injustice which are nothing short of contemptible; and what little there is concerning the new Irish renaissance is scattered here and there in the articles on English literature! ”

“ The English imagine that Irish politicians are so hot-headed and poetical that they have to pour out a torrent of burning words. The truth is that the Irish are so clear-headed and critical that they still regard rhetoric as a distinct art, as the ancients did. ”

“ They are incapable of receiving moral or religious instruction through its medium. The Irish is spoken very generally through the other three provinces except amongst the descendants of the Scotch in the north. It cannot be supposed that calculations on this subject should be perfectly accurate, but it has been concluded on good grounds that there are about two millions of people in Ireland [out of about six millions] who are incapable of understanding a continued discourse in English. ”

“ The strange spectacle is sometimes witnessed of an attempt to give the actual sound of Irish words by means of a spelling based on English values,—of Chaos applying for help to Confusion.
In addition to the reasons which might be urged generally in favour of recording folk-lore in the dialect of the narrators, is one which is largely peculiar to Irish tales. I will indicate it in the briefest manner. Words are of frequent occurrence which are not to be found in the dictionaries. ”

“ In our Anglo-Irish dialect the expression at all is often duplicated for emphasis: ‘I'll grow no corn this year at all at all’: ‘I have no money at all at all.’ So prevalent is this among us that in a very good English grammar recently published (written by an Irishman) speakers and writers are warned against it. This is an importation from Irish. ”

“ And they succeeded to a considerable extent; a large part of Eastern Ireland is now peopled by men who are substantially English by descent, and the English language has spread over the land far beyond the limits of English blood.
Ethnologically, the Irish people were originally, like the people of Britain, a mixture of Melanochroi and Xanthochroi. They resembled the Britons in speaking a Celtic tongue; but it was a Gaelic and not a Cymric form of the Celtic language. ”

“ At present the middle classes think it a sign of vulgarity to speak Irish—the children are everywhere taught English, and English alone in schools—and, what is worse, they are urged by rewards and punishments to speak it at home, for English is the language of their masters. ”

“ In this connection it may be pointed out that not only in songs, but in many stories and other writings purporting to be Irish, the phraseology is anything but Irish. Irishmen do not, and never did, speak of their spiritual guardian as the praste. The Irishman never mispronounces the sound of ie, and if he says tay for tea and mate for meat he is simply conforming to the old and correct English pronunciation, as may be seen by consulting the older English poets, who always rhymed sea with day, etc. ”

“ For more than two centuries thereafter, owing to the fact that the native Irish, because they were Catholics, were debarred by law from an education, the writing of English remained almost exclusively in the hands of members or descendants of the Anglo-Irish colony, who, with scarcely an exception, were Protestants and had as their principal Irish seat of learning the then essentially Protestant institution, Trinity College, Dublin. ”

“ Common all over Munster.
The people have a gentle laudable habit of mixing up sacred names and pious phrases with their ordinary conversation, in a purely reverential spirit. This is one of the many peculiarities of Anglo-Irish {195}speech derived from the Irish language: for pious expressions pervaded Irish to its very heart, of which the people lost a large part when they ceased to speak the language. Yet it continues very prevalent among our English-speaking people; and nearly all the expressions they use are direct translations from Irish. ”

“ During the Commonwealth, however, the English tongue made some way; and it is remarkable that the English-speaking Irish of the lower classes, in the present day, have preserved the idioms and the accentuation used about this period. Many of the expressions which provoke the mirth of the modern Englishman, and which he considers an evidence of the vulgarity of the uneducated Irish, may be found in the works of his countrymen, of which he is most justly proud. ”

“ The bias and ignorance of English historians and of many professed students of Irish history, who continue to write without a first-hand knowledge of its sources, have also reacted unfavourably upon the study of Irish literature. Slowly, however, the fact is becoming recognised in ever wider circles that the vernacular literature of ancient Ireland is the most primitive and original among the literatures of Western Europe, and that in its origins and development it affords a most fascinating study. ”