Irish language

“ 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. ”

“ The explanation of this fact is that for more than six centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 the Irish language continued to be both the spoken and, with Latin, the written organ of the great mass of the Irish people, and that for nearly the whole of that period those English settlers who did not become, as the well-known phrase has it, more Irish than the Irish themselves by adopting the native language, customs, and sentiments, were kept too busy in holding, defending, and extending their territory to devote themselves to literary pursuits. ”

“ All the world knows that bi-linguists are superior to men who know only one language, yet in Ireland everyone pretends to believe the contrary. A few words from the influential leaders of the race when next they visit Achill, for instance, would help to keep Irish alive there in sæcula sæculorum, and with the Irish language, the old Aryan folk-lore, the Ossianic poems, numberless ballads, folk-songs, and proverbs, and a thousand and one other interesting things that survive when Irish is spoken, and die when it dies. ”

“ Study has taken the place of idleness; grammars have replaced playing cards. On St. Patrick’s Day the Irish celebrate the restoration of their ancient language to its ancient dignity. The public-houses are shut up instead of being crowded. A new hope, a new motive, a new incentive,—all these are visible in Ireland. They find practicable expression in the enthusiasm with which the Irish language is being studied everywhere.
This latter may be a pure fad, but it is in no way an unhealthy one. How far the chief secretary’s attitude actually goes in behalf of Ireland, his own words will best tell. ”

“ It is a mark of that separateness which it is the business of every Nationalist to maintain and emphasise on every possible occasion. It is one of the signs-perhaps the chief sign-of nationality.... The Irish language is a weapon in our fight against England, and we cannot afford to throw away even the smallest weapon that may serve us in that struggle. ”

“ I say "totally useless" deliberately; for the arguments usually brought forward in favour of the study, apart from the political one-that Irish is of use in the study of philology, and that the MSS. of centuries ago contain fine specimens of poetry-are too absurd to be worth discussing. The real object of the Nationalists in "encouraging the revival of the Irish language" is clearly set out in the following words of T. MacSeamus in a recent number of the Irish Review:-
"Most important of all, the Irish language is one of the things that distinguish us from England. ”

“ So it came to pass that in a single generation the progeny of Cromwell's Puritans were in language as Irish as the purest-blooded aboriginal of Munster. Yet this adoption of the Irish language by the great majority of the children of these settlers took place in spite of the effect which the reading of books in English must have exerted to counteract the tendency to adopt the Irish language. Let us go back five hundred years in Irish history and we find exactly the same process going on. The Normans who followed Strongbow into Ireland, like their captain, frequently married native women. ”

“ If an old book began to be worn, ragged, or dim with age, so as to be hard to make out and read, some scribe was sure to copy it, so as to have a new book easy to read and well bound up. Most of the books written out in this manner related to Ireland, as will be described presently; and the language of these was almost always Irish. For in those times the Irish language was spoken by all the people of Ireland. ”

“ Yet now it is solemnly said that Ireland, being an independent nation, must have a language of its own; even in counties where no language but English has been spoken for centuries, and where probably none of the ancestors of the present population ever spoke any other language, Irish is being taught in the [pg 188] Roman Catholic primary schools, and the unhappy children who might be studying arithmetic or elementary geography, are wasting their time over a totally useless language. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With the usual individuality of our race, they resented the use of a separate language, to which the Irish, as individual in their way, clung as for very life. If, instead of trying to suppress the venerable and beloved tongue, England had given Ireland an open Bible in it—if she had insisted on the study of Holy Writ, and had left the manners to take care of themselves under its influence, what a different future there might have been! ”

“ Nothing can make us believe that it is natural or honourable for the Irish to speak the speech of the alien, the invader, the Sassenagh tyrant, and to abandon the language of our kings and heroes. What! give up the tongue of Ollamh Fodhla and Brian Boru, the tongue of M'Carty, and the O'Nials, the tongue of Sarsfield's, Curran's, Mathew's, and O'Connell's boyhood, for that of Strafford and Poynings, Sussex, Kirk, and Cromwell! ”

“ For Ireland history is not a subject in itself. In our primary and intermediate education Irish history is now a department of English language and literature. At the age when impressions made on a youth’s mind are certain to become the all-compelling habits of his later life, it is suggested to him that the history of his country is less important than the rules of English grammar, and that the achievements of his father may at the best rank with the model sentences in which English essayists write of Friendship and Gardens and Christmas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That the Irish either were or are a people remarkable for making bulls or blunders, is an imputation utterly unfounded, and in every sense untrue. The source of this error on the part of our neighbors is, however, readily traced. The language of our people has been for centuries, and is up to the present day, in a transition state. The English tongue is gradually superseding the Irish. In my own native place, for instance, there is not by any means so much Irish spoken now, as there was about twenty or five-and-twenty years ago. ”

“ 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 historian, the linguist, the farmer, the economist, the musician, the statesman, and the man of science can equally augment their pleasure and make it minister to Ireland.
Is a man curious upon our language? He can (not unread in Neilson, nor unaccompanied by O'Reilly's Dictionary) trace how far the Celtic words mixed in the classical French, or in the patois of Bretagne or Gascony, coincide with the Irish; he can search in the mountains of North Spain, whether in proper names or country words there be any analogy to the Gaelic of the opposite coast of Ireland. ”

“ Now all alike, save for an almost insignificant and rapidly dwindling minority, have assumed the speech of the English and Lowland Scotch intruders, who began to arrive late in the 12th century, and are now chiefly massed in Ulster, Leinster, and all the large towns. The rich and highly poetic Irish language has a copious medieval literature of the utmost importance to students of European origins. ”

“ The question whether the national language is to become wholly extinct like the Cornish, is one which must be decided within the next ten years. There are probably a hundred and fifty thousand households in Ireland at this moment where the parents speak Irish amongst themselves, and the children answer them in English. ”

“ Many, both scholars and literary men, object to the kind of English into which Lady Gregory translates the stories of Ireland's heroic age, her "Kiltartan English," the English of the people of her home country on the borders of Clare and Galway, the English made by a people who think in Irish. This familiar language, they say, has lessened the dignity of the old tales, bringing them all to one level by a diction and style that is one, whether they are romance or folk-tale. ”

“ Anglicisation has indeed been carried to an extreme pitch in most parts of Ireland, and is rapidly turning the Irish peasant into the most generally uninteresting, prosy, and least spirituel of mortals. As a rule, the more Anglicised he becomes the more intolerable he is. If the peasantry living round Emania had [Pg 64] preserved their native language, while at the same time knowing English, if they were bilingual, like millions of their class in different European countries, many things connected with the history of this celebrated place would be known to them ”

“ About half the people west of a line drawn from Derry to Waterford speak Irish habitually, and in some of the mountain tracts east of that line it is still common. Simply requiring the teachers of the national schools in these Irish-speaking districts to know Irish, and supplying them with Irish translations of the school books, would guard the language where it now exists, and prevent it from being swept away by the English tongue, as the Red Americans have been by the English race from New York to New Orleans. ”

“ In spite of many defects, it is claimed for this work that it contains a larger number of words used in the living Irish language and in the more modern written compositions than any Irish Dictionary yet published; that it gives the various words fuller grammatical treatment; that it explains them more in detail and with greater precision and accuracy; that it gives a fuller account of local usage and pronunciation; that it treats more fully the more important words which form the basis of the main idioms that constitute the core of the language ”

“ 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. ”