Manx language

“ G. Dottin, Revue de synthèse historique, viii. 79-91; M. C. Macleod, Modern Gaelic Bards (Stirling, 1908) . (E. C. Q.)
III. Manx Literature.—The literary remains written in the Manx language are much slighter than those of any other Celtic dialect. With one small exception nothing pertaining to the saga literature of Ireland has been preserved. The little we possess naturally falls under two heads—original compositions and translations. ”

“ Manx and English, (2) English and Manx, published by the Manx Society in 1866. Kelly also prepared a Triglot of Manx, Irish and Gaelic, based upon English, which has never been published. A useful paper on the language appeared in the Transactions of the London Philological Society for 1875 by H. Jenner, “The Manx Language: Its Grammar, Literature and Present State.” (E. C. Q.)
(ii) . Brythonic. The term Brythonic is used to denote the Celtic dialects of Wales, Brittany and Cornwall. Unlike the Goidels the Brythonic peoples have no common name for their language. ”

“ The last edition of the Manx Bible was issued in 1819, and of the New Testament in 1840. The present writer’s great-grandmother refused to speak English, his grandfather (b. 1815) preached in Manx and English, and his father (b. 1844) only spoke English. The following figures illustrate the rapid decline of the language:—
Manx stands in a much closer relation to Scottish Gaelic than Irish, and fishermen state that they could understand a good deal of what is said in South Argyll, though they are quite at a loss at Kinsale. ”

“ It is unlike any other form of death, for an unwritten language is even as a breath of air which when it is spent leaves no trace behind. A nation may die, yet its history remains, and that is the tangible part of its past. A city may fall to decay and lie a thousand years under the sands of the desert, yet its relics revivify its life. But a language that is dead, a tongue that has no life in its literature, is a breath of wind that is gone. ”

“ Laa-bee is old Manx for bed, literally half-meat, a profound commentary on the value of rest. The old salutation at the door of a Manx cottage before the visitor entered was this word spoken from the porch: Vel peccaghs thie? Literally: Any sinner within? All humanity being sinners in the common speech of the Manx people.
MANX PROVERBS
Nearly akin to the language of a race are its proverbs, and some of the Manx proverbs are wise, witty, and racy of the soil. Many of them are the common possession of all peoples. ”

“ When we turn to the two published dictionaries of the language, we find animal and plant names very numerous in both, but unfortunately their value is impaired by the vagueness and incorrectness of the English equivalents, proving that the compilers had little acquaintance with the English names of the objects signified.
For some birds common here I have been unable to trace any (Gaelic) Manx name, the English or a corruption of it being used in the Gaelic speech. There are, on the other hand, species whose Gaelic names are still frequently or universally used by Manxmen is speaking English. ”

“ Of twenty thousand persons in the Isle of Man, few in Hildesley's day were acquainted with English. A Manx translation of the New Testament had been begun by his predecessor, Bishop Wilson. Hildesley's resolve was to supply a complete translation of the whole bible. He himself learned Manx sufficiently well to conduct the services of the church in that language, but never acquired it perfectly. ”

“ Manuel II. (Palæologus) , Greek Emperor of Constantinople, 1391-1425. MANX KINGDOM, The. The Isle of Man in the Irish Sea gets its English name, Man, by an abbreviation of the native name, Mannin, the origin of which is unknown. The language, called Manx (now little used) , and the inhabitants, called Manxmen, are both of Gaelic, or Irish derivation. From the sixth to the tenth century the island was successively ruled by the Scots (Irish) , the Welsh and the Norwegians, finally becoming a separate petty kingdom, with Norwegian claims upon it. ”

“ Manx adopted in the seventeenth century an attempted, but not very successful, phonetic spelling, based partly on Welsh and partly on English, and therefore looks on paper very different from its sister languages; but it takes a Gaelic-speaking Highlander of intelligence a very short time to get to understand spoken Manx, though spoken Irish (except the Ulster dialect) is more difficult to him. Possibly Pictish, if it was Celtic at all, which is uncertain, was of the Gaelic branch, for we find but little of any language difficulty when St. ”

“ The curb of education, and the brake of common-sense are the surest checks on a people’s individuality. And these poor halfwits of the Manx race, wiser withal than many of the Malvolios who smile on them so demurely, exhibit the two great racial qualities of the Manx people—the Celtic and the Norse—in vivid companionship and contrast. ”

“ The Manx is not much spoken now. In the remoter villages, like Cregnesh, Ballaugh, Kirk Michael, and Kirk Andreas, it may still be heard. Moreover, the Manxman may hear Manx a hundred times for every time an Englishman hears it. But the younger generation of Manx folk do not speak Manx, and very often do not understand it. This is a rapid change on the condition of things in my own boyhood. Manx is to me, for all practical uses, an unknown tongue. ”

“ I have never in my life met with any race, except Icelanders and Norwegians, who are so completely the slave of hard fact. It is astounding how difficult the average Manxman finds it to put himself into the mood of the poet. That anything could come out of nothing, that there is such a thing as imagination, that any human brother of an honest man could say that a thing had been, which had not been, and yet not lie—these are bewildering difficulties to the modern Manxman. That a novel can be false and yet true—that, well that’s foolishness. I wrote a Manx romance called “The Deemster;” ”

“ A Manx proverb is no longer a Manx proverb when it is in English. The same is true of a Manx ballad translated, and of a Manx carval turned into an English carol. What belongs to us, our way of saying things, in a word, our style, is gone. The spirit is departed, and that which remains is only an English ghost flitting about in Manx grave-clothes. ”

“ I will engage two Manxmen quarrelling in Manx to make more noise in a given time than any other two human brethren in Christendom, not excepting two Irishmen. Also I think the Manx must be capable of notes of sweet feeling, and I observe that a certain higher lilt in a Manx woman’s voice, suggesting the effort to speak about the sound of the sea, and the whistle of the wind in the gorse, is lost in the voices of the younger women who speak English only. ”

“ Fact is not my domain, and I shall have to be content if in default of it I have got you close to that less palpable thing, the living heart of Manx-land, shown you our island, helped you to see its blue waters and to scent its golden gorse, and to know the Manxman from other men. ”

“ Manx has a word quaail (Irish comhdháil) , meaning a ‘meeting,’ and from it we have a derivative quaaltagh or qualtagh, meaning, according to Kelly’s Dictionary, ‘the first person or creature one meets going from home,’ whereby the author can have only meant the first met by one who is going from home. ”

“ The Manx are, as a rule, a sober people, and highly religious; as regards their tenets, they are mostly members of the Church of England or Wesleyan Methodists, or else both, which is by no means unusual. ”

“ Manx is a dialect mainly Celtic, and differing only slightly from the ancient Scottish Gaelic. I have heard my father say that when he was a boy in Ramsey, sixty years ago, a Scotch ship came ashore on the Carrick, and next morning after the wreck a long, lank, bony creature, with bare legs, and in short petticoats, came into the marketplace and played a tune on a little shrieking pair of smithy bellows, and then sang a song. ”

“ The Methodist local preachers have been the real guardians and repositories of one side of the Manx genius, a curious, hybrid thing, deadly earnest, often howlingly ludicrous, simple, generally sincere, here and there audaciously hypocritical. ”

“ I have rambled on too long about my eccentric Manx characters, and left myself little space for a summary of the soberer Manx characteristics. These are independence, modesty, a degree of sloth, a non-sanguine temperament, pride, and some covetousness. This uncanny combination of characteristics is perhaps due to our mixed Celtic and Norse blood. Our independence is pure Norse. ”

“ Death is not conqueror over such as these, but the human voice, the strange and beautiful part of us that is half spirit in life, is lost in death. For a while it startles us as an echo in an empty chamber, and then it is gone, and not all the world’s wealth could bring one note of it back. And such as the vanishing away of the voice of the friend we loved is the death of the old tongue which our fathers spoke. It is the death of the dead.
MANX SUPERSTITIONS
When the Manx tongue is dead there will remain, however, just one badge of our race—our superstition. ”

“ However, there is one proverb which is so Manx in spirit that I could almost take oath on its paternity, so exactly does it fit the religious temper of our people, though it contains a word that must strike an English ear as irreverent: “When one poor man helps another poor man, God himself laughs.”
MANX BALLADS
Next to the proverbs of a race its songs are the best expression of its spirit, and though Manx songs are few, some of them are full of Manx character. Always their best part is the air. ”

“ There isn’ the lek of him on the island at all, at all!” Always the island, the island, the island, or else the boats, and going out to the herrings. The sea is always present. You feel it, you hear it, you see it, you can never forget it. It dominates you. Manxmen are all sea-folk.
You will think this implies that Manxmen stick close to their island. They do more than that. I will tell you a story. Five years ago I went up into the mountains to seek an old Manx bard, last of a race of whom I shall have something to tell you in their turn. All his life he had been a poet. ”

“ The sea goes into their bones, it comes out at their skin. Their talk is full of it. They buy by it, they sell by it, they quarrel by it, they fight by it, they swear by it, they pray by it. Of course they are not conscious of this. Only their degenerate son, myself to wit, a chiel among them takin’ notes, knows how the sea exudes from the Manxmen. Say you ask if the Governor is at home. If he is not, what is the answer? “He’s not on the island, sir.” You inquire for the best hotel. “So-and-so is the best hotel on the island, sir.” You go to a Manx fair and hear a farmer selling a cow. ”

“ It falls into three periods, first, a period of Celtic rule, second of Norse rule, third of English dominion. Manx history is the history of surrounding nations. We have no Sagas of our own heroes. The Sagas are all of our conquerors. Save for our first three hundred recorded years we have never been masters in our own house. The first chapter of our history has yet to be written. We know we were Celts to begin with, but how we came we have never learnt, whether we walked dry-shod from Wales or sailed in boats from Ireland. ”

“ He played with his clergy as long as they had anything to lose, and then he played with a deemster and lost five hundred pounds himself. Poor little island, that had two such men for its masters, the one its master in the things of this world, the other its master in the things of the world to come! If anything is needful to complete the picture of wretchedness in which the poor Manx people must have existed then, it is the knowledge of what manner of man a deemster was in those days, what his powers were, and how he exercised them. ”

“ Nothing would give you a more vivid sense of the Manx people than some of our old airs. They would seem to take you into a little whitewashed cottage with sooty rafters and earthen floor, where an old man who looks half like a sailor and half like a landsman is dozing before a peat fire that is slumbering out. ”

“ Just about enough humanity in the four to make one complete man. But with vigour enough, fire enough, heart enough—I daren’t say soul enough—in their dismembered old trunks to make ten men apiece; born sea-rovers, true sons of Orry, their blood half brine. Well, is it not conceivable that in those earlier days of treasure seeking, when Elizabeth’s English captains were spoiling the Spaniard in the Indies, Manx sailors were also there? ”

“ No great man among us, no great event in our history, nothing to make us memorable. But I have been re-assured when I have remembered that, after all, to look on a life so simple and natural might even be a tonic. Here we are in the heart of the mighty world, which the true Manxman knows only by vague report; millions on millions huddled together, enough to make five hundred Isles of Man, more than all the Manxmen that have lived since the days of Orry, more than all that now walk on the island, added to all that rest under it ”

“ Patrick, and of St. Maughold were printed in Manx in the sixteenth century. Truly that is not enough, for, after all, we have no evidence that Shakespeare, who knew everything, knew Manx. But then Man has long been famous for its seamen. We had one of them at Trafalgar, holding Nelson in his arms when he died. The best days, or the worst days—which?—of the trade of the West Coast of Africa saw Manx captains in the thick of it. ”