aidan doyle: a history of the irish language

7/23/2019 Aidan Doyle: A History of the Irish Language

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A History of the Irish Language


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A History of the Irish

Language

From the Norman Invasion to

Independence

AIDAN DOYLE

1


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3Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX DP,

United Kingdom

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In memory of my mother, who didnt speak a word of Irish,but who loved language


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Contents

Acknowledgements xiList ofgures xiiiList of abbreviations xivConventions for spelling and transcription xv

. Introduction . Writing the history of a language . Dates and periods . Some sociolinguistic terminology

.. Standard languages and dialects .. Language contact

. Sources . Scope and lay-out Further reading

. The Anglo-Normans and their heritage () . The Anglo-Norman invasion

.. Before the Anglo-Normans .. The Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland .. The linguistic and cultural impact of the conquest .. Hibernicis ipsis Hiberniores

. The shape of the language () .. Early Modern Irish and Modern Irish .. Spelling and pronunciation .. Classical Irish .. The non-classical language .. Borrowing

. Conclusion

Further reading

. The Tudors () . A new era

.. The Tudors .. Language and identity under the Tudors .. The Tudor response to language conict .. The Gaelic reaction

. The shape of the language ()


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.. Conservatism, innovation, and genre .. Diglossia and bilingualism

. Conclusion Further reading

. The Stuarts () . A new dynasty

.. The linguistic effect of the conquest .. Language attitudes in the Stuart era .. Interaction between English and Irish at the written level .. The Irish abroad

. The shape of the language () .. Late Modern Irish (LMI) .. Borrowing and code-switching


. Two Irelands, two languages () . The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy

.. The Penal Laws .. The hidden Ireland .. Language contact and macaronic poems .. The Anglo-Irish and the Irish language .. The churches and the Irish language .. A private document .. Bilingualism, diglossia, and language statistics

. The shape of the language () .. Representing dialects in writing .. Vocabulary .. The language of Charles OConors journal


. A new language for a new nation () . Change comes to Ireland

.. Daniel OConnell .. Language and national identity in Europe and Ireland .. Education and literacy .. Boblir, Jumpers, andAn Cat Breac .. The Famine and emigration .. The extent and pace of the language shift .. Later attitudes towards the language shift .. Attempts to preserve and strengthen Irish

viii CONTENTS


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. The shape of the language () .. The innovative strand .. The conservative strand .. Borrowing

.. Grammars and primers . Conclusion Further reading

. Revival () . Political and social developments () . Cultural developments () . A precursor to the Gaelic League . Douglas Hyde . The Gaelic League . Education . Adult education . Cultural activity . Publishing

. The Gaeltacht .. Galltacht and Gaeltacht .. Conceptualizing the Gaeltacht .. The Gaeltacht: myth and reality

. The Gaelic League and politics

. Conclusion

the substance and the shadow Further reading

. The modernization of Irish () . Reshaping the language . Orthography . The dialects and standardization . Which dialect? . Perceived threats to Irish . Borrowings

. Irish forms of thought are not the same as thoseof other nations

. The codication of Irish . Vocabulary

.. Expanding the vocabulary .. The older language as a source of vocabulary .. The reception of the new words .. Censoring vocabulary

CONTENTS ix


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. New kinds of writing .. Literature .. Journalism

. Conclusion

Further reading


Glossary of linguistic terms References Name index Subject index

x CONTENTS


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Acknowledgements

This book arose partly as a response to the lack of suitable teaching materialsfor a course on the history of Irish which I have been teaching for the last veyears. For this reason, several groups of students have unwittingly providedme with feedback on various parts of the book which began as lecture material.I would like to acknowledge their collective assistance.

The Research Sabbatical Leave Committee of the College of Arts, SocialSciences, and Celtic Studies, University College Cork, granted me six months leave to work on this project. I thank Graham Allen in particular for his help.

My colleagues in the School of Irish Learning, UCC, have all helped andencouraged me in this undertaking. Special thanks to Pdraig Machin forformatting the manuscript images in Chapter , and to Kevin Murray for hishelp with the index. I am also grateful to Sen Coilein, Caitrona Dochartaigh, Siobhn N Dhonghaile, Ciara N Churnin, Daragh OConnell,Emma MacCarthy, and Jason Harris.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Crnn Doibhlin, MaryLombard, and Sheyeda Allen in Special Collections, Boole Library, UCC.Teresa ODriscoll in Arts and Humanities helped me with locating and copy-ing material. Thanks to Boole Library also for permission to publish an imagefrom Irish Manuscript , and to Irish Script on Screen for making the imageavailable.

A special word of thanks for Michael Murphy, Dept of Geography, UCC,for preparing Figures.,.,., and.for me. His aid enhanced the overallappearance of the book considerably.

Virve-Anneli Vihman read Chapter and made many useful commentswhich greatly improved it.

Michelle ORiordan prepared Figure., for which I am extremely grateful.I would like to acknowledge the help of Arndt Wigger, who spent hours

tracking down a single reference for me.Thanks to Routledge for permission to reproduce Figures .and., taken

from Diarmait Mac Giolla Chrost () The Irish language in Ireland(London/New York: Routledge).

Figure . is based on two sources: Figure. in Diarmait Mac GiollaChrost (),The Irish language in Ireland(London/New York: Routledge);and Map in Garret Fitzgerald (), Estimates for baronies of minimumlevel of Irish-speaking amongst successive decennial cohorts: to


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, Proceedings of the Royal Irish AcademyC, . Thanks toRoutledge and the Royal Irish Academy for permission to use these sources.

Material based on this book was presented at a conference at the Universityof Bristol and at a seminar at the University of Glasgow. I would like to thank

the participants for their remarks.The two anonymous reviewers chosen by OUP to referee this work have

inuenced the nal product signicantly. One was a linguist, the other ahistorian. While it is invidious to single out one of them, I am obliged tomention the contribution of the historian reviewer. This person went throughthe work with a ne comb, drawing to my attention countless errors andsuggesting many substantial additions to the references; they also highlighted anumber of lapses in style. I hope that the book in its nal shape will meet withtheir approval. Any remaining errors (and clichs) are my own.

Thanks to Julia Steer and Vicki Sunter of the Linguistics section, OUP, andto production editor Kate Gilks, for their unfailing help and courtesy duringthe process of seeing the book through the press. Copy-editor Jeremy Lang-worthy spotted many errors and infelicities of style, thus improving the overallpresentation considerably. I also thank Joy Mellor for reading the proofs sothoroughly.

On the personal level, the support of my father, sister, and brother was aconstant source of encouragement. Last but not least, there is the personwhose idea it was that I should write this book, but who does not wish to bementioned by name. In deference to her wishes, I can only quote the refrain ofthe old song:Ar irinn n ineosfainn c h.

xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


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List ofgures

. Map of Ireland

. Quatrain from University College Cork, Irish MS , p.

. Examples of manuscript contractions

. Language communities in Irelandc.



. Language communities in Ireland

. Language communities in Ireland

. The Gaelic font


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List of abbreviations

A. Publications

CS An Claidheamh Soluis

D Irish-English Dictionary(= Dinneen )

Des Desiderius(= ORahilly)

DIL Dictionary of the Irish Language(= Royal Irish Academy)

GJ The Gaelic Journal

HM An haiclara Mnas(= Stenson )

FL Finne an Lae

OD Foclir Gaeilge Barla[Irish-English dictionary] (= Dnaill )

PB Prliament na mban(= Cuv)

PCT Parliement Chloinne Tomis(= Williams )

PF Prliment na bhfodir(= Duinnshlibhe )

TST Teagasc ar an Sean-Tiomna(= Madagin )

B. Terms and names

EMI Early Modern Irish

LMI Late Modern Irish

MI Modern Irish

NUI National University of Ireland

SPIL Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language

C. Labels not found in Leipzig glossing rules

EMP emphatic

NAS nasalized consonant

PRS present

PRT particle


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Conventions for spelling

and transcription

Since many readers will not be familiar with the International PhoneticAlphabet, an attempt is made to represent the sounds of Irish using Englishspelling. Individual sounds are written between slashes, e.g. Therst sound inthe Irish wordsis pronounced as /sh/.

When discussing spelling, graphs are written between angled brackets, e.g. in the Irish wordphsis pronounced as /f/.

When discussing the provenance of words, a single angled bracket is placedbefore the source, e.g.sagart(< sacerdos).

Segments of words which have a grammatical function, such as prexes,sufxes, and endings of verbs, are written in bold, e.g. The ending-annin theIrish wordglanannstands for the Present Tense.

An asterisk before a word indicates that it is ungrammatical or misspelt, e.g.*mouses, *dogz.

Titles of publications in Irish are followed by an English translation insquare brackets, e.g.Cn lae Amhlaoibh U Shilleabhin[Humphrey OSulli-

vans diary] (de Bhaldraithe ).

Passages in Irish are followed by an English translation in square brackets,e.g. I ndn na nGall gealltar linn [In the poem for the foreigners we promise].

Linguistic examples which are discussed are numbered. When necessary,they are glossed word for word according to the Leipzig glossing rules.

Irish words which occur throughout the text and which are commonly usedin English are not written in italics, e.g. Gael, Gall, Gaeltacht. Individual Irishwords are written in italics and translated, e.g. the worddn close.

Many Irish names occur in both Irish and English variants, e.g. DouglasHyde = Dubhghlas de hde. In the text, the English variant is invariably used,

but the reader should bear in mind that Irish variants may occur in quotationsand references. The most common duplicates are cross-referenced in the index.Likewise, the spelling of Irish words varies depending on whether they

occur in texts before or after , e.g. Gael(new) = Gaedhal(old). Exceptin quotations and references, the post-form is used.

Unless otherwise stated, all translations are the authors.


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1

Introduction

1.1 Writing the history of a language

Libraries and bookshops often have sections entitled Language, or LanguageStudies. Within these sections one will nd a number of books dealing with thehistory of individual languages, like English or French. These histories can be

divided into two types depending on the approach taken by the author.Internal histories deal with concrete changes that have occurred in a languageover the centuries. In the case of English we can observe a major difference if wecompare the Old English period (c.c. AD) with present-day English.Old English is closely related to Old German, and many of its linguistic featurescan still be found in present-day German: for example, the three genders fornounsmasculine, feminine, and neuter. Present-day English no longer has thisgrammatical gender, and its vocabulary has expanded considerably in the lastmillennium, by borrowing words or creating them out of existing resources. Aninternal history of English would describe all of the various changes in detail,and try to account for their occurrence.

Language history is also part of history in general, it does not exist inisolation from it. External histories describe changes that take place in thecommunities that speak different languages, linking these changes to eventsin politics, culture, and social structure. If we take again the case of English,an external history would refer to the effect that the Norman invasion ofEngland in had on its linguistic community. It would describe amongother things the wholesale borrowing of words like dinneror baron fromFrench into English in the period following the Norman invasion, linking

this to the prestige enjoyed by the language of the new ruling class, NormanFrench. External histories also deal with such matters as bilingualism, therise and fall of languages, and written and spoken language. In brief, onemight say that external histories deal with the social aspects of language use,or sociolinguistics.

To some extent, internal and external histories are independent of eachother. Thus, it is possible to provide an outline of the development of alanguage and its interaction with society and culture without going into details


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of the internal changes within the language in the same period. Likewise, onecould deal with the details of linguistic change by simply stating, for example,that a certain sound or grammatical structure was replaced by another one,without linking this to non-linguistic factors. However, if we compare

the internal and external development of any language, we realize that thetwo are closely interconnected. Change is nearly always driven by somealteration in the linguistic community.

Consider for a moment the process by which a single language, Latin,developed in the periodc.c.ADinto the various individual languageswhich we know today as the Romance languagesFrench, Italian, Spanish,and Rumanian. Before the break-up, there were regional dialects of Latinwhich pregured the later languages. Now, one might argue that the dialectssimply diverged and leave it at that. However, it is no coincidence that this

divergence coincided with a period of great upheaval in the area of the Romanempire. Until the fth century this single administrative and cultural unit hadrelied on a single language, Latin, as its medium of communication. Before thefall of the western empire in ADit was necessary to have a language thatcould be used by all its citizens for communicating, whether they were living inBritain in the far west or in Northern Africa in the Mediterranean. With thebreak-up of the empire into smaller regions, such distant communication wasno longer necessary; one only had to deal with the inhabitants of ones ownregion, at least in speaking. Population movements and invasions furtherdisrupted the former unity, and the nal outcome was the emergence ofdifferent languages about years after the empire broke up.

Now it is not possible to state categorically that the change of a certainsound in Latin into another sound in Spanish is specically linked to an eventsuch as the invasion of the Iberian peninsula by the Vandals in the fthcentury. Nevertheless, it could be argued that the political upheaval wasindirectly responsible for the linguistic chaos which produced the newsound. To simply concentrate on the internal linguistic development withouttaking into consideration the external factors constitutes a very limitedapproach.

Likewise, social change often has as one of its consequences linguisticchange. Irish society has undergone something of a transformation in thelast forty tofty years. This has had an effect on the English spoken in Ireland.In , the regional dialects of the country were quite distinct, even in thecase of educated speakers. As soon as somebody opened their mouth, onecould identify them as coming from a particular region such as the south-west,or the north, or Dublin. Unlike Britain, where a standard kind of English hadexisted for sometime, there was no standard pronunciation for Irish English.

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This situation has changed dramatically in the last half century. A newdialect has emerged which one might label standard Irish English, a dialectspoken by members of the middle classes all over the country, from the heartof Dublin to the Aran Islands on the western seaboard. It is based on the

metropolitan dialect which has developed in Dublin in the last fty years or so,but it is no longer conned to this area. The rise of this standard dialect hasbeen accompanied by the decline of the traditional regional dialects. Thisparticular case of linguistic change is not accidental. It is a direct consequenceof the spread of education, the inuence of the mass media, particularlytelevision and radio, and the urbanization of Irish society.

The present work presents aspects of both the external and internal historyof Irish. However, it is not intended as a systematic study of the internalchanges that Irish has undergone in the period . For the most part,

it is concerned with the shifting position of Irish in society over the centuries,with the way it is perceived by the Irish people, and with its interaction withvarious historical developments in Ireland. At the same time, it seemed a goodidea to provide some information about how the actual shape of the languagechanged in tandem with the external developments. For this reason, I alsoprovide a brief account of the more accessible and important internal changeswhich affected Irish over the centuries.

In theory at least, it would be possible to write an internal history of Irishwithout saying much about other languages. For an external history, this issimply not possible. The history of Irish is intimately bound up with thespread of English in Ireland. This in turn is the result of a complex array ofpolitical, cultural, religious, educational, and sociological factors. An alterna-tive title for the book might be:A history of the Irish and English languages inIreland. Thus, as the narrative progresses, I will have more and more occasionto refer to the rise of English.

1.2 Dates and periods

At this stage, it is necessary to dene some terms that I will be using in the

course of this work. Just as general historians divide the past into variousperiods such as the Middle Ages or modern times, historians of language useterms like old or modern when referring to the various phases of a language slife. However, the terms used in language studies, and particularly in thehistory of Irish, differ somewhat from those found in general history, andoften cause confusion for students and readers. For this reason, I will try topresent a succinct and precise denition of the labels attached to the variousperiods in the history of Irish.

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Before AD, our picture of what Irish might have looked like is very hazyindeed. Most of what we know comes from monuments called Ogham stonesfrom the fth and sixth centuries. These stones are marked with lines andnotches which represent the letters of the Latin alphabet. For the most part,

the inscriptions consist of personal names. On the basis of the Ogham stonesand some other scraps of evidence, scholars have been able to put together atentative outline of what is known as Primitive Irish.

Theperiod c.c.AD is labelled Old Irish. In this era, wendtextswrittenin manuscripts, on the basis of which scholars have been able to reconstructreasonably completely the language of the time. In the years after , thelanguage underwent some far-reaching changes which resulted in a new kind ofIrish. For this reason, the periodc.c.is called Middle Irish. Sometimes,the whole period c.c.is called Medieval Irish. This can be a bit mis-

leading, because the medieval era in history lasts longer, until about .The next phase of Irish,c.c., has traditionally been referred to asEarly Modern Irish (EMI). This label has caused a lot of confusion. Forhistorians, the Early Modern Period does not begin until at least .Furthermore, Early Modern English is the name given to the English of thetwo centuriesc.c.. In terms of culture, the period c.c.inIreland is part of the medieval era, or the Middle Ages, and in fact there is aremarkable continuity between Middle Irish and Early Modern Irish withrespect to literature.

Modern Irish (MI), sometimes called Late Modern Irish (LMI), is regardedas beginning about and extending to the present day. This more or lesscorresponds to the modern period in general history, and so is unlikely tocause much misunderstanding. However, some authors use Modern Irish toinclude Early Modern Irish as well. This leads to an unfortunate mismatch,whereby Modern Irish begins in , but Modern Irish history does not startuntil about .

In what follows, I will stick to the traditional terminology, as to do otherwisewould only confuse things further, but the reader should bear in mind the some-what idiosyncratic nature of the terms used in relation to Irish in other works.

1.3 Some sociolinguistic terminology

In the course of this book I try to minimize the amount of technical jargon.However, it will be necessary to refer to some linguistic terminology which iswidely used in works of this sort. I present here the most basic concepts ofsociolinguistics, and I will gradually introduce some more terms in the courseof the narrative.

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1.3.1 Standard languages and dialects

Most living languages occur in more than one version in the modern world. Ifwe consider English in Ireland, we can observe that there is one version that isused in what one might call public situations. Such situations include broad-

casting, education, political speeches, religious ceremonies, and to a lesserextent written literature and drama. This version of English is standardEnglish. It has a more or less homogeneous pronunciation, grammar, andspelling. For example, if you listen to newsreaders working in RTE (the Irishpublic broadcasting service), their accents sound more or less the same. Atschool, children are taught to write in a uniform way, for example, to writenightinstead ofnite, orbiteinstead ofbight.

Of course, we all know that people do not speak the same way, even if they areall living in a small country. If one compares somebody from Dublin and some-

body from Cork, one will notice differences between their pronunciation, theirvocabulary, and even their grammar, perhaps. These variants of a language we calldialects. Dialects can be subdivided further into regional dialects, which are basedon geography, and social dialects, based on social class. For example, withinDublin one can distinguish middle-class and working-class pronunciation.

If there is a standard form of language, it contrasts with non-standardvarieties, which may be conned to a particular region or social class. Non-standard versions of a language are sometimes referred to as substandard, butlinguists try not to use this term, as it implies that one variety is somehow better

than another. In terms of language, there is nothing inherently superior aboutsaying I dont know anything, rather than I dont know nothingone mighteven argue that the latter is more logical, and so-called double negatives arecommon in other languages. One construction is standard, one is non-standard.Any additional evaluation exists only in the minds of the speakers and listeners.

Standard versions of languages are a relatively recent phenomenon, andusually are the result of a centralized authority like a state or church imposingits version of a language on other people. Standards are necessary when com-municating with strangers, people outside your own locality or social group.They are more used in written communication than in speaking, more in formal

situations than in casual ones.

1.3.2 Language contact

As we shall see, much of our story will be concerned with the way that Englishand Irish have inuenced each other over the centuries. Language contact is auniversal and age-old phenomenon. It is triggered by situations in which oneneeds to communicate with speakers of another language, which leads tospeakers being exposed to and perhaps learning a different language.

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A typical example of language contact would be an Irish or English touristcommunicating with locals in Spain. If the communication were in English,the Spanish speaker would bring some features of his own language with himinto the kind of English he spoke, e.g. the Spanish pronunciation of certain

vowels. It is also possible that language contact would lead to new items ofvocabulary being borrowed from one of the languages to the other.

In situations of prolonged contact, some individuals or communities maybe exposed to two languages from childhood onwards, which results in theirspeaking the two languages with similar prociency. This prociency isreferred to as bilingualism. As one would expect, if there is widespreadbilingualism in a community it can lead to fairly radical changes in one ofthe languages. An oft-quoted example of this kind of bilingualism is thesituation in England after the Norman conquest, in the period .

Many groups

the new government functionaries and administrators, theclergy, and the merchantswere bilingual in English and French. As a result,English borrowed a vast amount of French vocabulary in this period throughlanguage contact. The bilingualism didnt last, but it did have a permanenteffect on English.

Sometimes people with a knowledge of two languages will associate themwith two very different spheres of activity. A common scenario is that onelanguage is associated with more formal activities such as teaching or writing,and the other one is used more when speaking to members of one s family orto neighbours. This kind of situation is referred to as bilingual diglossia. It is

very common in post-colonial countries in Africa and Asia, where it is notunusual for people to speak a local language at home, and to speak English orFrench at school or at work.

Diglossia can also occur between a dialect of a language and a standardversion, particularly when the two are very far from each other. In many Arab-speaking countries, there is a standard form of Arabic used in ofcial com-munications, in writing, or when dealing with people from other regions,while a local dialect is spoken in everyday communication.

1.4 Sources

As with any kind of history, the history of a language is based on varioussources. The further back we go in time, the scarcer these sources become, andthe more difcult they are to interpret.

Generally speaking, we have more information about the external history ofIrish than its internal history, or at least the statements about the former aremore straightforward. Frequently, these statements come from outsiders,

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English speakers who were visiting Ireland, or inhabitants of the English-speaking parts of the country. For that reason, they have to be treated withcaution. However, even if the writers did not know Irish, it is safe to assumethat they would have recognized Irish when they heard it being spoken, and so

their statements about the numbers of speakers, or the parts of the countrythey inhabited, can be taken as reasonably reliable.

We also have evidence in Irish about the language. There is less of this thanthe English evidence, but since it provides us with a view from the inside, insome ways it is more valuable. In contrast to the English evidence, the Irishevidence tends to be a source of information about the internal history of thelanguage. A good example is the collection of texts known as grammaticaltracts (Bergin ; McKenna ). These were commentaries on Irishcompiled in the late medieval period by professional poets, probably as a kind

of manual for students of poetry. One reason that they are a valuable sourcefor the modern historian of the language is that they often provide us withinformation about particular words or forms or pronunciations which arelabelled as lochtach faulty. The fact that the poets felt the need to warn theirstudents about these mistakes tells us that some speakers of Irish at the timewere using these faultyforms in their speech, and thus we are able to deducesomething about dialectal and non-standard speech at the time. Most linguisticrecords before the twentieth century are written in standard or prestige varieties,and hence provide us with little information about colloquial or non-standardspeech. For this reason, evidence of the sort provided by the grammatical tractsis particularly precious.

While the English-language sources for the external history of Irish are wellknown and readily accessible, the Irish-language sources are familiar only tothose who can read them, and new evidence is still being collected andpublished. One purpose of this book is to point readers in the direction ofboth kinds of source, and especially to make them aware of the Irish-languageones.

1.5 Scope and lay-outThis book is primarily concerned with what happened in the period. The end of the twelfth century is regarded as a dening momentin Irish history, witnessing as it did the arrival of a new group of invaders, whobrought with them a language that was eventually to dislodge the one spokenuntil then. This, and the fact that internally Irish entered into a new phasearound (Early Modern Irish), makes a natural starting-point. InChapter , I include a short note on Old and Middle Irish in order to provide a

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context for what follows. It should be borne in mind, though, that the languageof the period is radically different from the later language, just asLatin is quite distinct from the Romance languages into which it metamor-phosed in the Middle Ages. The history of Old and Middle Irish would require

a separate study.The end-point of my narrative, , is less obvious. After all, the story of

Irish does not stop there; it continues right up to the present day. A number ofconsiderations prompted me to nish my narrative at this point. First, Irelandgained independence from Britain in . For the rst time ever, the Irishlanguage now had the support of the state. Second, for reasons that willbecome clear in Chapters and , in the period Irish enteredinto a new phase. Responsibility for the language passed from the hands ofnative speakers into the hands of learners. This in turn had a huge impact on

its structure, the echoes of which can still be felt. Future historians of Irish willbe faced with the task of labelling and describing the new language which isstill being shaped by second-language speakers, a language which is still in theprocess of becoming. In some ways marks the end of Late Modern Irish,the last variety of the language to be spoken by communities as a rstlanguage, rather than as one which they learned at school. Thus there aregood reasons connected with the internal history of Irish for ending thenarrative in .

The book is divided into an introduction and seven chapters. Each of thesechapters deals with a distinct period in the history of the language. Theindividual chapters are followed by a conclusion which relates the precedingdiscussion to present-day Ireland and the place that Irish occupies in its society.Each chapter is divided into two parts. The rst part deals with the externalhistory of Irish in the period in question. The second part provides a brief andconcise account of the more important internal developments that occurred inthis era. The drawback of this lay-out is that there is a certain abruptness aboutthe transition from one section to the other, with the ow of the narrative beinginterrupted. On the other hand, many readers will want to concentrate on onesection or another, and the unambiguous signposting of the contents will

facilitate this. Each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading. Theworks listed there will enable those who are interested to delve more fullyinto both the literary/cultural and linguistic aspects of the history of Irish.

Because the work is intended for a general readership, linguistic terms havebeen kept to a minimum, but it has been necessary to introduce a limitedamount of technical jargon. Linguistic terms which are used frequently areexplained in the glossary.

Abriefcommentisinorderonthemapsinthebook.Ihaveincludedanumberof maps with the aim of showing the geographical distribution of English and

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Irish at various stages over the centuries. Unfortunately, two-dimensional maps,while helpful, are not able to display this coexistence of two languages in onegeographical region. It is important that the reader bear this point in mind wheninterpreting language maps, both in this book and in other works. A map ofIreland from onwards is not like a map of present-day Western Europe,where it is more or less possible to delimit German-speaking regions fromFrench-speaking territories. Within the core German-speaking region, we

FIGURE. Map of Ireland

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know that all social classes, from the ruling elite to the unskilled labourers, speakGerman. This was not the case in Ireland, particularly after . For example,Irish was never spoken by the power elites in Dublin and other urban centres. Analternative way of trying to visualize the distribution of English and Irish would

be to think of geological layers. On the bottom we would nd Irish, then theremight be a transitional layer of mixed language, and on the top would bea layer ofEnglish. The essential point to remember is that the distribution of languages isnot merely geographical; it is also social and ethnic. The same two languages can,and often are, spoken in the same area, but by two different social and ethnicgroups. The history that I have written is more about describing these groups andtheir interaction than about trying to identify regions where all the populationspoke only one language to the exclusion of the other.

Finally, the book is written from an Irish perspective. Dublin, rather than

London or New York, is the capital city; when I write about English, I amreferring to the kind of English spoken in Ireland. The last chapter is focusedon present-day Ireland. Given the subject matter, this seems to be a reasonableenough approach. In the same way, one could hardly fault an author of ahistory of English for writing from an English perspective. A map of Irelandis provided to enable readers to identify locations referred to in the book(Figure .).

Further reading

For an introduction to the study of language, see Fromkin et al.().For a dictionary of linguistic terminology, see Crystal ().For an accessible introduction to the study of language change in general, seeChapter of Fromkinet al.().For introductions to sociolinguistics, see Chapter of Trudgill () andFromkinet al.().For a history of English, see Mugglestone (). This does not require anyprevious knowledge of linguistic terminology. Murch (), Huallachin (: ), and hUiginn ()

provide concise accounts of different aspects of the external history of Irish.For a history of Irish English, see Hickey ().For a comprehensive collection of English-language comments on Irish frommedieval times to the twentieth century, see Crowley ().

INTRODUCTION


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2

The Anglo-Normans and theirheritage (12001500)

2.1 The Anglo-Norman invasion

2.1.1 Before the Anglo-Normans

Our earliest detailed knowledge about Ireland and its culture comes from theperiod AD, after the introduction of Christianity. The new religionbrought with it the Latin language and the alphabet. Before that the languagespoken by the inhabitants of Ireland had never been written down.

The Christian missionaries soon established a network of monasteries allover the country, the remains of which can be seen to the present day in placeslike Clonmacnoise or Glendalough. These monasteries were centres of learn-ing, and fullled a similar function in society as universities do today.Because the language of the church was Latin, many of the medieval texts

that have been preserved are written in this language. The subjects are for themost part religious, such as commentaries on the Bible, theological tracts,and saintslives. Latin was also the medium chosen for secular subjects suchas history, law, or medicine, and even for poetry. One advantage that Latinhad over Irish was that it was an international language, understood all overEurope, much in the way that English is today. This meant that Irish clericscould correspond easily with their counterparts on the Continent, and readnew works being produced in other countries. Quite a few Irish clerics wentabroad to study, teach, and evangelize non-Christian peoples, using Latin asa means of communication.

By the beginning of the seventh century Irish monks had adapted the Latinalphabet for the purpose of writing down their native language. A fairly largecorpus of material survives from the period c.c., enough for scholarsto compile a grammar for the language of this time, Old Irish. Most of thismaterial survives in manuscripts preserved in monasteries in ContinentalEurope, such as St Gall in Switzerland or Wrzburg in Germany. Very oftenthey consist of brief explanations or translations, called glosses, of Latinsentences and phrases, which are written on the margins of manuscripts.


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Ireland differs from the rest of Europe in the Middle Ages in that bothclerics and lay writers began to use Irish to record longer texts at a relativelyearly date, from the eighth century onwards; elsewhere at this time writtencompositions still tend to be in Latin. Many of the treasures of medieval Irish

literature have survived in manuscripts written in monastic centres in the erac.c.. Much of the literature, such as the nature poems attributed tohermits, is overtly religious. However, the monastic scribes were also quitehappy to write down secular, pre-Christian tales like the sagaTin B Cuailgne[Cattle Raid of Cooley]. The most important categories of prose writingrecognized are historical tales, otherworld tales, heroic tales, Fanaigecht(tales about the warrior band called the Fian), legal texts, and saintslives.

Around the year , Vikings from Scandinavia and Scotland started raid-ing Ireland. Initially they conned themselves to brief raids, but soon they

began to stay for longer spells, and eventually founded a number of urbancentres around the coast, the most important of these being Dublin. For a fewhundred years, we can assume that there was a small community in Irelandwhich spoke the language of these Vikings, Old Norse. We can also be prettycertain that there were many people who were bilingual in Irish and OldNorse. However, by the Norsemen seem to have been relatively wellassimilated into the general Irish community, at least as far as language isconcerned. There was some borrowing of words from Old Norse into Irish.These were mostly terms connected with warfare, sailing, and commerce. Hereare some examples:

() targa shield(


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after the Norman invasion of England (the language of this period is calledMiddle English).

It is worth remembering that Ireland was not the only territory where Irishwas spoken in. Beginning in the fth century, invaders from Ireland had

settled in large numbers in Scotland. Christianity gained its rst foothold onthe tiny island of Iona on the western coast, and spread from there to thesouth-western part of the country and the Highlands. A Gaelic kingdom wasestablished in Scotland in the ninth century. Irish gave way to English in thesouth of the country in the twelfth century, but remained in the Highlands andWestern Isles for many centuries after that, eventually becoming a separatelanguage called Scots Gaelic. Irish also established itself as the language of theIsle of Man around the same time that it spread to Scotland. The languagewhich later emerged on this island is referred to as Manx.

Returning to Old and Middle Irish, it must be emphasized that they are verydifferent from Modern Irish. One example can serve to illustrate this. Mostlanguages have a verb expressing the conceptto fear, and this verb is followedby a direct object denoting the cause of the fear:

() I fear the Lord.

Old Irish was no exception in this regard. It too possessed a verb expressingtofear, which took a direct object:

() int adagadar in Coimdid

the.person who.fears the Lordhe who fears the Lord (DIL, under the entryad-gathar)

Here, the verbad-agadar fearstakes the direct objectin Coimdid the Lord.Now compare sentence () to a similar sentence in Modern Irish:

() T eagla orm roimh an Tiarna.is fear on.me before the LordI fear the Lord.

Instead of a single verb, followed by a direct object, in MI we have a construc-

tion involving the verbto be+ noun (eagla) + two prepositions. So the objectof the preposition ar on in MI corresponds to the subject I in the EnglishsentenceI fear the Lord, while the object of the prepositionroimh beforeinMI corresponds to the English object the Lord. On the other hand, thestructure of the Old Irish sentence () is more or less identical to the Englishequivalent: there is just a subject, verb, and object, without any prepositions.

This is only one of the many signicant differences between the languagebefore c. and the shape it took after that date. The verbal system in

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particular beforewas highly complex, and poses considerable difcultiesfor the learner. Even those students with a good command of MI have to learnOld and Middle Irish from the start.

2.1.2 The Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland

Very often, certain dates and events come to have a special signicance for thehistory of particular countries or societies. For French people, the year ,the year of the French Revolution, has a special resonance. For all Europeans,and , the years in which the two world wars began, have powerfulassociations. Countries and nations that have been occupied by other coun-tries frequently remember the years when the occupation began or ended. Inthe case of Ireland, one of the dates that stands out is , the year in which,

according to historians, the Anglo-Normans of England invaded the neigh-bouring country.In military terms, the invasion was highly successful. Within a mere six

years Henry II of England had been ofcially recognized as the Lord of Ireland,and his Anglo-Norman warlords had gained control over much of Leinster,Munster, and Connaught. Dublin became a new centre of government andadministration, the seat of the English kings representatives in Ireland. Largenumbers of settlers followed in the wake of the armies and soon had estab-lished themselves in a number of urban centres: Dublin, Cork, Limerick,Waterford, Kilkenny, Cahir, Galway, and Dundalk. The inuence of the new

rulers could be felt in the countryside as well, where they built castles tomaintain their control of the Irish chieftains.

Despite this victory, the Irish chieftains gradually rallied and began to resistthe newcomers. As well as this, as time went by many of the more powerfulAnglo-Norman families became virtually independent of the king of Englandand his representatives in Dublin. The history of the period is oneof intermittent wars and truces between the king of England and the Irish andAnglo-Norman lords, without either side gaining a conclusive victory. Boththe Irish and the Anglo-Normans seem to have had no hesitation in changing

sides if it lay in their own interests to do so. With intermarriage between thetwo groups, the distinctions which had initially existed between invader andinvaded became blurred, especially in the south-west and west of the country,where the English inuence was weaker than it was closer to Dublin.

The Anglo-Normans brought with them a different social and legal system,and tried to impose it on the parts of the country under their control. Apartfrom the towns and cities, only in two regions can they be said to havesucceeded in permanently establishing English law and customs. One wasthe Pale, the district comprising County Dublin and parts of Counties Louth,

THE ANGLO-NORMANS AND THEIR HERITAGE()


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Meath, Kildare, and Wicklow. The other was the south-east of Ireland, inCounty Wexford, the place where the invaders had landed in . In the restof Ireland, there was either a mixture of Irish and English law, or Irish law only.

From the point of view of this book, the main importance of the Anglo-

Norman conquest of Ireland was the fact that it brought a new element intothe linguistic landscape of the country, namely the English language.

2.1.3 The linguistic and cultural impact of the conquest

The group of people that invaded and settled Ireland in the period was mixed in terms of language. Some of the aristocratic leaders like Richardde Clare or Hugh de Lacy spoke Norman French as well as English, but mostof the soldiers and settlers were English speakers. For the next hundred yearsor so many French-speaking administrators and noblemen were sent over to

Ireland to represent the interests of the king of England. A few pieces ofliterature in Norman French dealing with events in Ireland have survivedfrom the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Despite this limited evidence forwriting in French, it seems safe to say that bythe new colonists of Irelandwere nearly all solidly Anglophone. Like in England, French continued to beused for a few centuries more in legal and administrative affairs, but this wasmostly at the written level. However, French did survive for a while as aspokenlingua francain commercial transactions among the merchant familiesof the coastal towns who traded with the Continent, and was used among

certain aristocratic circles and in some religious orders.In the period , the English speakers were more or less connedto those areas under the control of the crown. We have good evidence thatEnglish was spoken in the main towns and cities, in the Pale, and in the south-east. It was also spoken to some extent in Anglo-Norman households outsidethese areas, by noble families like the Fitzgeralds of Desmond in the south ofthe country, or the Burkes of Clanricarde in the west. We know also that Irishstill continued to be spoken by many of the inhabitants of the Pale, and even ofDublin. We can assume, then, that there must have been a high degree ofbilingualism in those areas of the country where the writ of English law ran.

2.1.4 Hibernicis ipsis Hiberniores

As time went by, many of the Anglo-Norman families became Gaelicized andtook on Irish language and customs. Writing of this development, the seven-teenth-century historian John Lynch remarked that they became Hibernicisipsis Hiberniores more Irish than the Irish themselves.

We can illustrate this with a verse from a poem written in the fourteenthcentury by a leading poet of the day, Gofraidh Fionn Dlaigh:



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I ndn na nGall gealltar linnGaoidhil dionnarba a hirinn;Goill do shraoineadh tar sl sairi ndn na nGaoidheal gealltair.

[In the poem for the foreigners we promise that the Irish will be driven fromIreland; in the poem for the Irish we promise that the foreigners will bescattered eastwards across the sea.]

(Mac Cionnaith : )

This verse is instructive for a number of reasons. First, it comes from a poemwritten for Gerald, the Earl of Desmond, an important Anglo-Norman lordfrom Munster (in the south of Ireland). It would suggest that Gerald andpeople of his class felt comfortable speaking Irish; not only that, but theyactively embraced native cultural forms of expression such as poetry

and music. Second, in this poem we

nd the terms Gael (Gaoidheal) andGall juxtaposed.1 The former refers to what we would nowadays call the Gaelicinhabitants of Ireland, the latter to the descendants of the invaders, the Anglo-Normans. Both groups speak Irish, but there is the implication in the poemthat there is an ethnic difference between them, a difference that at timesfound expression in actual armed conict.

The terms Gael and Gall survived the downfall of the Gaelic aristocracy inthe seventeenth century, and are widespread in the poetry of the period. In this latter period, though, there is a very clear divide betweenthe two groups. The Gael represents the ethnic, linguistic, cultural, andreligious values that the later poets identied with, while the Gall stands forall that is alien and opposed to those values. In the fourteenth-century poemby Gofraidh Fionn Dlaigh, though, the poet does not identify with theGael. Both the Anglo-Norman lord and the Gaelic chief are potential patronsfor the poet. He acknowledges that there are differences between the two kindsof patron, but the overall impression is that they are part of the same culturaland linguistic milieu.

In his bookMere Irish and For-Ghael, Joep Leersen points out that Geraldthe Earl of Desmond also wrote poems in Irish, and that in one of them he uses

the termireannach Irishmanto refer to the inhabitants of Ireland (Leersena: ). Unlike Gael or Gall, ireannachis not an ethnic name, but onethat refers merely to the country of residence. In Leersens view, this showsthat some of the Anglo-Normans felt a strong afnity between themselves andtheir Gaelic neighbours.

1 Note that Gaeil is the plural of Gael, while Gaill is the plural of Gall.



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There is other, more prosaic, evidence that the degree of assimilation of theAnglo-Normans was indeed far-reaching. One of the more important centresof royal rule and administration in medieval Ireland was the city of Kilkenny.In during a session there of the royal parliament of Ireland, a piece of

legislation called the Statutes of Kilkenny was enacted. In these statutes, thelegislators advert to the Gaelicization of the Anglo-Normans: But now manyEnglish of the said land, forsaking the English language, manners, mode ofriding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners,fashion and language of the Irish enemies (Curtis and McDowell : ;quoted in Crowley: ). As a corrective, they recommend the following:It is ordained that every Englishman do use the English language, and benamed by an English name . . . and use the English custom, fashion, mode ofriding and apparel . . . It is ordained that the men of Ireland do not use the

plays which men call hurling(Curtis and McDowell ; quoted in Crowley: ).

As far as we can tell, for the next years the Statutes of Kilkenny weremore honoured in the breach than in the observance. One might argue thatthe Norman conquest had as little impact on the linguistic landscape ofIreland as it had earlier on that of England. In both cases, it seemed, after aninitial period when the language of the conquerors held sway, after a while theinvaders adopted the language of the country. In England French yielded toEnglish, while in Ireland English gave way to Irish.

However, this does not mean that English did not inuence Irish in thecenturies following the Anglo-Norman invasion. On the contrary, it made itspresence strongly felt through an activity which seems to always thrive insituations where two languages are confronted with each other, namelytranslation. Large amounts of material were translated from English intoIrish in this period. The texts translated are representative of the kind ofmaterial to be found all over Europe at the time: they comprise Romancetales such as those connected with King Arthur and his knights, as well assermons, lives of saints, medical tracts, and travel books like the account ofMarco Polos visit to China.

On the spoken level, there must have been quite a lot of interpreting goingon between the different linguistic communities, especially in spheres ofactivity such as trade. All this translation, both written and spoken, meantthat there was considerable enrichment of the vocabulary of the Irish lan-guage, and also that the intellectual life of the literate Irish classes wasenhanced. Comparing Ireland to the rest of Europe at the time, we get theimpression of a language and society that is fully keeping pace with overseasdevelopments. This contact with other countries would have been facilitatedby the presence in Ireland of religious orders like the Franciscans, who had



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strong links with Britain and the Continent. Irish brothers and monks wereconstantly travelling abroad, bringing back with them knowledge of othercultures, a knowledge which found its way into the written texts produced inIrish in this period.

2.2 The shape of the language (12001500)

2.2.1 Early Modern Irish and Modern Irish

As mentioned in Chapter , it is common practice to refer to the language ofthe periodas Early Modern Irish (EMI). This might suggest that itis not that different from Modern Irish (MI), the language taught in schools inIreland to the present day. There is some truth in this: if we compare theearlier language to the Irish that some readers will be familiar with from their

schooldays, we can observe a remarkable degree of similarity.Lets start off with a simple sentence,The man kisses the woman, in EMI and

in MI:

() a. Pg-aidh an fear an mnaoi. (EMI)kiss-es the man the woman

b. Pg-ann an fear an bhean. (MI)kiss-es the man the woman

The three key words here arepg kiss,fear man, andbean woman. Two of

them are the same in a. and b.:pgandfear. The only word in EMI that looksdifferent from MI ismnaoi. The other big difference is the ending ofpg kiss.In MI it is -ann, while in EMI it is -aidh. In order to illustrate how thedifference came about I need to use a little bit of technical terminology.

Words likefear manandbean womanare called nouns; they name someentity. Nouns can appear in different forms depending on the context. InEnglish, we use the formcat(singular) when there is only one animal involved,andcats(plural) when there is more than one present in the discourse. Thereis a change in form fromcat cats, indicated by the presence of-s, but we are

still talking about the same animal. The change in meaning might be describedas grammatical, in the sense that we are not changing the object of discourse,merely providing some extra information about it. Languages which exploitthis device a lot are called (highly) inected languages.

Nouns can have different roles depending on their place in a sentence.A noun may be the entity initiating the action, or the entity being acted upon.If the former, we say it is the subject, if the latter, the object. Now in English,the same form is used for subject and object:



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() a. The man kisses the woman. (womanis object)b. The woman kisses the man. (womanis subject)

The same is true for MI:

() a. Pgann an fear an bhean. (beanis object)kisses the man the womanThe man kisses the woman.

b. Pgann an bhean an fear. (beanis subject)kisses the woman the manThe woman kisses the man.

All that distinguishes the subject from the object in MI is its position in thesentence.

EMI is more inected than MI. Some nouns, when they are objects, take ona different form from when they are subjects. One such noun isbean woman.When it is the subject, it is bean, just as in the modern language:

() Pgaidh an bhean an fear.kisses the woman the manThe woman kisses the man.

But when it is the object, it changes tomnaoi, as in (a) above. So sometimesthe inection, the actual form of the noun, tells us what the semantic role is.

Another kind of word which takes on many different grammatical forms in

the Irish of this time is the verb. In English, we usually need separate wordslike I, youand he/sheto tell us who is doing the action (the person). Thesewords likeIand you are called pronouns. In English, the ending of the verbonly changes once, when we have a subject who is a third party (not thespeaker or the person being spoken to), and this subject is singular:

() cleanSingular Plural

I clean we clean you clean you clean he/she/Susan cleans they clean

Obviously, we need a word likeIoryoufor most verbs, or we wouldnt be ableto gure out who was doing the action from the form alone. If we just saidclean, the subject could beI,you,we,you pl, orthey. This system for dealingwith the person of the verb, whereby it is combined with a pronoun, is calledanalytic inection. Its as if the verb is analysed (broken down) into twopartsthe verb proper and the pronoun.

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Some languages have a separate form for each person of the verb. We canobserve this in Italian, for instance:

() comprare buy

Singular Plural compr-o I buy compr-iamo we buy compr-i you buy compr-ate you buy compr-a he/she buys compr-ano they buy

Here, the endings tell us what person we are talking about: the -oin comprotells us that it is the rst-person sg (I), so we dont need the pronounIas well.Verbs which conform to the Italian system are called synthetic verbsthe verband the ending are synthesized, or brought together.

MI is half-way between English and Italian in terms of the shape its verbs

take. In the rst-person sg and pl, we have an ending:() glan clean

Singular Plural glan-aim I clean glan-aimid we clean

This is like Italian: the ending-aimidfor the plural tells us that the subject iswe; there is no need for a separate pronoun as well. For the other persons,though, the system is like English. We nd one verbal form glanann, andseparate pronouns for the persons:

() Singular Plural glanann t you clean glanann sibh you clean glanann s/s he/she cleans glanann siad they clean

In EMI, on the other hand, all the persons of the verb have separate endings, asin Italian:

() Singular Plural glan-aim I clean glan-maid we clean glan-ae you clean glan-taoi you clean

glan-aidh he/she cleans

glan-aid

they clean

As in Italian, the endings provide the information about who is doing thecleaning, so that we nd the verb and the person all in one single word.

When we have a noun subject like an bhean the woman, oran fear theman, we can observe a further difference between MI and EMI. In MI, thecommon form ending in -ann is found with a noun subject, whether it issingular or plural:



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() a. Glan-ann an fear an seomra.clean-PRS the man the roomThe man cleans the room.

b. Glan-ann na r an seomra.clean-PRS the men the roomThe men clean the room.

In EMI, when the subject is singular, the verb is singular, when the subject isplural, the verb is plural:

() a. Glan-aidh an fear an seomra.clean-PRS.SG the man the roomThe man cleans the room.

b. Glan-aid na r an seomra.

clean-PRS.PL the men the roomThe men clean the room.

This matching between the singular noun and the singular verb, and betweenthe plural noun and the plural verb, is called agreement. We can describe thedifference between MI and EMI in terms of agreement: in EMI there isagreement between subject and verb, while in MI there is none.

These are only some of the most striking differences between MI and EMI,differences in inection. There has been a huge reduction in the number offorms in Irish for nouns and verbs since EMI, so that in one sense it is easier tolearn the modern language. The student who is approaching EMI for the rsttime has to master a multitude of forms, which obviously makes the task muchmore difcult.

2.2.2 Spelling and pronunciation

Rules for writing were not standardized for Irish until the twentieth century,so that the printed versions that we have nowadays of medieval texts are theresult of editing. The scribes of the time simply wrote as they sawt. We cansee this if we look at a verse of poetry as it appears in the original manuscript(Figure.).

The rst thing that catches our eye is that the letters are written differentlyfrom nowadays; in fact, it almost looks as if the alphabet were different. This isnot actually so, it is simply the case that scribes shaped the letters differently inthe Middle Ages. Copying a long passage was a laborious task, and medievalscribes used short-cuts, just as we use short-cuts today when texting. The Irishname for a contraction of this kind is nod. You can see some examples of thesecontractions in Figure..



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The rst stage in editing a manuscript is to decipher the original spelling, andwrite the contractions out in full. With our manuscript this is relatively easy, as

the scribe wrote clearly and the contractions are unambiguous. With oldermanuscripts, though, the modern editor has to struggle with ink-stains andother extraneous marks, with careless copying, and even with missing pages.A rst transcription of the verse might look like this:

() Olc do thaigrais athornage bheith dfeabhas healadhnatar ceann leithe mogha muighre niall cosgrach a ccrachain

FIGURE. Quatrain from University College Cork, Irish MS , p. Source: Irish Script on Screen(http://www.isos.dias.ie/)

FIGURE. Examples of manuscript contractions

http://www.isos.dias.ie/http://www.isos.dias.ie/


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This rst version, where the spelling of the scribe is reproduced exactly, iscalled a diplomatic edition. It is certainly an advance on the original, in that wecan make out recognizable letters. But even for somebody who knows EMIwell, it is hard to make sense of this version. That is because in modern printed

texts in all languages, not just Irish, there are various conventions which helpthe reader make sense of what they are reading. For instance, proper nouns,names of people and places, are written with capitals. Then there are language-specic spelling rules. In the case of Irish, these were only established in thelast hundred years. One convention is that short grammatical words liketheoraare kept separate from other words. Thusan theis separated from the nounthat follows it, even though in speech the two seem to form a single unit. In MIwe writean fear the man, not *anfear. In the manuscripts, though, it is notuncommon to nd the two written as a single word, and often the ofanis

written as , so that we get infearfor MIan fear.Returning to our quatrain in Figure ., we know from other sources that apersonal nameTornaexisted in the medieval period. When addressing some-body in Irish, we use a particlea before the name, e.g.a Mhire! oh Mary!This, and our knowledge of the conventions of the scribes, enables us torewrite the ending of the rst line, so that we arrive at a Thornafor athorna.We are now beginning to make progress, we know that the poet is addressingsomebody called Torna. Applying the same kind of process to the other linesof the verse, we can bring them into line with modern conventions for writing,and produce a version which is more or less intelligible to somebody who hasstudied EMI and is familiar with its grammar and vocabulary. In the nal

version, called a normalized edition, punctuation marks have been introduced,and words spelled in keeping with modern rules:

() Olc do thagrais, a Thorna,g bheith dfheabhas tealadhna,tar ceann Leithe Mogha amuigh,re Niall coscrach i gCruachain.[Despite your great learning, Torna, you pleaded badly on behalf ofLeath Mogha with triumphant Niall from Cruachain.]

It should be noted that there are limits to how far one can go with normalizinga text. For example, in the case of Figure . above, it contains the wordealadhna, which is spelled ealaona in modern dictionaries. The reason fornot totally modernizing it is that the metrical scheme of EMI demands that itshould be spelled in the old way. The old spelling indicates that the secondsyllable (-ladh-) has a short vowel, which is necessary for the metre. This effectwould be lost if it were spelledealaona, with a long vowel (-la-) in the second



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syllable. Note also that I have only dealt with one short, simple example ofediting; with whole poems offty or more quatrains, often an editor will haveto decide whether to change what was written by the original scribe or to leaveit as it is. While there are general guidelines for editing, to some extent it

involves subjective choices.I have dwelt on the issue of manuscripts and editing because so much of

written Irish was in manuscript form until the twentieth century, and we areonly in the process of discovering what these manuscripts contain. It isimportant for the modern reader always to bear in mind that what we readin printed form is the result of choices made by editors over the years, and thatthe rules and conventions which guide them are arbitrary, and are constantlychanging.

In my expos of the structure of EMI, I have not yet touched on the most

basic aspect of the language, namely pronunciation. Unfortunately, we canonly form tentative proposals for EMI compared to what is possible forthe twentieth century, when machine recordings of real speech became avail-able for the rst time. The poems of the EMI period were written in strictmetre, with rhyme between the ends of the lines and assonance (vowel rhyme)between individual words, and with a xed number of syllables in each line.The pronunciation demanded by the verse was conservative, in that it wasoften based on spelling rather than on the speech of the day. Spelling often lagsfar behind developments in the spoken language. In English, for example, westill write a at the beginning of the wordknight, even though this hasnot been pronounced since at least the seventeenth century. In Irish in theperiod , many consonant sounds disappeared when they occurredbetween vowels. For instance, the word croidhe heart originally had twosyllables, with the in the middle being pronounced like the initialsound in British Englishthe, so that the whole would have sounded somethinglike /krithe/. By the fourteenth century the sound had disappeared andthe vowel preceding it had been lengthened to /ee/. However, the spellingreects the old pronunciation, and this pronunciation was maintained in thepoetry. A word likecroidhewould thus count as two syllables in verse, whereas

its modern counterpartcro/kree/ has only one syllable. This is why moderneditions of medieval poetry often retain the old spelling.

2.2.3 Classical Irish

In the introduction, I adverted to the fact that nowadays, many languages existin two forms. One is the standard dialect, used in writing and in the publicdomain. The other form consists of regional and social dialects, usuallyassociated with a more informal, spoken domain.



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If we think of standard English in the twenty-rst century, we can distin-guish four main divisions of language where standardization might apply.These are:

a. pronunciationb. grammarc. vocabularyd. spelling.

Grammar and spelling are often acquired at school. For example, a child whohears I done itat home might be corrected by their teacher, and told to sayI did it.In the same way, speakers of English are taught to write in a certainway, regardless of how a word is pronounced. Both thoughand enoughendwith the letters , even though in one case the is not pronounced,

and in the other it is pronounced as /f/.With pronunciation, the school instruction is usually less explicit, so chil-dren acquire their accent from other sources. In Chapter , I mentioned theexistence of standard Irish English pronunciation, based on middle-classDublin speech. This pronunciation is absorbed through exposure to the speechof people in positions of inuence, people such as broadcasters, politicians,and increasingly media celebrities of all sorts. However, this pronunciation isnot explicitly taught at Irish schools. Similarly, with respect to vocabulary,there is no dictionary of Irish words in general use. Speakers of Irish Englishuse British English dictionaries, even though they may also use some indivi-dual words and constructions which are specically Irish. A case in point is theso-called after-perfect, as in the sentence Im after reading the newspaper(I have read the newspaper), which is found in all regions and social classesin Ireland. Some Irish words have even enjoyed international careers, such asthe wordfeck(mild expletive), which caught on with British TV viewers afterthe success of the seriesFather Ted.

From this brief discussion, we can see that in order for a standard to comeinto being, some kind of institution must exist which codies and promotes aparticular variety of language. In modern France, the Acadmie Franaise tries

to regulate the French language, introducing various rules which acceptcertain linguistic forms and reject others. Ireland in the late Middle Ages didnot have an academy of this sort, but it did have a highly organized andarticulate literary class. These were the l(pl ofle). The word leis oftentranslated as poetor bard, but alein the twelfth century was much morethan a modern-day poethe was more like a journalist, in that his task was tocomment on current events which were of importance for his community. It istrue that thelwrote in verse, but the subject matter was not personal. Firstand foremost they celebrated the deeds of the dynasty they were attached to.



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Thelewas employed by a patron, the local chieftain, to praise him and hisfamily, to enumerate his illustrious ancestors, and to mourn his death. Thepoems produced were highly conventional, and were written in special metres.The language of the poems is based on the spoken language ofc., but it

represents a high register. In the same way, nowadays the language of aca-demic discourse is based on everyday speech, but differs from it in the kind of

vocabulary and constructions it uses. The name given to the verse produced inthis period is Bardic poetry.

Thelwere an extremely inuential group in society, and it was they whoset the written standard for Irish. Poetry was a profession, usually handeddown from father to son, and required a special linguistic training, which wasprovided in schools of poetry. Some manuals for the use of students havesurvived, called grammatical tracts (Bergin ; McKenna ), and

these enable us to form some kind of picture of the language used in poetry.Scholars who have edited and deciphered these grammatical tracts commenton the fact that they provided a standard for the writing of poetry: As to howthis standard was formed we have no information, but from about the begin-ning of the thirteenth century it must have been taught in all the schools, forthe same dialect is found in all scholastic verse written in Ireland till themiddle of the seventeenth century(Bergin : ).

The standardization recommended by the grammatical tracts manifesteditself mostly in the area of grammar, and specically in the form that certainwords take, what I called inection in the previous section (..). Thus, thetracts provided information about the various forms of the noun and verb forthe students of poetry, and thanks to this we are able to form a picture ofnominal and verbal inection in EMI. What is interesting about these tracts isthat often the compiler labels the examples given as either cir correct orlochtach faulty. Now, the so-called lochtach forms were not learners mis-takes; they were produced by native speakers of Irish. This means that theymust have been common in speech. Consider once again example (a) fromsection ..:

(a) Pgaidh an fear an mnaoi.Kisses the man the woman

mnaoiis the form prescribed by the grammars whenbeanis the object of theverb, and the formbeanis prohibited, labelled aslochtach. However, we knowfrom prose sources that the old formmnaoiwas disappearing as early as (Jackson; McManus b). So, using todays terminology, we could saythat the form labelledcirrepresents the written standard, and that labelledlochtachthe spoken dialect.



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In other cases, two different versions of a word are accorded the same statusby the grammatical tracts, being regarded as acceptable variants. We can seethis in the case of the verb. Recall that in section ..we noted that there aretwo possibilities for expressing the person of a verb, either with a pronoun as

in English, or with an ending, as in Italian. Some MI dialects resemble Englishin this regard, while others are closer to the Italian model. The same must havebeen true of dialects in the period , because the grammatical tractsexplicitly allow students of poetry the choice of using one system or the other:

() glanrst-person sg Past Tensea. do ghlan-as (ending)

PST clean-sg

b. do ghlan m (separate pronoun)

PST clean II cleaned

Since the twentieth century, there has been an ongoing dispute in progressabout which of the modern dialects of Irish is the oldest and purest. One of thecriteria advanced for classifying a given dialect as older than another was thepresence of the synthetic verbal system rather than the analytic onesynthetic

verbal systems were considered by some scholars to be superior to analyticones. As can be seen, neither system had precedence in EMI, which under-mines spurious claims about one dialect being older, and hence better, than

another. The truth is that all of the modern dialects contain traces of the olderlanguage. This is one reason why it is important to study the history of Irishit enables us to form balanced and rational judgements about the shape of themodern language, by separating genuine linguistic facts from language myths.

As can be seen, then, there was a certain amount of exibility in thegrammatical tracts with respect to what was and what wasnt allowed. Thishas led scholars to claim that the language of Bardic poetry is the result of theformal adoption of vernacular speech as the basis for a new literary standard( Cuv : ). Some qualication is needed for this statement. AsMcManus (b) shows in detail, various strands were present in Bardicpoetry and the grammatical tracts, some of which were conservative, someinnovatory. Certainly, some of the rules reect innovations in the spokenlanguage, and other rules allow for both old and new forms. But many ofthe guidelines are conservative, and exclude developments taking place in thespoken language. Of course, as pointed out by McManus (b), one reasonfor retaining obsolete forms was that they gave the writers greater exibilitywhen writing verse, where one is conned by the demands of the metre. In anycase, regardless of what the situation may have been in , when the rules



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for writing poetry had been laid down, by the spoken language hadchanged considerably, just as the English ofdiffers from the English of. As a result, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, a typical Bardicpoem would have been pretty unintelligible to anybody who hadnt received a

special education in the language and metres found in this kind of writing.We also have to bear in mind that poetry can never be said to be typical of

the language as a whole, because it is an articial creation. The composers ofBardic poetry were under pressure to conform to very strict metres andrhyming schemes. This led them to rearrange the normal word order ofsentences. Consider the following couplet:

() Flaitheas nach gabhaid Gaoidhilsovereignty that.not possess Gaelsgeallmaid dibh i nduanlaoidhibh.

we.promise to.them in poemsWe promise a sovereignty which the Irish do not possess to them inpoems.

(Mac Cionnaith : )

In Irish, the verb normally comes rst in the sentence, followed by the subject(if there is one), followed by the object, followed by the rest of the sentence. Sothe above verse, in normal prose, would read:

() Verb Object RestGeallmaid aitheas nach gabhaid Gaoidhil dibh i nduanlaoidhibh.we.promise sovereignty which the Irish

dont possessto them in poems

Even when written like this, it still is difcult for the modern reader to makesense of the whole, but at least the verb and object are in the right place in theprose version, whereas in the poetry they have been moved about. In the sameway, the English poet Milton uses a highly unnatural word order in ParadiseLost:

() Of Mans First Disobedience . . . sing Heavnly Muse

The normal word order at the time (seventeenth century) would have been:

() Sing, Heavnly muse, of Mans First Disobedience

In other words, poetry of any period in any language does not give us a very goodidea of how people actually spoke, and this is especially true of Bardic poetry.

The Irish poets also had to make use of a highly stylized vocabulary, whichmade reference to gures from literature and mythology. There were set ways



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of describing such things as the appearance of the chieftain, or the place wherehe lived. The more allusive the approach and the less direct it was, thebetter, as far as the poets were concerned. One ornament that the bardswere particularly fond of was compounding. This consists in putting two

(or more) words together to make a new one, e.g. black-board, house-wife.Some of the compounds we nd in Bardic verse are transparent, in that we caneasily guess their meaning:

() Compound Meaning a. bog-chroidhe soft heart

soft-heart

b. trom-ghonaidh wounds heavilyheavy-wounds

Very often, though, the two original elements are harder to discern, because ofcertain sound processes which take place at the juncture of the words whichchange the spelling:

() Original elements Compound Meaningdeoch + gear dig-gar bitter drinkdrink + bitterbean + liaigh beinliaigh woman doctorwoman + doctor

In other cases, it takes the reader a while to work out the meaning:() Compound Meaning

a. barr-r-thais with fresh and damp hairhead-fresh-damp

b. Tadhg-mhac Tadhg the sonTadhg-son

c. ceann-las to light abovehead-light

Because it was a vehicle of literary expression for years, and becauserelatively little prose was written in the same period, this Bardic poetry hasacquired a privileged status in the history of Irish. This is a common enoughoccurrence cross-linguistically. For reasons having more to do with literaryachievement or the cultural inuence of particular authors, certain varieties oflanguage come to possess an authority that leads to them being held up asexamples of how to write or speak. The best-known case of this in the Westernworld is Latin. Because of their political and cultural inuence, writers likeCicero, Caesar, and Vergil came to be regarded as representing the last word in



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Latin style and elegance, and the language found in their writings came to becalled classical Latin. This classical Latin was based on the speech of educatedRomans in the rst century BC. Latin continued to be spoken for anotheryears after that, undergoing many changes in the meantime, but the

written language taught in schools in late antiquity continued to be the sameclassical standard of the rst century BC. When the study of Latin received anew impetus during the Renaissance, emphasis was placed once again onauthors like Cicero, Caesar, and Vergil, and this tradition has remained withus right up to the present day.

The language of Bardic poetry is often referred to as classical Irish, becauselike classical Latin, its form remained unchanged for centuries. With respect tothe study of Irish after , classical Irish occupies a position not unlike thatof classical Latin. The following passage is illustrative of the attitudes of

present-day scholars to the language used in Bardic poetry:From its creation in or around the thirteenth century to the middle of the seventeenthcentury classical Modern Irish was the subject of intense study by the Irish literati, inparticular by the professional poets, whose genre it served. Never before (or since forthat matter) had a more strictly regulated and beautifully balanced medium beendevised for a specic task, and the Bardic grammarians guarded it jealously. As the

vehicle for what, at that time at least, was the only cultivated medium, viz. verse, andthe bread and butter of the learned classes in the form of the Bardic ode, classicalModern Irish was held in the highest esteem.

(McManus: )

However, in a different work McManus (a), the author of the abovepassage, makes the point that classical Irish does not reect the changes thatwere taking place in spoken Irish in the late Middle Ages. Spoken language isconstantly changing, and Irish and Latin are no exceptions. What complicatesthe picture for these two languages is that the high status of a particularwritten variety meant that it was a long time before changes in speech madetheir presence felt in writing.

Fortunately, there is another source for EMI besides Bardic poetry, namely

prose. Non-verse texts provide valuable evidence for the changes taking placein the language at the time, as we shall see in the next section.

2.2.4 The non-classical language

On the whole, prose tends to offer a better reection of ordinary language thanpoetry. However, a word of caution must be sounded even here with respect toIrish. Because of the authority of tradition, many medieval scribes tried tomake their texts look older than they were by employing outmoded gramma-tical forms. The effect was similar to what would happen if somebody living in



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Ireland in the twenty-rst century tried to write a text in what they thoughtwas medieval English. In some cases the forms would be genuinely medieval,in others they would not. But one way or another, the result would notfaithfully mirror English as spoken and written in the second decade of the

twenty-rst century. So we nd a whole range of styles in medieval Irish texts.At one end of the scale we have archaizing texts, which deliberately uselinguistic forms which are out of date. At the other end of the scale are piecesof prose which reect contemporary usage. In the majority of cases, however,we nd a mixture of the two styles.

Thanks to the work of modern editors of the medieval texts, we are in aposition to judge which linguistic features are archaizing, and which might bedescribed as reecting the languag

aidan doyle: a history of the irish language

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