Planet Word

by J. P. Davidson

  The League proved immensely popular in English-speaking areas of Ireland and by 1908 it had around 600 branches. The non-political stance of Hyde became increasingly unpopular and in 1915 he resigned the League’s presidency after its members committed it to ‘a free, Gaelic-speaking Ireland’ at the annual conference. Many of those members participated in the Easter Rising the following year and helped set up the Irish Free State a few years later.

  Hand in hand with the revitalization of the Irish language at the end of the nineteenth century was a literary revival which saw the flourishing of some of Ireland’s greatest writers. Sitting at the centre of this extraordinary blossoming, in her black widow’s weeds, was the figure of Lady Gregory, who, along with her friend William Butler Yeats, was the driving force of the revival.

  Described by George Bernard Shaw as ‘the greatest living Irishwoman’, she was born Augusta Persse in 1852, the youngest daughter of a Unionist landowning family in Galway. At the age of twenty-seven, the plain-faced Augusta climbed to the top of the social ladder when she married widower Sir William Gregory, a retired Governor of Ceylon, who owned neighbouring Coole Park estate. He was thirty-five years older than his new wife. The couple spent much of the 1880s travelling or in London, where their house was filled with literary luminaries of the day – Browning, Tennyson, Henry James.

  When her husband died in 1892, Augusta donned the widow’s weeds which she wore until her own death forty years later and retreated to Galway, to the family house at Coole Park. Widowhood seemed to inspire her. She learned Irish and began collecting local stories and translating them into the Anglo-Irish dialect of her local area, Kiltartan.

  The playwright Edward Martyn – later to become the first president of Sinn Féin – was a neighbour, and it was during one of her visits to his home at Tullira Castle that she met W. B. Yeats. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the two. The redoubtable widow tried to teach the young writer Irish but with little success. Yeats is reputed to have tried and failed on thirteen separate occasions to learn to speak the language.

  Lady Gregory’s home at Coole Park became a summer retreat for Yeats and other writers of this Irish Revival. There’s a giant copper beech still standing in the grounds of Coole Park known as the Autograph Tree. Carved into its trunk are the initials of its summer visitors, amongst them Yeats, J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, George Russell (AE) and George Bernard Shaw. Out of these long summer sojourns came the idea for the Irish Literary Theatre, which Lady Gregory, Yeats and Martyn set up in 1899. Its aims, according to its manifesto, were: ‘to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature … to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland’.

  The project collapsed due to lack of funds, but the Irish National Theatre Society was set up soon after, and out of this came Dublin’s famous Abbey Theatre – seen by many as the cornerstone of the Irish Revival. The Abbey was immediately popular with audiences, but first and foremost it was a writers’ theatre, a hugely influential nursery for playwrights and actors.

  George Bernard Shaw described Lady Gregory as ‘the charwoman’ of the Abbey; she turned her hand to anything and everything. She wrote over forty plays, directed, acted and raised funds. When crowds rioted at the opening of Synge’s controversial The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, one observer described Lady Gregory as ‘as calm and collected as Queen Victoria about to open a charity bazaar’.

  Lady Gregory died in her beloved Coole Parke home in 1932, in a newly independent Ireland. Her influence on the revival of an Irish literature was huge; her effect on the revitalizing of the Irish language less so. The numbers of Irish-speakers in the census of 1926 had fallen to just over 500,000, the lowest level ever.

  Lady Gregory was one of the few members of the Abbey Theatre who spoke Irish well; most of the work to come out of the literary revival was written in English, or rather in Hiberno-English, the version of English spoken in Ireland. But this was an English never seen before, one word put after another in the service of a good sentence with more skill and artistry than had almost ever been seen before. The influence of the Irish language on the writing of Yeats and Joyce and Beckett was fundamental. Here’s Declan Kiberd, Professor of Hiberno-Anglo Literature at University College Dublin, on the subject.

  Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, a founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin

  The Autograph Tree, Coole Park

  The Abbey Theatre in Dublin, founded to further the cause of the Irish Cultural Revival

  ‘You have to remember that Irish as a language was spoken up till the 1840s and 50s by many, perhaps the majority of Irish people. So it’s a backdrop to all this. People made the transition from Irish to English so rapidly that many were thinking in Irish while using English words and they taught themselves English out of books. So they acquired strange pronunciations of their own, they re-routed the genius of the English language down new circuits, and I believe this is one of the reasons for the explosion of writing at the beginning of the twentieth century in Ireland. You can explain this in a very concrete way. You know in Standard English, if you want to emphasize a word you do it tonally: “Are you going to town tomorrow?” or “Are you going to town tomorrow?” But in Irish you bring the key word forward in the sentence, “Is it you that’s going to town tomorrow?” “Is it tomorrow that you’re going to town?” And that can sound quite poetic to an ear that’s trained in Standard English because it’s a deviation. If you map this on to a wider attitude, to the rules of literature, people like Joyce and Yeats and Beckett, they broke so many of the rules with abandon because they didn’t have any superstitious investment in English literary traditions, they were in the end at an angle to them. So the freedom with language becomes a freedom with form in general.

  ‘Hiberno-English has other grammatical idioms which are very similar to Irish. For example, Irish has no pluperfect tense and uses the phrase tar eis, which means “after”. Hiberno-English imitates this and, instead of saying “I have just done”, it says “I was after doing”. ”Why did you hit him?” “He was after punching me.”

  ‘Irish doesn’t have words for yes and no and instead repeats the verb in question. Hiberno-English uses yes and no much less frequently than Standard English. “Is it cold outside?” “It is.” “Are you coming in?” “I am.” ’

  Perhaps it was because Ireland’s writers didn’t have Milton or Dryden or Tennyson breathing down their necks that they were able to draw on the Irish language, or at least the memory of that language – even though they couldn’t speak it themselves.

  Politics, so often the force which kills off a language, became the Irish language’s best friend. The Irish Free State established in 1922 – later to become the Republic of Ireland – made the restoration of the Irish language part of government policy. The new constitution declared Irish to be the national language; it was made compulsory at school and speaking it was a prerequisite for any job in the civil service. Gaeltacht areas – the native Irish-speaking areas – were officially recognized. These Gaeltachts are mostly in the remote areas of the west of the country, in Donegal, Mayo, Galway, Kerry and Cork.

  But the measures came too late – and the government’s efforts were seen by many to be too heavy-handed. The teaching of the Irish language in schools tended to be dull, the learning difficult. Irish lessons came to be dreaded by schoolchildren in the same way as many are in terror of Latin – a dead language, grammatically difficult, removed from everyday life and to be dropped the minute one leaves school.

  Today, most people in Ireland, including those in Gaeltacht areas, no longer speak Irish as a first language. The most recent figures suggest that only a quarter of households in the Gaeltacht areas are fluent Irish-speakers. Irish may be the first official language of the Republic but it’s certainly not spoken by the majority of its people.

  Attempts to keep Irish alive continue. Raidió na Gaeltachta (Gaeltacht Radio) and Teilifís na Gaeilge (Irish-lan
guage Television, or TG4) have had limited success, but the jewel in the crown is an award-winning TV soap in Irish called Ros na Rún. The entire crew from first AD to best boys, gaffers and cameramen all speak to each other in fluent Irish. They provide a useful sounding board for where people think the Irish language is now. The producer, Hugh Farley, predicts that Irish is always going to be a second language for the majority of Irish people. He does, however, note a new ‘coolness’ about Irish.

  Stephen appearing in Irish-language soap Ros na Rún

  Posters on a wall in Dublin promoting Irish

  ‘I know that if you were to speak to some of the cast here who grew up in the area they’d say that within a generation or so they can remember going into Galway City and being laughed at because they were speaking the Irish language. It was held in such low status. I think that has changed in recent years, particularly in Dublin because of the growth of Gael schools. So actually the great and the good, the bourgeoisie, wanted to send their kids to Irish-language school because they believed they were going to get a better education through the Irish language.’

  The future of the language may indeed rely on the urban communities of Irish-speakers who are sending their children to Irish-language gaelscoileanna in droves. Nearly 10 per cent of all schoolchildren attend these schools, the fastest-growing sector of education in the country. All of the standard curriculum lessons are taught in Irish – apart from English, of course.

  The pupils at one of these schools have interesting ideas about when it is that they use English and when Irish. English, for instance, is the language of the internet and definitely of texting. The grammar of written Irish is fiendishly complicated, so book-reading for pleasure is usually in English as well. No Gaelic Harry Potters here. But Irish is the language of the playground and out shopping with friends and chatting on the phone. It’s the language of everyday life. Will they keep on speaking Irish, or is the language in terminal decline? Hugh Farley is unsure.

  ‘I think that we have as a nation a very ambivalent attitude to the language … The Irish feel kind of culturally embarrassed that they are not good at the language and they are slightly resentful that they can’t speak it fluently and therefore they try to discard it … I think that the trouble is we’re caught in the double bind. We have people within the Gaeltacht areas [where] the younger generation are speaking it less than ever before and the number of people who are learning Irish and using it outside of the Gaeltacht is increasing. So we may be in a situation in twenty years’ time where there are more people who are non-native speakers of the language who are keeping the language alive rather than people who live indigenously and speak it natively.’

  Nipperlings and Waterstuff – the English Story

  Think about these pairs of words for a minute: lawful and legal; goodwill and benevolence; help and aid. The first thing, obviously, is that they have similar meanings – they’re synonyms, after all, and the English language is very, very rich in synonyms. But the second thing is: although they’re words of similar meaning, don’t you think they feel different? Isn’t there something deep in the character, the personality almost, of the words that triggers differing responses in you? If you went to someone in desperation, you wouldn’t say, ‘I need aid, please!’ Goodwill has a more personal, practical feel than benevolence. Lawful suggests something more ethical and substantial than legal.

  It’s not just about usage: these are subtle but unmistakable shades of meaning which are the result of different linguistic roots. The first words are Anglo-Saxon or Old English in derivation, and their synonyms are Latinate or French-based. These words and thousands like them came to us from different times in our history and along different paths. Over the centuries the English language has been coloured and seasoned by those linguistic journeys. And more than that: the words tell us about our history, and where we come from.

  We’ll get back to the synonyms, but a bit of history first. English as we know it today was shaped principally by three periods of settlement and invasion: new peoples arrived on our shores and brought their languages with them. In the fifth and sixth centuries, it was those strangely named tribes which every schoolchild used to reel off parrot-fashion – the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. They sailed over from the north-western coastline of continental Europe, from present-day Denmark and northern Germany. They pushed most of the Celtic-speaking Britons north and west, mainly into what’s now Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and their Germanic language developed into what we now call Old English. It looks and sounds just like a foreign language to a modern English-speaker (the epic poem Beowulf is written in Old English), but the fact is that about half of the words we most commonly use today have Old English roots, like be, strong, water. They are the bedrock of our language.

  Extract from Beowulf c.1000

  A few centuries later, there was another wave of invasion, and another layer added to the language mix. The Vikings were on the move. From the middle of the ninth century large numbers of Norse invaders came racing over the North Sea, raiding, trading and settling in Britain, particularly in the north and east. They came in such numbers, and were so successful, that by the eleventh century the whole of England had a Danish king, Canute. Their language was also a Germanic variety, Old Norse, and it had a deep influence on Old English. This is when very basic words like take and they come into the language, along with huge numbers of other loanwords, from the Scottish kirk to all these placenames with -by on the end, meaning ‘village’ or ‘settlement’.

  And then it was the turn of the Normans: 1066 and all that. This was the invasion which triggered enormous changes in English, as it developed into what’s called Middle English (the language of Chaucer), leaving behind the inflectional system of Old English with its changing word-endings for the more or less simplified grammar we have today. Not only did English vocabulary increase hugely with the influx of French borrowings, but French became the language of the court and the ruling and business classes. For a while there was a linguistic class division, with the poor and the ordinary people speaking English and the upper classes speaking French.

  There was a third language too, though: Latin. Latin was the language of the Church and of learning. Ever since St Augustine and his monks came to Britain in the sixth century, Latin (and Greek) words had been influencing English. During this trilingual period in the later medieval era, words stepped over from one language to another and left their footprints. Huge numbers of French and Latin words entered English, and English was very happy to accommodate them. The habit of borrowing and assimilating became second nature.

  That’s why we’re swimming in all these synonyms mentioned at the start – because of the successive layers of borrowed words laid down on our language over the centuries. The majority of synonyms are from two sources – Anglo-Saxon (Old English) origin and the French or Latin origin – and they follow a distinct pattern. In general, Anglo-Saxon words are simple, essential, strong, everyday words in common usage, such as see, good and heart. French- and Latin-derived words are often more sophisticated, or learned or conceptual. Compare see and perceive: they mean the same, but the Latin-derived word would much more likely be used in an official, formal document.

  The borrowed words are coloured by how they came into English and the status of the people who brought and used them. Latin was the language of religion and the law and learning, and French, as the language of the court, left a strong literary and cultural footprint. Our basic, concrete and close-to-the-heart words we held on to from Anglo-Saxon. Only about one-fifth of our common English words today are Anglo-Saxon, compared with three-fifths for Latin, Greek and French, but the Anglo-Saxon words are far more frequent. The hundred most frequently used English words are almost all Anglo-Saxon: hand, foot, land, sun, cow, drink, say, have, tree, heart, life, go. And the odd, double-word arrangement we have in English when it comes to types of meat – we call the meat by a different word from the animal it comes from – dates
from the Norman period, when they brought their own words bœuf and porc for the products of the animals which had Germanic names – cows and pigs.

  The synonyms, the layers, the different influences and endless loanwords all made English the flexible, subtle, vibrant language it is. They made Chaucer and Shakespeare and Joyce possible.

  There have always been the purists who objected to the heavy influence of Latin, Greek and other languages on English. William Barnes was a nineteenth-century poet and philologist who argued that English needed to get back to its Anglo-Saxon roots so that ordinary people without a classical education could understand it better. So he came up with rather wonderful alternatives, like sun-print for photograph, welkinfire for meteor and the truly delicious nipperlings for forceps. He was surely outdone, though, by the American science fiction writer Paul Anderson, who set out to write a text which did not use any loanwords from other languages, particularly Latin, Greek or French. This wasn’t just a simple story; his subject was atomic theory, so he had to make up a lot of new words and compounds from Anglo-Saxon roots and words, like waterstuff for hydrogen, bulkbits for molecules or the beautiful uncleftish worldken for atomic physics. He published Uncleftish Beholding in 1989, and it’s as charming and inventive as William Barnes’ efforts a century before.

  You Say Oïl, I Say Oc

  Homogenization has been with us for a long time: all empires in one way or another try to do it, and language plays a key role. Think of the Romans, the Ottomans, the British, the French – they’ve all imposed their language and customs on their vassal states. It’s much easier to control and govern if everyone speaks the same language. That’s the theory. Of course, in practice it’s a different matter.