Photo Credit: miamiamia

If I had ten lives, one of them would be lived as a linguist.

Language, phonetics, and the structure of the ways in which people speak their own languages and of how they carry that into English fascinate me.  Modern Irish (what the Irish call Irish and others sometimes call Irish Gaelic) was my first non-Romance language.  I studied it for two to three years, mainly in order to get a sense of how it affected the way in which the Irish speak and write in English.  (My pleasure in the structures and rhythms of Hiberno-English, along with a fifteen-year love-affair with Irish culture, eventually led to my writing of the novel Tinker’s Damn, a section of which was published in Ontario Review (Spring 2005).)

It is impossible, in this small space, to truly address the wonders and complexities that are the Irish language and how it has affected the ways in which the Irish historically have written and spoken in English.  But, perhaps, one can be given the merest taste, to whet the appetite.

Irish is one of six languages on the Celtic branch of the Indo-European tree.  One sub-branch contains Cornish, Welsh, and Breton.  The other sub-branch contains Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, and Manx.  (As I understand it, Manx originated in the Isle of Man and is now an utterly dead language.)  I don’t know enough about the other five Celtic languages to speak concerning them—but Irish is complex.  Some examples:  the nouns in Irish carry gender and are declined.  While the verb for “to be” is irregular in many languages, the various forms of “to be”—positive, negative, and question—are at least recognizably connected.  But, compare the forms in Irish:  I am: Táim.  I am not: Nílim.  Am I?:  An bhfuilim?  And Irish numbers may vary in form according to whether one is counting persons, objects, or in the abstract.  And as for phonetics, while most European languages have, for practical purposes, only one sort of sound for the letters b, c, d, f, etc., Irish has two sorts, defined as broad and slender.  One only knows whether a consonant or group of consonants is broad or slender by looking at the vowels they are next to.

What are some ways in which Irish structure has come into Hiberno-English?

In Irish, there is no word “yes” or “no.”  As a result, in English, the Irish have tended, traditionally, to repeat the relevant verb in the positive or the negative.  Thus, if one asks the question, “Did you go to town?,” the answer would come, “I did,” or “I did not.”

Irish verbs have a past tense, but not a recent past tense.  Therefore, in English, the word “after” has been used to indicate action in the recent past.  So, rather than say, “I have gone to the pub” or “I have just gone to the pub,” one might say, “I’m after going to the pub.”

The Irish language does not have one word for “sunrise” or “moonrise.  Thus, these terms came into Hiberno-English as “the rising of the sun” (éirigh na gréine) and “the rising of the moon” (éirigh na gealaigh).  It is a matter of translation, not of poetry, but it does tend to make one feel that Irish must be a naturally poetic language.

And finally, of course, there are the many words from Irish that have come directly, or nearly directly, into the English language:  Shanty, whiskey, bard, slob, slew (as in a slew of new products—sluagh)), gob (mouth), keen (as in keening after a death), banshee, smithereen ( in Irish, literally, a little nothing), galore (from go Leor, meaning enough, plenty).

What I’ve written above is, of course, barely even the merest taste of this subject.  For those who want to learn more, I highly recommend the following books:  English As We Speak It in Ireland, by P.W. Joyce, Wolfhound Press, ( first published in 1910; reprinted 1991); Teach Yourself Irish, by Myles Dillon and Donncha ó Cróinín, (copyright 1961); and Learning Irish, by Mícheál ó Siadhail, (copyright, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, first published 1980).

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Jessie Seigel is an AIW board member.  Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Ontario Review, Gargoyle,Elan, and the anthology Electric Grace.  Her poetry has been featured bi-weekly in the Boston Jewish Times. She is an associate editor at The Potomac Review.

Note: A special thanks to Eleanor Max, my former Irish teacher, for checking the correctness of what I have written here. -JS