THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 54

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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would be as a man that heareth not in the Parliament of Tara; he would listen to O'Neill's address to his army and understand not a word; he would find himself an alien even around the camp-fires of Mountcashel's Brigades; and that, on the other hand, if Cuchullin and Finn, if King Niall and King Brian, if St. Columbkille and St. Colman, if Art McMurrough, and Feach O'Byrne, and Red Hugh O'Donnell—if the men whose holiness has made the Irish earth holy, or whose deeds by field and flood live in the very life-blood of Irish Nationality—could but visibly revisit the many-streamed hills of Erin, they would have to shrink back among the huts along the western rocks in order to make themselves understood, or, possibly, in order not to be laughed at.

The reasons which men give for the uneasy shudder with which they listen to enthusiasts for the preservation of the Gaelic Language may be summed up in this, that it is a language hard to learn and useless when learned. There is nothing to be gained by shirking the fact that it is at first sight a language apt to be the despair of beginners. The Greek or Latin grammar, once mastered, admits you into a wide branching palace wherein the modern Romance languages are only so many different apartments filled with familiar acquaintances, clothed in an ever-brightening dress, and murmuring ever-softer accents. The Gaelic, on the contrary, stands apart in sturdy independence, girt with a stormy Irish sea, true to the root-words of the first century in the nineteenth, proudly maintaining a mode of notation peculiarly its own, whose function it seems to be to wage a perpetual civil war against the consonants, and rich in wholly strange and unaccustomed sounds as different from the mincing charms of French or Italian pronunciation as an Irish lullaby is … continue reading »

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