THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 55

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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from the tipsy music of 'La Fille de Madame Angot.' One is prone to repine at the want of distinction in the tense-ending of the verbs, to grow dizzy over the difference between the spelling of words and their pronunciation, and to storm at the long litanies of compounded pronouns and prepositions. The tongue aches at the first endeavours to pronounce words which seem mere disorderly mobs of consonants. Even after the rules enlighten you as to how eclipsing letters soften the asperities of those unruly c's and b's and t's, and how the aspiration dots knock them summarily on the head, you sometimes grow as nervous lest no consonant at all should survive to take a firm hold of, as you were at first pained for the fate of the vowels. But in all this the difficulties are more apparent than real. To my mind the one formidable difficulty of the Irish language is the pronunciation. Until the pronunciation dawns upon a beginner all is chaos and barrenness. The pronunciation once learned, as it can only be from Irish lips, the rest becomes order, harmony, and a labour of love.

I may be permitted to cite my own case as containing balm for the discouraged. More than twenty years ago I so far mastered the grammar rules and dry bones of the language for myself that, with the help of 'O'Brien's Dictionary,' which I found in the library of the Cork Queen's College, I could stumble through an old Irish Chronicle with rather more than the facility with which a schoolboy stumbles through Livy's Histories. But it was with even less relish. Try as I did ever so hard to educe music out of this provoking hurly-burly of words, no written rules could serve me. I knew there must be hidden somewhere the spirit melody in which generations of Irish scholars found raptures; but the rapture was not … continue reading »

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