THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893

Page 56

THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE

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for me. I knew the language, but I knew it as a man who raises the lid of a coffin knows the once living man inside. Last year the fate which brought me within the walls of Galway Gaol brought me also into occasional communion with a chaplain, to whom the Gaelic accents came as naturally as mountain air to his lungs. For the first time the dead language my eyes had ached over, like the field of bones seen in the prophet's vision, began to stir with life and to be clad with beauty. The lawless consonants which seemed to defy articulate utterance rushed from the lips like streams from the hills, or clans to the battle. The charm was wound up. The language as it first looked in books was as different from the language clothed in the rich soft sunshine of the native pronunciation as the heather mountain over which one gropes and flounders in the dark differs from the same heather mountain sparkling with the amethyst lights of the morning sun. I have no pretension to more than a sort of tourist acquaintance with the Gaelic world, but it may cheer those who are even less versed in the language than myself to know that the little I did learn proved to be an unfailing refuge from heart-breaking political cares, and an acquirement which I esteem decidedly cheap at the price of six months' imprisonment. Let me offer one further suggestion for the benefit of learners. If they would kindle within themselves at once a living interest in the language, let them not begin even with so attractive a piece of mediaeval Gaelic as 'The Pursuit of Diarmid and Grainne,' for they will be disheartened by finding its pages crowded with words unintelligible to the Gaelic-speaking peasant. A foreigner commencing to learn English would soon give it over in despair if he tried his English acquaintance with the language of Chaucer, or even with the language of … continue reading »

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