THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE
From Irish Ideas by William O'Brien, 1893
Page 75
THE INFLUENCE OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE
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history of an apparently lost tongue, when the Sencur Mor, recovered as by a miracle from the proscriptions and neglect of ages, was found to be written in a dialect, which was no longer intelligible to the most learned Irish scholar then alive. Finally, there came the discovery of the great French and German philologists, that the Gaelic language afforded as inestimable a key to the history of pre-Roman Europe as the baths of Caracalla and the golden house of the Caesars do to the character of the Imperial city itself. At the same time there arose in our own country that pleiad of conscientious, accurate, and indefatigable Irish scholars, the Petries and O'Donovans and O'Currys—who deciphered and unearthed and made light in the dark places, confounded the scoffers, and convinced every scientific thinker in Europe for all time that the rotting manuscripts to which Irish enthusiasm had clung throughout centuries of unexampled horror were not the mere abracadabra of the fanatical worshippers of a barbarous patois, but were the authentic title-deeds of a social system, a history and a literature more venerable and more fascinating than any European race, except the Romans and the Greeks, can produce.
The Gaelic enthusiasts were vindicated. But the Gaelic tongue, while it is honoured in the schools, has been dying on the hills. The masters of many languages take off their hats to it, but to the Irish youth, whom it has suckled, whose mental atmosphere, so to say, it has provided, whose blood pulses with its inspirations, it is still a stranger—an uncouth, ill-clad, poor relation at the door. I do not preach any sudden or violent diversion of our national energies from the channels in which they are now directed, for a National Parliament is the life-giver without which no national interest can flourish, and in … continue reading »
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