Irish-Gaelic--What a Language!

So you have a drop of Irish blood in your veins and you are thinking about learning Gaelic, the language of your ancestors. Think again . . . then go ahead and dive into the deep end!

What's the Name of This Language?

Everything about Gaelic is complicated . . . and fun. Grist for lots of humor and conversation over a couple/few Guinness. Even the name of the language is tricky. When speaking English, the Irish don't call their language "Gaelic" --they save that term for the language of the Highland Scots. They call their language "Irish." When they are speaking in their Celtic tongue (and only about 1/4 of the Irish can do this (some estimates range up to 42%), they call their language "Gaeilge"--unless they come from parts of Munster, southwest Ireland, where the language is called "Gaelinn." In a few isolated places, there are even other names for this language. This issue of the name of the language has political ramifications to it--don't get me started on that! Here is what Wikipedia says about the name of the language: "Other forms of the name found in the various modern Irish dialects, in addition to south Connacht Gaeilge mentioned above, include Gaedhilic/Gaeilic/Gaeilig or Gaedhlag in Ulster Irish and northern Connacht Irish and Gaedhealaing/Gaoluinn/Gaelainn Munster Irish." Anyway, it's hard as hell to figure out what this language is even called!

At the Edge of Annihilation.

Irish came this close to extermination. The forces of annihilation included the power of British government and law, that feared and disdained Gaelic Ireland; the devastation of the Great Famine of the mid 1800's; and the imperial power of English and American popular culture. In the 1800's the language began retreating underground and became mostly the oral language of the poor, those without land, money, or means (our ancestors!). This despite an almost 2000 year written history and a rich literature. When the famine, An Gorta Mor, hit in the mid 1840's, a huge number of the poor Irish-speaking population died or emigrated to save their lives (about 1/4 of the population died or left). Astonishingly, we find large Irish-speaking emigres in the most unlikely places--for example, in the mining communities around Butte, Montana, and in the Gold Rush communities in the Yukon and Alaska.

A. Astonishing, Byzantine Grammar.

My teachers, Warren Clay and Paul Curran, and sometimes Ellen Holland Keller, often begin an Irish grammar lesson by saying something like, "You can't make this stuff up!" That is how astonishing and byzantine the grammar of Irish is. The truth of the complexity is beyond any fiction you could invent. What many people don't realize is that their own native language is filled with hundreds of rules, exceptions to rules, and options as strange as those in Irish. I know that entire books have been written about the use of articles (a, an, and the) in English. What seems second nature to a native speaker is like Chinese torture to those learning English (or Irish, or whatever) as a second language. I won't go into the details of Irish grammar here, but let's just say that almost every element of the language, from vocabulary to syntax to pronunciation, is different and at times feels much more foreign than, say, German or French.

B. Difficulty in Using a Dictionary.

Irish isn't the hardest language for using a dictionary. Can you imagine trying to figure out how to use a Chinese or Japanese dictionary? But it is tricky because Irish words and their spellings transmute in various situations. One reason they change is because of tense, when verbs are involved, and in grammatical case, when nouns come into play. Noun plurals change much as in Latin, but without Latin's regularity (as far as I know). So the noun cara (friend) is cairde in the plural (friends). but in so many real contexts, these words appear as chara and chairde, and those spellings won't be found in Irish dictionaries. This is because of a process called lenition, in which the initial consonant of Irish words is "softened," changed--sometimes rather dramatically! There are rules for this process, so it's not a big problem after about five years of studying the language! But at first it seems like an insane problem.

Verbs can also present a big problem because many common verbs have wildly irregular forms, and because verbs change endings under many circumstances. This same thing is true for most Indo-European languages, and probably many other language families. [examples will follow]

C. How Do You Pronounce This?

The first time you try to read a passage written in Irish-Gaelic is an eye-opener. The letters look like the familiar Roman alphabet (unless you are reading an older Irish font--that presents some modest problems at first). But you won't be able to come very close to actual Irish pronunciation. Before I get into some actual details of Irish pronunciation, let me try to describe what the language sounds like. My first impression was that the language sounds like the wisperings of the wind, with lots of soft, breathy sounds. And there is some truth in that--some passages, some poems and songs, sound like the West Wind blowing in from the North Atlantic. Other times, the language sounds oddly like German or even like Hebrew. You hear/ch/ sounds as in words like loch (lake) or oiche (night)--sounds which don't exist in many dialects of English. The sentence rhythms seems very unlike English too. Sometimes the rhythms of Irish remind me of Scandanavian rhythms. Also, you can begin to notice the heavy accenting of initial syllables, the presence of strong /r/ sounds (and a few odd /r/ sounds similar to the "hairy r" in Czech words and names like Dvorak). All in all, the lanuage as spoken by a native sounds very very foreign, quite different from English (except Hiberno-English, the Irish twist on English, which picks up many feaures from the Irish-Gaelic).

My teacher Paul Curran always reminds us that "Irish is pronounced exactly the way it's spelled." That is a bit of a joke, because it takes a couple years to figure out the letter-sound correspondences of Irish. But for the most part, the language is consistent, unlike English. In that regard, Irish is more like Italian or Spanish--or a better analogy might be French, which is mostly consistent but strange indeed!


D. Strange Words Where None Exist in English.

It is never possible to translate word-for-word from one language to another. Those little computers they sell as translators make me laugh--they can do some things well, but they can't make perfectly accurate translations!

A fun part of studying a foreign language is discovering words that don't have a simple corresponding word in your native language. A couple of examples from German are the words Gemuetlichkeit and Fingerspitzengefuehl. You can explain these words with an English phrase or sentence, but usually not with a single word. Fingerspitzengefuehl is a nice German word that literally means the "feeling-you-have-at-the-tips-of-your-fingers." We might say that it means "intuition," but that's not exactly right or accurate--it's more than that.

Here are some fun Irish words and their definitions:

Baclainn, "crooked arm," the way your arm is when you bend your elbow (to carry a baby, for example). Bhi an leanbh ina baclainn aici, She was carrying the child in the crook of her arm.

Ioscaid, the hollow space behind your knee.

Ladhar, the space between your fingers and your toes.

Masach, having big buttocks.

There are many more and I will add to this list as I run across interesting new words.



E. Lack of Words for Certain Things.

There is no simple way in Irish to say the following things: yes, no, to have, to want. You can say “yes” in Irish by saying a version of “it is” (and "no" by saying “it isn’t” in some contexts). Other times you need to repeat the subject and the verb. So if you are asked something like “Do you drive a car?” you could answer “I drive.” In some ways this is like Latin (which from ninth grade Latin I remember this rule: “To say ‘yes’ you can say sic, vero, itaque, certe, or repeat the verb”). Saying “no” also involves a negative particle plus a verb or a repetition of the sentence with a negator. Maybe this is why the Irish are so garrulous!

To indicate possession (we do it in English with the verb "have"), Irish speakers say something like: “The book is at me,” Tá an leabhar agam, word-for-word, “is the book at-me.” There are many similar idiomatic ways to express things in Irish that strike an English speaker as odd.

F. English Words Borrowed from Irish Gaelic. A sampling.

Words:

banshee (bean sí, literally, woman of the fairies)
bard
blarney (name of a town and castle near Cork, Ireland)
bog (bog, soft)
boreen (botharín, little road)
brogue (bróg, shoe)
cairn (carn, pile of stones, often a prehistoric archeological site)
clan
colleen (cailín, girl)
galore (go leor, much, many)
glen (gleann)
gob (and gob-smacked),
keen (caoinadh, crying, wailing)
kibosh (from the Online Etymological Dictionary: "One candidate is Ir. caip bháis, caipín báis "cap of death," sometimes said to be the black cap a judge would don when pronouncing a death sentence, but in other sources identified as a gruesome method of execution 'employed by Brit. forces against 1798 insurgents' [Bernard Share, 'Slanguage, A Dictionary of Irish Slang']. ")
leprechaun
loch (lake)
poteen (poitín, homemade whiskey)
shamrock (seamróg)
shanty (sean tí, old house)
shillelagh
slew
slogan
smithereens (smideríní, little pieces)
tory
whiskey (uisce beatha, water of life)

Other possibilities: lynch, hooligan, shenanigans . . .

Phrases:

Erin go bragh (Ireland forever), dún do bheal (shut your mouth), póg mo thóin (kiss my behind), cead mile failte (a hundred thousand welcomes), slainte! (health; toast).

Personal Names: ( a small sampling, using mostly Anglicized spellings)

Brigid, Brian, Cieran, Colleen, Conal, Cormac, Deirdre, Dermot, Donal, Eamon, Ellen, Enya, Erin, Fergus, Finbar, Kathleen, Kenneth, Kevin, Malachy, Molly, Murray, Maeve, Maura, Maureen, Maurice, Murphy, Neil, Niav (Neeve), Nuala, Owen, Patrick (a name adopted by the Irish--their language originally did not have the letter "p"), Rosheen, Rory, Ryan, Sean, Shiela, Tadg (or Ty), Una (or Oona), and so on!

Place Names:

So many place names are borrowed from Irish! A surprising one is Baltimore, a town in county Cork and a city in Maryland. Here in Ohio we have our own Dublin, which means "black pool." Derry, Vermont has its namesake in Ulster. The name means something like"oak grove." Coleraine is a township in southwest Ohio and a town in the north of Ireland. So many towns, subdivisions, and roads are named after Irish cities and villages that it would be impossible to list them! My great-great grandparents, Daniel and Mary Crowley Coughlin, lived with their children, including my great grandfather Cornelius Coughlin, on Cork Road, in the Town of Scipio, Cayuga County, New York. These immigrants brought parts of Ireland with them and gave these names to their new homes.