The Current State of the Irish Language--"Gaeilge"

 State of the Irish Language

I'm no expert on the state of the Irish language, Gaeilge, but I am very engaged with the language and I read a lot about it. I’ve been studying Irish since about 2005 with a small study group that, until the Covid pandemic, met every Wednesday night at the East Side Irish-American Club in Euclid, Ohio.

Irish is spoken as an every-day community language in the Gaeltachts, Irish -speaking areas mostly in the west of Ireland. They are located in Counties Donegal (very strong Gaeltacht), Mayo, Galway (very strong), the Aran Islands (very strong), the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry (strong area), small areas in County Cork, and a couple other places, Counties Waterford and Meath. The Gaeltachts get state subsidies to support the language, but they are not protected ghettoes. Non-speakers can move in and fluent speakers can move out. In theory an area could lose its status as a Gaeltacht. For a nice overview of Ireland's Gaeltachts, check out the Wikipedia entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaeltacht

So maybe 100,000 Irish speakers are in the Gaeltachts (of the 4+ million residents of the Republic). But many people outside these areas can speak, read, and understand Irish, to varying degrees. It's said that about a million people in Ireland have competence in Irish. Even that's not the whole story. Almost everyone in the country, in the Republic of Ireland at least, knows some Irish. It's really part of the everyday language, Hiberno-English (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiberno-English). Also, almost all children study Irish in the schools. More on that in a minute.

So even if the number of Irish speakers in the Gaeltachts is decreasing, there is still hope and lots of energy for the language. There are six Celtic languages: Welsh, Breton (in Brittany, Northwestern France), Cornish (Cornwall, England); and the Gaelic-type: Manx Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), and Irish (Gaeilge). The one doing best right now is Welsh, with Irish the runner-up.

Much of that energy is generated in the gaelscoil, Irish language schools that instruct children in Irish, basically immerse them in Irish. These are prized and honored schools, and there’s competition to get a place in one of them. They are located all throughout the Republic of Ireland and serve about 50,000 children in some 200 schools. The Wikipedia article on the Gaelscoil is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelscoil There are also Irish-language schools in Northern Ireland, believe it or not.

Besides the instruction in the Gaeltachts and Gaelscoil, there are language programs in various parts of the country where children (and older students) can go for Irish instruction via immersion for various periods of time (from weekends to weeks or months). These schools are often in the Gaeltacht regions, but there are some held in the USA and Canada.

Irish Language College Programs.

There are programs in American and Canadian colleges. The University of Notre Dame in Indiana has a very good program, but you have to be a Notre Dame student to participate, and that is expensive. There are Irish study programs all over the USA and Canada: https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/education/the-definitive-list-of-irish-studies-programs-united-states-and-canada

There are many free resources and at least one free college program. The internet is now full of Irish language resources. The greatest resource is free! It is the great Irish and Irish-English dictionaries offered by www.teanglann.ie. This resource can be accessed by any computer and it is fully downloadable for free to smartphones. I use it every day. It even has a function that pronounces words in the three major dialects.

The free college courses that I know about are offered by Dublin City University: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/irish-language

There are other sources that people use to study Irish, including Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, and many others. You can also get books with tapes, cd’s, or online audio. A good way is to find a group led by a competent teacher. Cleveland, Ohio has at least two, one on the East Side and one on the West Side. Daltaí Gaeilge (“Students of Irish”) has some of these resources: http://www.daltai.com/classes/ There are probably classes in Montana, Washington, and Oregon, maybe even in Portland. The "daltai" website might tell you.

Conclusion.

Despite the decline in everyday Irish use in the Gaeltachts of Ireland, Irish is actually flourishing in other areas. What is really hopeful is all the popular culture Irish activity, including radio (RTE), television (TG4), TikTok, Twitter, and so on. Gaeilge Abu!

Postscript.

• Irish is an Indo-European language like most of the languages spoken in Europe and like many languages spoken in Asia (Persian, Hindi, Russian). But it does feel very different than, say, German or Spanish or Italian. The word order is a bit unfamiliar (Verb-Subject-Object); there’s a tendency to use what we call in formal English “sentence fragments”; there is no one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds (the phonological rules are daunting at first).

• It’s hard to learn Irish on your own. At some point to achieve fluency you need an immersion experience.

• Irish has a very rich literature, but physical books are still hard to come by in American bookstores and even Amazon.com. Books can be shipped from Irish bookstores (like Kennys Bookshop in Galway (www.Kennys.ie) or www.Litriocht.com), but it’s expensive. Sometimes Irish books are available as e-books or can be borrowed from big American libraries (the Cleveland Public Library comes to mind).

• A heartening thing about Irish is that many immigrants from all over the world are becoming fluent, including People of Color, and many from Eastern Europe. Their fluency almost shames some native-born Irish who don't even know their country's language very well. There's a great short movie that illustrates this issue, "Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom," which translates “My Name Is Yu Ming.”  It is available on YouTube and has English subtitles: https://youtu.be/JqYtG9BNhfM. This film is about 13 minutes long and is very funny.

Bob Coughlin / April 28, 2021

"Lament for Art O'Leary" --in Irish and in English

Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, "Lament for Art O'Leary"

The following was found on the website of the Munster Literature Center (Cork, Ireland). Here's a link: http://www.munsterlit.ie/Cork%20Heritage.html

The famous 'Caoineadh', or 'Lament', for Art O' Leary was written about 1773 by O'Leary's widow, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. O'Leary, who had served as a colonel in the Austrian army, was outlawed and killed in Carriganimma, County Cork, for refusing to sell his much-admired horse to a Protestant named Morris for £5 (at the time a Catholic was not permitted to own a horse of higher value).

The sixth to eighth stanzas are reprinted below, in the masterly translation of Frank O'Connor, followed by the original Irish. Other translations have been rendered by Elis Dillon, Patrick Galvin and Vona Groarke.



My Love and my mate
That I never thought dead
Till your horse came to me
With bridle trailing,
All blood from forehead
To polished saddle
Where you should be,
Either sitting or standing;

I gave one leap to the threshold,
A second to the gate,
A third upon its back.
I clapped my hands,
And off at a gallop;
I never lingered
Till I found you lying
By a little furze-bush
Without pope or bishop
Or priest or cleric
One prayer to whisper
But an old, old woman,
And her cloak about you,
And your blood in torrents ~
Art O'Leary ~
I did not wipe it off,
I drank it from my palms.

My love and my delight
Stand up now beside me,
And let me lead you home
Until I make a feast,
And I will roast the meat
And send for company
And call the harpers in,
And I shall make your bed
Of soft and snowy sheets
And blankets dark and rough
To warm the beloved limbs
An autumn blast has chilled.


Mo chara thu go daingean!
Is níor chreideas riamh dod mharbh
Gur tháinig chugham do chapall
Is a srianta léi go talamh,
Is fuil do chroí ar a leacain
Siar go t'iallait ghreanta
Mar a mbítheá id shuí's id sheasamh.

Thugas léim go tairsigh,
An dara léim go geata,
An tríú léim ar do chapall.
Do bhuaileas go luath mo bhasa
Is do bhaineas as na reathaibh
Chomh maith is bhí sé agam,
Go bhfuaras romham tú marbh
Cois toirín ísil aitinn,
Gan Pápa gan easpag,
Gan cléireach gan sagart
Do léifeadh ort an tsailm,
Ach seanbhean chríonna chaite
Do leath ort binn dá fallaing ~
Do chuid fola leat 'na sraithibh;
Is níor fhanas le hí ghlanadh
Ach í ól suas lem basaibh.

Mo ghrá thu go daingean!
Is éirigh suas id sheasamh
Is tar liom féin abhaile,
Go gcuirfeam mairt á leagadh,
Go nglaofam ar chóisir fhairsing,
Go mbeidh againn ceol a spreagadh,
Go gcóireod duitse leaba
Faoi bhairlíní geala,
Faoi chuilteanna breátha breaca,
A bhainfidh asat allas
In ionad an fhuachta a ghlacais.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Shona Duit! Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Here's how to pronounce the Irish: /LAW AY-luh PAWD-rick HUN-uh DIT/ which, word-for word, means "Day of-feast of-Patrick happy to-you," that is, "Happy St. Patrick's Day!"

Cleveland's St. Patrick's Day parade was observed by some 400,000 people on the most beautiful March 17th in Cleveland history, with uncharacteristic blue skies and temperature around 70 degrees. Alas, I was teaching during the parade. The evening of March 17th was spent at the East Side Irish-American Club in Euclid, Ohio, where we heard the band "Fergie and the Bog Dogs," with Johnie Ferguson, his son, and my friend John Connell (aka John Mac Connell), from County Cavan, Ireland. Johnny Mac has a very beautiful voice, and plays a fine button-box accordian as well as guitar. John teaches math and staffs the math lab where I also teach. John is married to Marlene, the most-Irish Slovenian on the face of the earth--"more Irish than the Irish! John has told me that my Fitzpatrick ancestors are probably from County Cavan. We haven't pinpointed that for sure. My Mother thought the Fitzpatrick's were from somewhere near Dublin. Of course, parts of County Cavan are not that far from Dublin!

Started a New Blog on Learning Irish-Gaelic

I have decided to create a new blog, this one focused on learning to speak, read, and write Irish-Gaelic. The focus will be on the needs and interests of beginner or intermediate Irish students. I'll probably copy some of my current blog entries into this new blog (www.learningirishgaelic.blogspot.com) instead of reinventing the wheel. From time to time I will ask my teachers and classmates at the Irish study group (Wednesday nights, 7 PM, in the basement of the Irish-American Club, East Side, in Euclid, Ohio) to make some contributions to the blog.

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.