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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/5/2015, SPi
A History of the Irish Language
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/5/2015, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/5/2015, SPi
A History of the Irish
Language
From the Norman Invasion to
Independence
AI DAN D OYLE
1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/5/2015, SPi
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX DP,
United Kingdom
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It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
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# Aidan Doyle
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/5/2015, SPi
In memory of my mother, who didn’t speak a word of Irish,
but who loved language
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/5/2015, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/5/2015, SPi
Contents
Acknowledgements xi
List of figures xiii
List of abbreviations xiv
Conventions for spelling and transcription xv
. Introduction
. Writing the history of a language
. Dates and periods
. Some sociolinguistic terminology
.. Standard languages and dialects
.. Language contact
. Sources
. Scope and lay-out
Further reading
. The Anglo-Normans and their heritage (–)
. The Anglo-Norman invasion
.. Before the Anglo-Normans
.. The Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland
.. The linguistic and cultural impact of the conquest
.. Hibernicis ipsis Hiberniores
. The shape of the language (–)
.. Early Modern Irish and Modern Irish
.. Spelling and pronunciation
.. Classical Irish
.. The non-classical language
.. Borrowing
. Conclusion
Further reading
. The Tudors (–)
. A new era
.. The Tudors
.. Language and identity under the Tudors
.. The Tudor response to language conflict
.. The Gaelic reaction
. The shape of the language (–)
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/5/2015, SPi
viii CONTENTS
.. Conservatism, innovation, and genre
.. Diglossia and bilingualism
. Conclusion
Further reading
. The Stuarts (–)
. A new dynasty
.. The linguistic effect of the conquest
.. Language attitudes in the Stuart era
.. Interaction between English and Irish at the written level
.. The Irish abroad
. The shape of the language (–)
.. Late Modern Irish (LMI)
.. Borrowing and code-switching
. Conclusion
Further reading
. Two Irelands, two languages (–)
. The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy
.. The Penal Laws
.. The hidden Ireland
.. Language contact and macaronic poems
.. The Anglo-Irish and the Irish language
.. The churches and the Irish language
.. A private document
.. Bilingualism, diglossia, and language statistics
. The shape of the language (–)
.. Representing dialects in writing
.. Vocabulary
.. The language of Charles O’Conor’s journal
. Conclusion
Further reading
. A new language for a new nation (–)
. Change comes to Ireland
.. Daniel O’Connell
.. Language and national identity in Europe and Ireland
.. Education and literacy
.. Bíoblóirí, Jumpers, and An Cat Breac
.. The Famine and emigration
.. The extent and pace of the language shift
.. Later attitudes towards the language shift
.. Attempts to preserve and strengthen Irish
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/5/2015, SPi
CONTENTS ix
. The shape of the language (–)
.. The innovative strand
.. The conservative strand
.. Borrowing
.. Grammars and primers
. Conclusion
Further reading
. Revival (–)
. Political and social developments (–)
. Cultural developments (–)
. A precursor to the Gaelic League
. Douglas Hyde
. The Gaelic League
. Education
. Adult education
. Cultural activity
. Publishing
. The Gaeltacht
.. Galltacht and Gaeltacht
.. Conceptualizing the Gaeltacht
.. The Gaeltacht: myth and reality
. The Gaelic League and politics
. Conclusion—the substance and the shadow
Further reading
. The modernization of Irish (–)
. Reshaping the language
. Orthography
. The dialects and standardization
. Which dialect?
. Perceived threats to Irish
. Borrowings
. ‘Irish forms of thought are not the same as those
of other nations’
. The codification of Irish
. Vocabulary
.. Expanding the vocabulary
.. The older language as a source of vocabulary
.. The reception of the new words
.. Censoring vocabulary
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x CONTENTS
. New kinds of writing
.. Literature
.. Journalism
. Conclusion
Further reading
. Conclusion
Further reading
Glossary of linguistic terms
References
Name index
Subject index
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Acknowledgements
This book arose partly as a response to the lack of suitable teaching materials
for a course on the history of Irish which I have been teaching for the last five
years. For this reason, several groups of students have unwittingly provided
me with feedback on various parts of the book which began as lecture material.
I would like to acknowledge their collective assistance.
The Research Sabbatical Leave Committee of the College of Arts, Social
Sciences, and Celtic Studies, University College Cork, granted me six months’
leave to work on this project. I thank Graham Allen in particular for his help.
My colleagues in the School of Irish Learning, UCC, have all helped and
encouraged me in this undertaking. Special thanks to Pádraig Ó Macháin for
formatting the manuscript images in Chapter , and to Kevin Murray for his
help with the index. I am also grateful to Seán Ó Coileáin, Caitríona Ó
Dochartaigh, Siobhán Ní Dhonghaile, Ciara Ní Churnáin, Daragh O’Connell,
Emma MacCarthy, and Jason Harris.
I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Crónán Ó Doibhlin, Mary
Lombard, and Sheyeda Allen in Special Collections, Boole Library, UCC.
Teresa O’Driscoll in Arts and Humanities helped me with locating and copy-
ing material. Thanks to Boole Library also for permission to publish an image
from Irish Manuscript , and to Irish Script on Screen for making the image
available.
A special word of thanks for Michael Murphy, Dept of Geography, UCC,
for preparing Figures ., ., ., and . for me. His aid enhanced the overall
appearance of the book considerably.
Virve-Anneli Vihman read Chapter and made many useful comments
which greatly improved it.
Michelle O’Riordan prepared Figure ., for which I am extremely grateful.
I would like to acknowledge the help of Arndt Wigger, who spent hours
tracking down a single reference for me.
Thanks to Routledge for permission to reproduce Figures . and ., taken
from Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost () The Irish language in Ireland
(London/New York: Routledge).
Figure . is based on two sources: Figure . in Diarmait Mac Giolla
Chríost (), The Irish language in Ireland (London/New York: Routledge);
and Map in Garret Fitzgerald (), ‘Estimates for baronies of minimum
level of Irish-speaking amongst successive decennial cohorts: – to
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/5/2015, SPi
xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
–’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy C, –. Thanks to
Routledge and the Royal Irish Academy for permission to use these sources.
Material based on this book was presented at a conference at the University
of Bristol and at a seminar at the University of Glasgow. I would like to thank
the participants for their remarks.
The two anonymous reviewers chosen by OUP to referee this work have
influenced the final product significantly. One was a linguist, the other a
historian. While it is invidious to single out one of them, I am obliged to
mention the contribution of the historian reviewer. This person went through
the work with a fine comb, drawing to my attention countless errors and
suggesting many substantial additions to the references; they also highlighted a
number of lapses in style. I hope that the book in its final shape will meet with
their approval. Any remaining errors (and clichés) are my own.
Thanks to Julia Steer and Vicki Sunter of the Linguistics section, OUP, and
to production editor Kate Gilks, for their unfailing help and courtesy during
the process of seeing the book through the press. Copy-editor Jeremy Lang-
worthy spotted many errors and infelicities of style, thus improving the overall
presentation considerably. I also thank Joy Mellor for reading the proofs so
thoroughly.
On the personal level, the support of my father, sister, and brother was a
constant source of encouragement. Last but not least, there is the person
whose idea it was that I should write this book, but who does not wish to be
mentioned by name. In deference to her wishes, I can only quote the refrain of
the old song: Ar Éirinn ní ineosfainn cé hí.
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List of figures
. Map of Ireland
. Quatrain from University College Cork, Irish MS , p.
. Examples of manuscript contractions
. Language communities in Ireland c.
. Language communities in Ireland c.
. Language communities in Ireland c.
. Language communities in Ireland
. Language communities in Ireland
. The Gaelic font
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/5/2015, SPi
List of abbreviations
A. Publications
CS An Claidheamh Soluis
D Irish-English Dictionary (= Dinneen )
Des Desiderius (= O’Rahilly )
DIL Dictionary of the Irish Language (= Royal Irish Academy )
GJ The Gaelic Journal
HM An haicléara Mánas (= Stenson )
FL Fáinne an Lae
OD Foclóir Gaeilge Béarla [Irish-English dictionary] (= Ó Dónaill )
PB Párliament na mban (= Ó Cuív )
PCT Parliement Chloinne Tomáis (= Williams )
PF Párliment na bhfíodóirí (= Ó Duinnshléibhe )
TST Teagasc ar an Sean-Tiomna (= Ó Madagáin )
B. Terms and names
EMI Early Modern Irish
LMI Late Modern Irish
MI Modern Irish
NUI National University of Ireland
SPIL Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language
C. Labels not found in Leipzig glossing rules
EMP emphatic
NAS nasalized consonant
PRS present
PRT particle
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Conventions for spelling
and transcription
Since many readers will not be familiar with the International Phonetic
Alphabet, an attempt is made to represent the sounds of Irish using English
spelling. Individual sounds are written between slashes, e.g. ‘The first sound in
the Irish word sí is pronounced as /sh/’.
When discussing spelling, graphs are written between angled brackets, e.g.
‘<ph> in the Irish word phós is pronounced as /f/’.
When discussing the provenance of words, a single angled bracket is placed
before the source, e.g. sagart (< sacerdos).
Segments of words which have a grammatical function, such as prefixes,
suffixes, and endings of verbs, are written in bold, e.g. ‘The ending -ann in the
Irish word glanann stands for the Present Tense’.
An asterisk before a word indicates that it is ungrammatical or misspelt, e.g.
*mouses, *dogz.
Titles of publications in Irish are followed by an English translation in
square brackets, e.g. Cín lae Amhlaoibh Uí Shúilleabháin [Humphrey O’Sulli-
van’s diary] (de Bhaldraithe ).
Passages in Irish are followed by an English translation in square brackets,
e.g. I ndán na nGall gealltar linn [In the poem for the foreigners we promise].
Linguistic examples which are discussed are numbered. When necessary,
they are glossed word for word according to the Leipzig glossing rules.
Irish words which occur throughout the text and which are commonly used
in English are not written in italics, e.g. Gael, Gall, Gaeltacht. Individual Irish
words are written in italics and translated, e.g. the word dún ‘close’.
Many Irish names occur in both Irish and English variants, e.g. Douglas
Hyde = Dubhghlas de hÍde. In the text, the English variant is invariably used,
but the reader should bear in mind that Irish variants may occur in quotations
and references. The most common duplicates are cross-referenced in the index.
Likewise, the spelling of Irish words varies depending on whether they
occur in texts before or after , e.g. Gael (new) = Gaedhal (old). Except
in quotations and references, the post- form is used.
Unless otherwise stated, all translations are the author’s.
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/5/2015, SPi
Introduction
1.1 Writing the history of a language
Libraries and bookshops often have sections entitled Language, or Language
Studies. Within these sections one will find a number of books dealing with the
history of individual languages, like English or French. These histories can be
divided into two types depending on the approach taken by the author.
Internal histories deal with concrete changes that have occurred in a language
over the centuries. In the case of English we can observe a major difference if we
compare the Old English period (c.–c. AD) with present-day English.
Old English is closely related to Old German, and many of its linguistic features
can still be found in present-day German: for example, the three genders for
nouns—masculine, feminine, and neuter. Present-day English no longer has this
grammatical gender, and its vocabulary has expanded considerably in the last
millennium, by borrowing words or creating them out of existing resources. An
internal history of English would describe all of the various changes in detail,
and try to account for their occurrence.
Language history is also part of history in general, it does not exist in
isolation from it. External histories describe changes that take place in the
communities that speak different languages, linking these changes to events
in politics, culture, and social structure. If we take again the case of English,
an external history would refer to the effect that the Norman invasion of
England in had on its linguistic community. It would describe among
other things the wholesale borrowing of words like dinner or baron from
French into English in the period following the Norman invasion, linking
this to the prestige enjoyed by the language of the new ruling class, Norman
French. External histories also deal with such matters as bilingualism, the
rise and fall of languages, and written and spoken language. In brief, one
might say that external histories deal with the social aspects of language use,
or sociolinguistics.
To some extent, internal and external histories are independent of each
other. Thus, it is possible to provide an outline of the development of a
language and its interaction with society and culture without going into details
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 13/5/2015, SPi
INTRODUCTION
of the internal changes within the language in the same period. Likewise, one
could deal with the details of linguistic change by simply stating, for example,
that a certain sound or grammatical structure was replaced by another one,
without linking this to non-linguistic factors. However, if we compare
the internal and external development of any language, we realize that the
two are closely interconnected. Change is nearly always driven by some
alteration in the linguistic community.
Consider for a moment the process by which a single language, Latin,
developed in the period c.–c. AD into the various individual languages
which we know today as the Romance languages—French, Italian, Spanish,
and Rumanian. Before the break-up, there were regional dialects of Latin
which prefigured the later languages. Now, one might argue that the dialects
simply diverged and leave it at that. However, it is no coincidence that this
divergence coincided with a period of great upheaval in the area of the Roman
empire. Until the fifth century this single administrative and cultural unit had
relied on a single language, Latin, as its medium of communication. Before the
fall of the western empire in AD it was necessary to have a language that
could be used by all its citizens for communicating, whether they were living in
Britain in the far west or in Northern Africa in the Mediterranean. With the
break-up of the empire into smaller regions, such distant communication was
no longer necessary; one only had to deal with the inhabitants of one’s own
region, at least in speaking. Population movements and invasions further
disrupted the former unity, and the final outcome was the emergence of
different languages about years after the empire broke up.
Now it is not possible to state categorically that the change of a certain
sound in Latin into another sound in Spanish is specifically linked to an event
such as the invasion of the Iberian peninsula by the Vandals in the fifth
century. Nevertheless, it could be argued that the political upheaval was
indirectly responsible for the linguistic chaos which produced the new
sound. To simply concentrate on the internal linguistic development without
taking into consideration the external factors constitutes a very limited
approach.
Likewise, social change often has as one of its consequences linguistic
change. Irish society has undergone something of a transformation in the
last forty to fifty years. This has had an effect on the English spoken in Ireland.
In , the regional dialects of the country were quite distinct, even in the
case of educated speakers. As soon as somebody opened their mouth, one
could identify them as coming from a particular region such as the south-west,
or the north, or Dublin. Unlike Britain, where a standard kind of English had
existed for sometime, there was no standard pronunciation for Irish English.
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DATES AND PERIODS
This situation has changed dramatically in the last half century. A new
dialect has emerged which one might label standard Irish English, a dialect
spoken by members of the middle classes all over the country, from the heart
of Dublin to the Aran Islands on the western seaboard. It is based on the
metropolitan dialect which has developed in Dublin in the last fifty years or so,
but it is no longer confined to this area. The rise of this standard dialect has
been accompanied by the decline of the traditional regional dialects. This
particular case of linguistic change is not accidental. It is a direct consequence
of the spread of education, the influence of the mass media, particularly
television and radio, and the urbanization of Irish society.
The present work presents aspects of both the external and internal history
of Irish. However, it is not intended as a systematic study of the internal
changes that Irish has undergone in the period –. For the most part,
it is concerned with the shifting position of Irish in society over the centuries,
with the way it is perceived by the Irish people, and with its interaction with
various historical developments in Ireland. At the same time, it seemed a good
idea to provide some information about how the actual shape of the language
changed in tandem with the external developments. For this reason, I also
provide a brief account of the more accessible and important internal changes
which affected Irish over the centuries.
In theory at least, it would be possible to write an internal history of Irish
without saying much about other languages. For an external history, this is
simply not possible. The history of Irish is intimately bound up with the
spread of English in Ireland. This in turn is the result of a complex array of
political, cultural, religious, educational, and sociological factors. An alterna-
tive title for the book might be: A history of the Irish and English languages in
Ireland. Thus, as the narrative progresses, I will have more and more occasion
to refer to the rise of English.
1.2 Dates and periods
At this stage, it is necessary to define some terms that I will be using in the
course of this work. Just as general historians divide the past into various
periods such as the Middle Ages or modern times, historians of language use
terms like old or modern when referring to the various phases of a language’s
life. However, the terms used in language studies, and particularly in the
history of Irish, differ somewhat from those found in general history, and
often cause confusion for students and readers. For this reason, I will try to
present a succinct and precise definition of the labels attached to the various
periods in the history of Irish.
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INTRODUCTION
Before AD, our picture of what Irish might have looked like is very hazy
indeed. Most of what we know comes from monuments called Ogham stones
from the fifth and sixth centuries. These stones are marked with lines and
notches which represent the letters of the Latin alphabet. For the most part,
the inscriptions consist of personal names. On the basis of the Ogham stones
and some other scraps of evidence, scholars have been able to put together a
tentative outline of what is known as Primitive Irish.
The period c.–c. AD is labelled Old Irish. In this era, we find texts written
in manuscripts, on the basis of which scholars have been able to reconstruct
reasonably completely the language of the time. In the years after , the
language underwent some far-reaching changes which resulted in a new kind of
Irish. For this reason, the period c.–c. is called Middle Irish. Sometimes,
the whole period c.–c. is called Medieval Irish. This can be a bit mis-
leading, because the medieval era in history lasts longer, until about .
The next phase of Irish, c.–c., has traditionally been referred to as
Early Modern Irish (EMI). This label has caused a lot of confusion. For
historians, the Early Modern Period does not begin until at least .
Furthermore, Early Modern English is the name given to the English of the
two centuries c.–c.. In terms of culture, the period c.–c. in
Ireland is part of the medieval era, or the Middle Ages, and in fact there is a
remarkable continuity between Middle Irish and Early Modern Irish with
respect to literature.
Modern Irish (MI), sometimes called Late Modern Irish (LMI), is regarded
as beginning about and extending to the present day. This more or less
corresponds to the modern period in general history, and so is unlikely to
cause much misunderstanding. However, some authors use Modern Irish to
include Early Modern Irish as well. This leads to an unfortunate mismatch,
whereby Modern Irish begins in , but Modern Irish history does not start
until about .
In what follows, I will stick to the traditional terminology, as to do otherwise
would only confuse things further, but the reader should bear in mind the some-
what idiosyncratic nature of the terms used in relation to Irish in other works.
1.3 Some sociolinguistic terminology
In the course of this book I try to minimize the amount of technical jargon.
However, it will be necessary to refer to some linguistic terminology which is
widely used in works of this sort. I present here the most basic concepts of
sociolinguistics, and I will gradually introduce some more terms in the course
of the narrative.
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SOME SOCIOLINGUISTIC TERMINOLOGY
1.3.1 Standard languages and dialects
Most living languages occur in more than one version in the modern world. If
we consider English in Ireland, we can observe that there is one version that is
used in what one might call public situations. Such situations include broad-
casting, education, political speeches, religious ceremonies, and to a lesser
extent written literature and drama. This version of English is standard
English. It has a more or less homogeneous pronunciation, grammar, and
spelling. For example, if you listen to newsreaders working in RTE (the Irish
public broadcasting service), their accents sound more or less the same. At
school, children are taught to write in a uniform way, for example, to write
night instead of nite, or bite instead of bight.
Of course, we all know that people do not speak the same way, even if they are
all living in a small country. If one compares somebody from Dublin and some-
body from Cork, one will notice differences between their pronunciation, their
vocabulary, and even their grammar, perhaps. These variants of a language we call
dialects. Dialects can be subdivided further into regional dialects, which are based
on geography, and social dialects, based on social class. For example, within
Dublin one can distinguish middle-class and working-class pronunciation.
If there is a standard form of language, it contrasts with non-standard
varieties, which may be confined to a particular region or social class. Non-
standard versions of a language are sometimes referred to as substandard, but
linguists try not to use this term, as it implies that one variety is somehow better
than another. In terms of language, there is nothing inherently superior about
saying ‘I don’t know anything’, rather than ‘I don’t know nothing’—one might
even argue that the latter is more logical, and so-called double negatives are
common in other languages. One construction is standard, one is non-standard.
Any additional evaluation exists only in the minds of the speakers and listeners.
Standard versions of languages are a relatively recent phenomenon, and
usually are the result of a centralized authority like a state or church imposing
its version of a language on other people. Standards are necessary when com-
municating with strangers, people outside your own locality or social group.
They are more used in written communication than in speaking, more in formal
situations than in casual ones.
1.3.2 Language contact
As we shall see, much of our story will be concerned with the way that English
and Irish have influenced each other over the centuries. Language contact is a
universal and age-old phenomenon. It is triggered by situations in which one
needs to communicate with speakers of another language, which leads to
speakers being exposed to and perhaps learning a different language.
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INTRODUCTION
A typical example of language contact would be an Irish or English tourist
communicating with locals in Spain. If the communication were in English,
the Spanish speaker would bring some features of his own language with him
into the kind of English he spoke, e.g. the Spanish pronunciation of certain
vowels. It is also possible that language contact would lead to new items of
vocabulary being borrowed from one of the languages to the other.
In situations of prolonged contact, some individuals or communities may
be exposed to two languages from childhood onwards, which results in their
speaking the two languages with similar proficiency. This proficiency is
referred to as bilingualism. As one would expect, if there is widespread
bilingualism in a community it can lead to fairly radical changes in one of
the languages. An oft-quoted example of this kind of bilingualism is the
situation in England after the Norman conquest, in the period –.
Many groups—the new government functionaries and administrators, the
clergy, and the merchants—were bilingual in English and French. As a result,
English borrowed a vast amount of French vocabulary in this period through
language contact. The bilingualism didn’t last, but it did have a permanent
effect on English.
Sometimes people with a knowledge of two languages will associate them
with two very different spheres of activity. A common scenario is that one
language is associated with more formal activities such as teaching or writing,
and the other one is used more when speaking to members of one’s family or
to neighbours. This kind of situation is referred to as bilingual diglossia. It is
very common in post-colonial countries in Africa and Asia, where it is not
unusual for people to speak a local language at home, and to speak English or
French at school or at work.
Diglossia can also occur between a dialect of a language and a standard
version, particularly when the two are very far from each other. In many Arab-
speaking countries, there is a standard form of Arabic used in official com-
munications, in writing, or when dealing with people from other regions,
while a local dialect is spoken in everyday communication.
1.4 Sources
As with any kind of history, the history of a language is based on various
sources. The further back we go in time, the scarcer these sources become, and
the more difficult they are to interpret.
Generally speaking, we have more information about the external history of
Irish than its internal history, or at least the statements about the former are
more straightforward. Frequently, these statements come from outsiders,
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English speakers who were visiting Ireland, or inhabitants of the English-
speaking parts of the country. For that reason, they have to be treated with
caution. However, even if the writers did not know Irish, it is safe to assume
that they would have recognized Irish when they heard it being spoken, and so
their statements about the numbers of speakers, or the parts of the country
they inhabited, can be taken as reasonably reliable.
We also have evidence in Irish about the language. There is less of this than
the English evidence, but since it provides us with a view from the inside, in
some ways it is more valuable. In contrast to the English evidence, the Irish
evidence tends to be a source of information about the internal history of the
language. A good example is the collection of texts known as grammatical
tracts (Bergin –; McKenna ). These were commentaries on Irish
compiled in the late medieval period by professional poets, probably as a kind
of manual for students of poetry. One reason that they are a valuable source
for the modern historian of the language is that they often provide us with
information about particular words or forms or pronunciations which are
labelled as lochtach ‘faulty’. The fact that the poets felt the need to warn their
students about these mistakes tells us that some speakers of Irish at the time
were using these ‘faulty’ forms in their speech, and thus we are able to deduce
something about dialectal and non-standard speech at the time. Most linguistic
records before the twentieth century are written in standard or prestige varieties,
and hence provide us with little information about colloquial or non-standard
speech. For this reason, evidence of the sort provided by the grammatical tracts
is particularly precious.
While the English-language sources for the external history of Irish are well
known and readily accessible, the Irish-language sources are familiar only to
those who can read them, and new evidence is still being collected and
published. One purpose of this book is to point readers in the direction of
both kinds of source, and especially to make them aware of the Irish-language
ones.
1.5 Scope and lay-out
This book is primarily concerned with what happened in the period
–. The end of the twelfth century is regarded as a defining moment
in Irish history, witnessing as it did the arrival of a new group of invaders, who
brought with them a language that was eventually to dislodge the one spoken
until then. This, and the fact that internally Irish entered into a new phase
around (Early Modern Irish), makes a natural starting-point. In
Chapter , I include a short note on Old and Middle Irish in order to provide a
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INTRODUCTION
context for what follows. It should be borne in mind, though, that the language
of the period – is radically different from the later language, just as
Latin is quite distinct from the Romance languages into which it metamor-
phosed in the Middle Ages. The history of Old and Middle Irish would require
a separate study.
The end-point of my narrative, , is less obvious. After all, the story of
Irish does not stop there; it continues right up to the present day. A number of
considerations prompted me to finish my narrative at this point. First, Ireland
gained independence from Britain in . For the first time ever, the Irish
language now had the support of the state. Second, for reasons that will
become clear in Chapters and , in the period – Irish entered
into a new phase. Responsibility for the language passed from the hands of
native speakers into the hands of learners. This in turn had a huge impact on
its structure, the echoes of which can still be felt. Future historians of Irish will
be faced with the task of labelling and describing the new language which is
still being shaped by second-language speakers, a language which is still in the
process of becoming. In some ways marks the end of Late Modern Irish,
the last variety of the language to be spoken by communities as a first
language, rather than as one which they learned at school. Thus there are
good reasons connected with the internal history of Irish for ending the
narrative in .
The book is divided into an introduction and seven chapters. Each of these
chapters deals with a distinct period in the history of the language. The
individual chapters are followed by a conclusion which relates the preceding
discussion to present-day Ireland and the place that Irish occupies in its society.
Each chapter is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the external
history of Irish in the period in question. The second part provides a brief and
concise account of the more important internal developments that occurred in
this era. The drawback of this lay-out is that there is a certain abruptness about
the transition from one section to the other, with the flow of the narrative being
interrupted. On the other hand, many readers will want to concentrate on one
section or another, and the unambiguous signposting of the contents will
facilitate this. Each chapter ends with suggestions for further reading. The
works listed there will enable those who are interested to delve more fully
into both the literary/cultural and linguistic aspects of the history of Irish.
Because the work is intended for a general readership, linguistic terms have
been kept to a minimum, but it has been necessary to introduce a limited
amount of technical jargon. Linguistic terms which are used frequently are
explained in the glossary.
A brief comment is in order on the maps in the book. I have included a number
of maps with the aim of showing the geographical distribution of English and
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FIGURE . Map of Ireland
Irish at various stages over the centuries. Unfortunately, two-dimensional maps,
while helpful, are not able to display this coexistence of two languages in one
geographical region. It is important that the reader bear this point in mind when
interpreting language maps, both in this book and in other works. A map of
Ireland from onwards is not like a map of present-day Western Europe,
where it is more or less possible to delimit German-speaking regions from
French-speaking territories. Within the core German-speaking region, we
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INTRODUCTION
know that all social classes, from the ruling elite to the unskilled labourers, speak
German. This was not the case in Ireland, particularly after . For example,
Irish was never spoken by the power elites in Dublin and other urban centres. An
alternative way of trying to visualize the distribution of English and Irish would
be to think of geological layers. On the bottom we would find Irish, then there
might be a transitional layer of mixed language, and on the top would be a layer of
English. The essential point to remember is that the distribution of languages is
not merely geographical; it is also social and ethnic. The same two languages can,
and often are, spoken in the same area, but by two different social and ethnic
groups. The history that I have written is more about describing these groups and
their interaction than about trying to identify regions where all the population
spoke only one language to the exclusion of the other.
Finally, the book is written from an Irish perspective. Dublin, rather than
London or New York, is the capital city; when I write about English, I am
referring to the kind of English spoken in Ireland. The last chapter is focused
on present-day Ireland. Given the subject matter, this seems to be a reasonable
enough approach. In the same way, one could hardly fault an author of a
history of English for writing from an English perspective. A map of Ireland
is provided to enable readers to identify locations referred to in the book
(Figure .).
Further reading
For an introduction to the study of language, see Fromkin et al. ().
For a dictionary of linguistic terminology, see Crystal ().
For an accessible introduction to the study of language change in general, see
Chapter of Fromkin et al. ().
For introductions to sociolinguistics, see Chapter of Trudgill () and
Fromkin et al. ().
For a history of English, see Mugglestone (). This does not require any
previous knowledge of linguistic terminology.
Ó Murchú (), Ó Huallacháin (: –), and Ó hUiginn ()
provide concise accounts of different aspects of the external history of Irish.
For a history of Irish English, see Hickey ().
For a comprehensive collection of English-language comments on Irish from
medieval times to the twentieth century, see Crowley ().
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The Anglo-Normans and their
heritage (1200–1500)
2.1 The Anglo-Norman invasion
2.1.1 Before the Anglo-Normans
Our earliest detailed knowledge about Ireland and its culture comes from the
period – AD, after the introduction of Christianity. The new religion
brought with it the Latin language and the alphabet. Before that the language
spoken by the inhabitants of Ireland had never been written down.
The Christian missionaries soon established a network of monasteries all
over the country, the remains of which can be seen to the present day in places
like Clonmacnoise or Glendalough. These monasteries were centres of learn-
ing, and fulfilled a similar function in society as universities do today.
Because the language of the church was Latin, many of the medieval texts
that have been preserved are written in this language. The subjects are for the
most part religious, such as commentaries on the Bible, theological tracts,
and saints’ lives. Latin was also the medium chosen for secular subjects such
as history, law, or medicine, and even for poetry. One advantage that Latin
had over Irish was that it was an international language, understood all over
Europe, much in the way that English is today. This meant that Irish clerics
could correspond easily with their counterparts on the Continent, and read
new works being produced in other countries. Quite a few Irish clerics went
abroad to study, teach, and evangelize non-Christian peoples, using Latin as
a means of communication.
By the beginning of the seventh century Irish monks had adapted the Latin
alphabet for the purpose of writing down their native language. A fairly large
corpus of material survives from the period c.–c., enough for scholars
to compile a grammar for the language of this time, Old Irish. Most of this
material survives in manuscripts preserved in monasteries in Continental
Europe, such as St Gall in Switzerland or Würzburg in Germany. Very often
they consist of brief explanations or translations, called glosses, of Latin
sentences and phrases, which are written on the margins of manuscripts.
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Ireland differs from the rest of Europe in the Middle Ages in that both
clerics and lay writers began to use Irish to record longer texts at a relatively
early date, from the eighth century onwards; elsewhere at this time written
compositions still tend to be in Latin. Many of the treasures of medieval Irish
literature have survived in manuscripts written in monastic centres in the era
c.–c.. Much of the literature, such as the nature poems attributed to
hermits, is overtly religious. However, the monastic scribes were also quite
happy to write down secular, pre-Christian tales like the saga Táin Bó Cuailgne
[Cattle Raid of Cooley]. The most important categories of prose writing
recognized are historical tales, otherworld tales, heroic tales, Fíanaigecht
(tales about the warrior band called the Fian), legal texts, and saints’ lives.
Around the year , Vikings from Scandinavia and Scotland started raid-
ing Ireland. Initially they confined themselves to brief raids, but soon they
began to stay for longer spells, and eventually founded a number of urban
centres around the coast, the most important of these being Dublin. For a few
hundred years, we can assume that there was a small community in Ireland
which spoke the language of these Vikings, Old Norse. We can also be pretty
certain that there were many people who were bilingual in Irish and Old
Norse. However, by the Norsemen seem to have been relatively well
assimilated into the general Irish community, at least as far as language is
concerned. There was some borrowing of words from Old Norse into Irish.
These were mostly terms connected with warfare, sailing, and commerce. Here
are some examples:
() targa ‘shield’ (< targa), garrda ‘enclosure, garden’ (< garðr), stiúir ‘rudder,
helm’ (< styri), trosc ‘codfish’ (< Þorskr), margad ‘market’ (< markaðr),
beóir ‘beer’ (< bjórr)
Eventually the newcomers adapted themselves to their new surroundings and
took on the language of the host country, just as they had done earlier in
northern England, Scotland, and Normandy in France.
The years following the first Viking raids was a period of social and
political upheaval, with alliances being formed between the various Gaelic and
Viking dynasties which were trying to assume control over large parts of the
country. Linguistically, the period c.–c. is referred to as Middle Irish,
because Old Irish underwent a number of drastic changes then which ulti-
mately produced a very different language. Some scholars have speculated that
the linguistic change may have been partly driven by the social turmoil of the
time. While this claim cannot be decisively proved, we know in the case of
other languages that political and social change is often a catalyst for linguistic
developments. A case often quoted is the change which English underwent
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after the Norman invasion of England (the language of this period is called
Middle English).
It is worth remembering that Ireland was not the only territory where Irish
was spoken in . Beginning in the fifth century, invaders from Ireland had
settled in large numbers in Scotland. Christianity gained its first foothold on
the tiny island of Iona on the western coast, and spread from there to the
south-western part of the country and the Highlands. A Gaelic kingdom was
established in Scotland in the ninth century. Irish gave way to English in the
south of the country in the twelfth century, but remained in the Highlands and
Western Isles for many centuries after that, eventually becoming a separate
language called Scots Gaelic. Irish also established itself as the language of the
Isle of Man around the same time that it spread to Scotland. The language
which later emerged on this island is referred to as Manx.
Returning to Old and Middle Irish, it must be emphasized that they are very
different from Modern Irish. One example can serve to illustrate this. Most
languages have a verb expressing the concept to fear, and this verb is followed
by a direct object denoting the cause of the fear:
() I fear the Lord.
Old Irish was no exception in this regard. It too possessed a verb expressing to
fear, which took a direct object:
() intí adagadar in Coimdid
the.person who.fears the Lord
‘he who fears the Lord’ (DIL, under the entry ad-ágathar)
Here, the verb ad-agadar ‘fears’ takes the direct object in Coimdid ‘the Lord’.
Now compare sentence () to a similar sentence in Modern Irish:
() Tá eagla orm roimh an Tiarna.
is fear on.me before the Lord
‘I fear the Lord.’
Instead of a single verb, followed by a direct object, in MI we have a construc-
tion involving the verb to be + noun (eagla) + two prepositions. So the object
of the preposition ar ‘on’ in MI corresponds to the subject I in the English
sentence I fear the Lord, while the object of the preposition roimh ‘before’ in
MI corresponds to the English object the Lord. On the other hand, the
structure of the Old Irish sentence () is more or less identical to the English
equivalent: there is just a subject, verb, and object, without any prepositions.
This is only one of the many significant differences between the language
before c. and the shape it took after that date. The verbal system in
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particular before was highly complex, and poses considerable difficulties
for the learner. Even those students with a good command of MI have to learn
Old and Middle Irish from the start.
2.1.2 The Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland
Very often, certain dates and events come to have a special significance for the
history of particular countries or societies. For French people, the year ,
the year of the French Revolution, has a special resonance. For all Europeans,
and , the years in which the two world wars began, have powerful
associations. Countries and nations that have been occupied by other coun-
tries frequently remember the years when the occupation began or ended. In
the case of Ireland, one of the dates that stands out is , the year in which,
according to historians, the Anglo-Normans of England invaded the neigh-
bouring country.
In military terms, the invasion was highly successful. Within a mere six
years Henry II of England had been officially recognized as the Lord of Ireland,
and his Anglo-Norman warlords had gained control over much of Leinster,
Munster, and Connaught. Dublin became a new centre of government and
administration, the seat of the English king’s representatives in Ireland. Large
numbers of settlers followed in the wake of the armies and soon had estab-
lished themselves in a number of urban centres: Dublin, Cork, Limerick,
Waterford, Kilkenny, Cahir, Galway, and Dundalk. The influence of the new
rulers could be felt in the countryside as well, where they built castles to
maintain their control of the Irish chieftains.
Despite this victory, the Irish chieftains gradually rallied and began to resist
the newcomers. As well as this, as time went by many of the more powerful
Anglo-Norman families became virtually independent of the king of England
and his representatives in Dublin. The history of the period – is one
of intermittent wars and truces between the king of England and the Irish and
Anglo-Norman lords, without either side gaining a conclusive victory. Both
the Irish and the Anglo-Normans seem to have had no hesitation in changing
sides if it lay in their own interests to do so. With intermarriage between the
two groups, the distinctions which had initially existed between invader and
invaded became blurred, especially in the south-west and west of the country,
where the English influence was weaker than it was closer to Dublin.
The Anglo-Normans brought with them a different social and legal system,
and tried to impose it on the parts of the country under their control. Apart
from the towns and cities, only in two regions can they be said to have
succeeded in permanently establishing English law and customs. One was
the Pale, the district comprising County Dublin and parts of Counties Louth,
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Meath, Kildare, and Wicklow. The other was the south-east of Ireland, in
County Wexford, the place where the invaders had landed in . In the rest
of Ireland, there was either a mixture of Irish and English law, or Irish law only.
From the point of view of this book, the main importance of the Anglo-
Norman conquest of Ireland was the fact that it brought a new element into
the linguistic landscape of the country, namely the English language.
2.1.3 The linguistic and cultural impact of the conquest
The group of people that invaded and settled Ireland in the period –
was mixed in terms of language. Some of the aristocratic leaders like Richard
de Clare or Hugh de Lacy spoke Norman French as well as English, but most
of the soldiers and settlers were English speakers. For the next hundred years
or so many French-speaking administrators and noblemen were sent over to
Ireland to represent the interests of the king of England. A few pieces of
literature in Norman French dealing with events in Ireland have survived
from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Despite this limited evidence for
writing in French, it seems safe to say that by the new colonists of Ireland
were nearly all solidly Anglophone. Like in England, French continued to be
used for a few centuries more in legal and administrative affairs, but this was
mostly at the written level. However, French did survive for a while as a
spoken lingua franca in commercial transactions among the merchant families
of the coastal towns who traded with the Continent, and was used among
certain aristocratic circles and in some religious orders.
In the period –, the English speakers were more or less confined
to those areas under the control of the crown. We have good evidence that
English was spoken in the main towns and cities, in the Pale, and in the south-
east. It was also spoken to some extent in Anglo-Norman households outside
these areas, by noble families like the Fitzgeralds of Desmond in the south of
the country, or the Burkes of Clanricarde in the west. We know also that Irish
still continued to be spoken by many of the inhabitants of the Pale, and even of
Dublin. We can assume, then, that there must have been a high degree of
bilingualism in those areas of the country where the writ of English law ran.
2.1.4 Hibernicis ipsis Hiberniores
As time went by, many of the Anglo-Norman families became Gaelicized and
took on Irish language and customs. Writing of this development, the seven-
teenth-century historian John Lynch remarked that they became Hibernicis
ipsis Hiberniores ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’.
We can illustrate this with a verse from a poem written in the fourteenth
century by a leading poet of the day, Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh:
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I ndán na nGall gealltar linn
Gaoidhil d’ionnarba a hÉirinn;
Goill do shraoineadh tar sál sair
i ndán na nGaoidheal gealltair.
[In the poem for the foreigners we promise that the Irish will be driven from
Ireland; in the poem for the Irish we promise that the foreigners will be
scattered eastwards across the sea.]
(Mac Cionnaith : )
This verse is instructive for a number of reasons. First, it comes from a poem
written for Gerald, the Earl of Desmond, an important Anglo-Norman lord
from Munster (in the south of Ireland). It would suggest that Gerald and
people of his class felt comfortable speaking Irish; not only that, but they
actively embraced native cultural forms of expression such as poetry
and music. Second, in this poem we find the terms Gael (Gaoidheal) and
Gall juxtaposed.1 The former refers to what we would nowadays call the Gaelic
inhabitants of Ireland, the latter to the descendants of the invaders, the Anglo-
Normans. Both groups speak Irish, but there is the implication in the poem
that there is an ethnic difference between them, a difference that at times
found expression in actual armed conflict.
The terms Gael and Gall survived the downfall of the Gaelic aristocracy in
the seventeenth century, and are widespread in the poetry of the period
–. In this latter period, though, there is a very clear divide between
the two groups. The Gael represents the ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and
religious values that the later poets identified with, while the Gall stands for
all that is alien and opposed to those values. In the fourteenth-century poem
by Gofraidh Fionn Ó Dálaigh, though, the poet does not identify with the
Gael. Both the Anglo-Norman lord and the Gaelic chief are potential patrons
for the poet. He acknowledges that there are differences between the two kinds
of patron, but the overall impression is that they are part of the same cultural
and linguistic milieu.
In his book Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael, Joep Leersen points out that Gerald
the Earl of Desmond also wrote poems in Irish, and that in one of them he uses
the term Éireannach ‘Irishman’ to refer to the inhabitants of Ireland (Leersen
a: ). Unlike Gael or Gall, Éireannach is not an ethnic name, but one
that refers merely to the country of residence. In Leersen’s view, this shows
that some of the Anglo-Normans felt a strong affinity between themselves and
their Gaelic neighbours.
1
Note that Gaeil is the plural of Gael, while Gaill is the plural of Gall.
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There is other, more prosaic, evidence that the degree of assimilation of the
Anglo-Normans was indeed far-reaching. One of the more important centres
of royal rule and administration in medieval Ireland was the city of Kilkenny.
In during a session there of the royal parliament of Ireland, a piece of
legislation called the Statutes of Kilkenny was enacted. In these statutes, the
legislators advert to the Gaelicization of the Anglo-Normans: ‘But now many
English of the said land, forsaking the English language, manners, mode of
riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners,
fashion and language of the Irish enemies’ (Curtis and McDowell : ;
quoted in Crowley : ). As a corrective, they recommend the following:
‘It is ordained that every Englishman do use the English language, and be
named by an English name . . . and use the English custom, fashion, mode of
riding and apparel . . . It is ordained that the men of Ireland do not use the
plays which men call hurling’ (Curtis and McDowell ; quoted in Crowley
: ).
As far as we can tell, for the next years the Statutes of Kilkenny were
more honoured in the breach than in the observance. One might argue that
the Norman conquest had as little impact on the linguistic landscape of
Ireland as it had earlier on that of England. In both cases, it seemed, after an
initial period when the language of the conquerors held sway, after a while the
invaders adopted the language of the country. In England French yielded to
English, while in Ireland English gave way to Irish.
However, this does not mean that English did not influence Irish in the
centuries following the Anglo-Norman invasion. On the contrary, it made its
presence strongly felt through an activity which seems to always thrive in
situations where two languages are confronted with each other, namely
translation. Large amounts of material were translated from English into
Irish in this period. The texts translated are representative of the kind of
material to be found all over Europe at the time: they comprise Romance
tales such as those connected with King Arthur and his knights, as well as
sermons, lives of saints, medical tracts, and travel books like the account of
Marco Polo’s visit to China.
On the spoken level, there must have been quite a lot of interpreting going
on between the different linguistic communities, especially in spheres of
activity such as trade. All this translation, both written and spoken, meant
that there was considerable enrichment of the vocabulary of the Irish lan-
guage, and also that the intellectual life of the literate Irish classes was
enhanced. Comparing Ireland to the rest of Europe at the time, we get the
impression of a language and society that is fully keeping pace with overseas
developments. This contact with other countries would have been facilitated
by the presence in Ireland of religious orders like the Franciscans, who had
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strong links with Britain and the Continent. Irish brothers and monks were
constantly travelling abroad, bringing back with them knowledge of other
cultures, a knowledge which found its way into the written texts produced in
Irish in this period.
2.2 The shape of the language (1200–1500)
2.2.1 Early Modern Irish and Modern Irish
As mentioned in Chapter , it is common practice to refer to the language of
the period – as Early Modern Irish (EMI). This might suggest that it
is not that different from Modern Irish (MI), the language taught in schools in
Ireland to the present day. There is some truth in this: if we compare the
earlier language to the Irish that some readers will be familiar with from their
schooldays, we can observe a remarkable degree of similarity.
Let’s start off with a simple sentence, The man kisses the woman, in EMI and
in MI:
() a. Póg-aidh an fear an mnaoi. (EMI)
kiss-es the man the woman
b. Póg-ann an fear an bhean. (MI)
kiss-es the man the woman
The three key words here are póg ‘kiss’, fear ‘man’, and bean ‘woman’. Two of
them are the same in a. and b.: póg and fear. The only word in EMI that looks
different from MI is mnaoi. The other big difference is the ending of póg ‘kiss’.
In MI it is -ann, while in EMI it is -aidh. In order to illustrate how the
difference came about I need to use a little bit of technical terminology.
Words like fear ‘man’ and bean ‘woman’ are called nouns; they name some
entity. Nouns can appear in different forms depending on the context. In
English, we use the form cat (singular) when there is only one animal involved,
and cats (plural) when there is more than one present in the discourse. There
is a change in form from cat → cats, indicated by the presence of -s, but we are
still talking about the same animal. The change in meaning might be described
as grammatical, in the sense that we are not changing the object of discourse,
merely providing some extra information about it. Languages which exploit
this device a lot are called (highly) inflected languages.
Nouns can have different roles depending on their place in a sentence.
A noun may be the entity initiating the action, or the entity being acted upon.
If the former, we say it is the subject, if the latter, the object. Now in English,
the same form is used for subject and object:
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THE SHAPE OF THE LANGUAGE (–)
() a. The man kisses the woman. (woman is object)
b. The woman kisses the man. (woman is subject)
The same is true for MI:
() a. Pógann an fear an bhean. (bean is object)
kisses the man the woman
‘The man kisses the woman.’
b. Pógann an bhean an fear. (bean is subject)
kisses the woman the man
‘The woman kisses the man.’
All that distinguishes the subject from the object in MI is its position in the
sentence.
EMI is more inflected than MI. Some nouns, when they are objects, take on
a different form from when they are subjects. One such noun is bean ‘woman’.
When it is the subject, it is bean, just as in the modern language:
() Pógaidh an bhean an fear.
kisses the woman the man
‘The woman kisses the man.’
But when it is the object, it changes to mnaoi, as in (a) above. So sometimes
the inflection, the actual form of the noun, tells us what the semantic role is.
Another kind of word which takes on many different grammatical forms in
the Irish of this time is the verb. In English, we usually need separate words
like I, you and he/she to tell us who is doing the action (the person). These
words like I and you are called pronouns. In English, the ending of the verb
only changes once, when we have a subject who is a third party (not the
speaker or the person being spoken to), and this subject is singular:
() clean
Singular Plural
I clean we clean
you clean you clean
he/she/Susan cleans they clean
Obviously, we need a word like I or you for most verbs, or we wouldn’t be able
to figure out who was doing the action from the form alone. If we just said
clean, the subject could be I, you, we, you pl, or they. This system for dealing
with the person of the verb, whereby it is combined with a pronoun, is called
analytic inflection. It’s as if the verb is analysed (broken down) into two
parts—the verb proper and the pronoun.
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Some languages have a separate form for each person of the verb. We can
observe this in Italian, for instance:
() comprare ‘buy’
Singular Plural
compr-o ‘I buy’ compr-iamo ‘we buy’
compr-i ‘you buy’ compr-ate ‘you buy’
compr-a ‘he/she buys’ compr-ano ‘they buy’
Here, the endings tell us what person we are talking about: the -o in compro
tells us that it is the first-person sg (I), so we don’t need the pronoun I as well.
Verbs which conform to the Italian system are called synthetic verbs—the verb
and the ending are synthesized, or brought together.
MI is half-way between English and Italian in terms of the shape its verbs
take. In the first-person sg and pl, we have an ending:
() glan ‘clean’
Singular Plural
glan-aim ‘I clean’ glan-aimid ‘we clean’
This is like Italian: the ending -aimid for the plural tells us that the subject is
we; there is no need for a separate pronoun as well. For the other persons,
though, the system is like English. We find one verbal form glanann, and
separate pronouns for the persons:
() Singular Plural
glanann tú ‘you clean’ glanann sibh ‘you clean’
glanann sé/sí ‘he/she cleans’ glanann siad ‘they clean’
In EMI, on the other hand, all the persons of the verb have separate endings, as
in Italian:
() Singular Plural
glan-aim ‘I clean’ glan-maid ‘we clean’
glan-ae ‘you clean’ glan-taoi ‘you clean’
glan-aidh ‘he/she cleans’ glan-aid ‘they clean’
As in Italian, the endings provide the information about who is doing the
cleaning, so that we find the verb and the person all in one single word.
When we have a noun subject like an bhean ‘the woman’, or an fear ‘the
man’, we can observe a further difference between MI and EMI. In MI, the
common form ending in -ann is found with a noun subject, whether it is
singular or plural:
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() a. Glan-ann an fear an seomra.
clean-PRS the man the room
‘The man cleans the room.’
b. Glan-ann na fir an seomra.
clean-PRS the men the room
‘The men clean the room.’
In EMI, when the subject is singular, the verb is singular, when the subject is
plural, the verb is plural:
() a. Glan-aidh an fear an seomra.
clean-PRS.SG the man the room
‘The man cleans the room.’
b. Glan-aid na fir an seomra.
clean-PRS.PL the men the room
‘The men clean the room.’
This matching between the singular noun and the singular verb, and between
the plural noun and the plural verb, is called agreement. We can describe the
difference between MI and EMI in terms of agreement: in EMI there is
agreement between subject and verb, while in MI there is none.
These are only some of the most striking differences between MI and EMI,
differences in inflection. There has been a huge reduction in the number of
forms in Irish for nouns and verbs since EMI, so that in one sense it is easier to
learn the modern language. The student who is approaching EMI for the first
time has to master a multitude of forms, which obviously makes the task much
more difficult.
2.2.2 Spelling and pronunciation
Rules for writing were not standardized for Irish until the twentieth century,
so that the printed versions that we have nowadays of medieval texts are the
result of editing. The scribes of the time simply wrote as they saw fit. We can
see this if we look at a verse of poetry as it appears in the original manuscript
(Figure .).
The first thing that catches our eye is that the letters are written differently
from nowadays; in fact, it almost looks as if the alphabet were different. This is
not actually so, it is simply the case that scribes shaped the letters differently in
the Middle Ages. Copying a long passage was a laborious task, and medieval
scribes used short-cuts, just as we use short-cuts today when texting. The Irish
name for a contraction of this kind is nod. You can see some examples of these
contractions in Figure ..
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FIGURE . Quatrain from University College Cork, Irish MS , p.
Source: Irish Script on Screen (http://www.isos.dias.ie/)
FIGURE . Examples of manuscript contractions
The first stage in editing a manuscript is to decipher the original spelling, and
write the contractions out in full. With our manuscript this is relatively easy, as
the scribe wrote clearly and the contractions are unambiguous. With older
manuscripts, though, the modern editor has to struggle with ink-stains and
other extraneous marks, with careless copying, and even with missing pages.
A first transcription of the verse might look like this:
() Olc do thaigrais athorna
ge bheith dfeabhas healadhna
tar ceann leithe mogha muigh
re niall cosgrach a ccrúachain
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This first version, where the spelling of the scribe is reproduced exactly, is
called a diplomatic edition. It is certainly an advance on the original, in that we
can make out recognizable letters. But even for somebody who knows EMI
well, it is hard to make sense of this version. That is because in modern printed
texts in all languages, not just Irish, there are various conventions which help
the reader make sense of what they are reading. For instance, proper nouns,
names of people and places, are written with capitals. Then there are language-
specific spelling rules. In the case of Irish, these were only established in the
last hundred years. One convention is that short grammatical words like the or
a are kept separate from other words. Thus an ‘the’ is separated from the noun
that follows it, even though in speech the two seem to form a single unit. In MI
we write an fear ‘the man’, not *anfear. In the manuscripts, though, it is not
uncommon to find the two written as a single word, and often the <a> of an is
written as <i>, so that we get infear for MI an fear.
Returning to our quatrain in Figure ., we know from other sources that a
personal name Torna existed in the medieval period. When addressing some-
body in Irish, we use a particle a before the name, e.g. a Mháire! ‘oh Mary!’
This, and our knowledge of the conventions of the scribes, enables us to
rewrite the ending of the first line, so that we arrive at a Thorna for athorna.
We are now beginning to make progress, we know that the poet is addressing
somebody called Torna. Applying the same kind of process to the other lines
of the verse, we can bring them into line with modern conventions for writing,
and produce a version which is more or less intelligible to somebody who has
studied EMI and is familiar with its grammar and vocabulary. In the final
version, called a normalized edition, punctuation marks have been introduced,
and words spelled in keeping with modern rules:
() Olc do thagrais, a Thorna,
gé bheith d’fheabhas t’ealadhna,
tar ceann Leithe Mogha amuigh,
re Niall coscrach i gCruachain.
[Despite your great learning, Torna, you pleaded badly on behalf of
Leath Mogha with triumphant Niall from Cruachain.]
It should be noted that there are limits to how far one can go with normalizing
a text. For example, in the case of Figure . above, it contains the word
ealadhna, which is spelled ealaíona in modern dictionaries. The reason for
not totally modernizing it is that the metrical scheme of EMI demands that it
should be spelled in the old way. The old spelling indicates that the second
syllable (-ladh-) has a short vowel, which is necessary for the metre. This effect
would be lost if it were spelled ealaíona, with a long vowel (-laí-) in the second
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syllable. Note also that I have only dealt with one short, simple example of
editing; with whole poems of fifty or more quatrains, often an editor will have
to decide whether to change what was written by the original scribe or to leave
it as it is. While there are general guidelines for editing, to some extent it
involves subjective choices.
I have dwelt on the issue of manuscripts and editing because so much of
written Irish was in manuscript form until the twentieth century, and we are
only in the process of discovering what these manuscripts contain. It is
important for the modern reader always to bear in mind that what we read
in printed form is the result of choices made by editors over the years, and that
the rules and conventions which guide them are arbitrary, and are constantly
changing.
In my exposé of the structure of EMI, I have not yet touched on the most
basic aspect of the language, namely pronunciation. Unfortunately, we can
only form tentative proposals for EMI compared to what is possible for
the twentieth century, when machine recordings of real speech became avail-
able for the first time. The poems of the EMI period were written in strict
metre, with rhyme between the ends of the lines and assonance (vowel rhyme)
between individual words, and with a fixed number of syllables in each line.
The pronunciation demanded by the verse was conservative, in that it was
often based on spelling rather than on the speech of the day. Spelling often lags
far behind developments in the spoken language. In English, for example, we
still write a <k> at the beginning of the word knight, even though this <k> has
not been pronounced since at least the seventeenth century. In Irish in the
period –, many consonant sounds disappeared when they occurred
between vowels. For instance, the word croidhe ‘heart’ originally had two
syllables, with the <dh> in the middle being pronounced like the initial
sound in British English the, so that the whole would have sounded something
like /krithe/. By the fourteenth century the <dh> sound had disappeared and
the vowel preceding it had been lengthened to /ee/. However, the spelling
reflects the old pronunciation, and this pronunciation was maintained in the
poetry. A word like croidhe would thus count as two syllables in verse, whereas
its modern counterpart croí /kree/ has only one syllable. This is why modern
editions of medieval poetry often retain the old spelling.
2.2.3 Classical Irish
In the introduction, I adverted to the fact that nowadays, many languages exist
in two forms. One is the standard dialect, used in writing and in the public
domain. The other form consists of regional and social dialects, usually
associated with a more informal, spoken domain.
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If we think of standard English in the twenty-first century, we can distin-
guish four main divisions of language where standardization might apply.
These are:
a. pronunciation
b. grammar
c. vocabulary
d. spelling.
Grammar and spelling are often acquired at school. For example, a child who
hears ‘I done it’ at home might be corrected by their teacher, and told to say
‘I did it.’ In the same way, speakers of English are taught to write in a certain
way, regardless of how a word is pronounced. Both though and enough end
with the letters <gh>, even though in one case the <gh> is not pronounced,
and in the other it is pronounced as /f/.
With pronunciation, the school instruction is usually less explicit, so chil-
dren acquire their accent from other sources. In Chapter , I mentioned the
existence of standard Irish English pronunciation, based on middle-class
Dublin speech. This pronunciation is absorbed through exposure to the speech
of people in positions of influence, people such as broadcasters, politicians,
and increasingly media celebrities of all sorts. However, this pronunciation is
not explicitly taught at Irish schools. Similarly, with respect to vocabulary,
there is no dictionary of Irish words in general use. Speakers of Irish English
use British English dictionaries, even though they may also use some indivi-
dual words and constructions which are specifically Irish. A case in point is the
so-called after-perfect, as in the sentence I’m after reading the newspaper
(‘I have read the newspaper’), which is found in all regions and social classes
in Ireland. Some Irish words have even enjoyed international careers, such as
the word feck (mild expletive), which caught on with British TV viewers after
the success of the series Father Ted.
From this brief discussion, we can see that in order for a standard to come
into being, some kind of institution must exist which codifies and promotes a
particular variety of language. In modern France, the Académie Française tries
to regulate the French language, introducing various rules which accept
certain linguistic forms and reject others. Ireland in the late Middle Ages did
not have an academy of this sort, but it did have a highly organized and
articulate literary class. These were the filí (pl of file). The word file is often
translated as ‘poet’ or ‘bard’, but a file in the twelfth century was much more
than a modern-day poet—he was more like a journalist, in that his task was to
comment on current events which were of importance for his community. It is
true that the filí wrote in verse, but the subject matter was not personal. First
and foremost they celebrated the deeds of the dynasty they were attached to.
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The file was employed by a patron, the local chieftain, to praise him and his
family, to enumerate his illustrious ancestors, and to mourn his death. The
poems produced were highly conventional, and were written in special metres.
The language of the poems is based on the spoken language of c., but it
represents a high register. In the same way, nowadays the language of aca-
demic discourse is based on everyday speech, but differs from it in the kind of
vocabulary and constructions it uses. The name given to the verse produced in
this period is Bardic poetry.
The filí were an extremely influential group in society, and it was they who
set the written standard for Irish. Poetry was a profession, usually handed
down from father to son, and required a special linguistic training, which was
provided in schools of poetry. Some manuals for the use of students have
survived, called grammatical tracts (Bergin –; McKenna ), and
these enable us to form some kind of picture of the language used in poetry.
Scholars who have edited and deciphered these grammatical tracts comment
on the fact that they provided a standard for the writing of poetry: ‘As to how
this standard was formed we have no information, but from about the begin-
ning of the thirteenth century it must have been taught in all the schools, for
the same dialect is found in all scholastic verse written in Ireland till the
middle of the seventeenth century’ (Bergin : ).
The standardization recommended by the grammatical tracts manifested
itself mostly in the area of grammar, and specifically in the form that certain
words take, what I called inflection in the previous section (..). Thus, the
tracts provided information about the various forms of the noun and verb for
the students of poetry, and thanks to this we are able to form a picture of
nominal and verbal inflection in EMI. What is interesting about these tracts is
that often the compiler labels the examples given as either cóir ‘correct’ or
lochtach ‘faulty’. Now, the so-called lochtach forms were not learners’ mis-
takes; they were produced by native speakers of Irish. This means that they
must have been common in speech. Consider once again example (a) from
section ..:
(a) Pógaidh an fear an mnaoi.
Kisses the man the woman
mnaoi is the form prescribed by the grammars when bean is the object of the
verb, and the form bean is prohibited, labelled as lochtach. However, we know
from prose sources that the old form mnaoi was disappearing as early as
(Jackson ; McManus b). So, using today’s terminology, we could say
that the form labelled cóir represents the written standard, and that labelled
lochtach the spoken dialect.
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In other cases, two different versions of a word are accorded the same status
by the grammatical tracts, being regarded as acceptable variants. We can see
this in the case of the verb. Recall that in section .. we noted that there are
two possibilities for expressing the person of a verb, either with a pronoun as
in English, or with an ending, as in Italian. Some MI dialects resemble English
in this regard, while others are closer to the Italian model. The same must have
been true of dialects in the period –, because the grammatical tracts
explicitly allow students of poetry the choice of using one system or the other:
() glan—first-person sg Past Tense
a. do ghlan-as (ending)
PST clean-sg
b. do ghlan mé (separate pronoun)
PST clean I
‘I cleaned’
Since the twentieth century, there has been an ongoing dispute in progress
about which of the modern dialects of Irish is the oldest and purest. One of the
criteria advanced for classifying a given dialect as older than another was the
presence of the synthetic verbal system rather than the analytic one—synthetic
verbal systems were considered by some scholars to be superior to analytic
ones. As can be seen, neither system had precedence in EMI, which under-
mines spurious claims about one dialect being older, and hence better, than
another. The truth is that all of the modern dialects contain traces of the older
language. This is one reason why it is important to study the history of Irish—
it enables us to form balanced and rational judgements about the shape of the
modern language, by separating genuine linguistic facts from language myths.
As can be seen, then, there was a certain amount of flexibility in the
grammatical tracts with respect to what was and what wasn’t allowed. This
has led scholars to claim that the language of Bardic poetry is the result of ‘the
formal adoption of vernacular speech as the basis for a new literary standard’
(Ó Cuív : ). Some qualification is needed for this statement. As
McManus (b) shows in detail, various strands were present in Bardic
poetry and the grammatical tracts, some of which were conservative, some
innovatory. Certainly, some of the rules reflect innovations in the spoken
language, and other rules allow for both old and new forms. But many of
the guidelines are conservative, and exclude developments taking place in the
spoken language. Of course, as pointed out by McManus (b), one reason
for retaining obsolete forms was that they gave the writers greater flexibility
when writing verse, where one is confined by the demands of the metre. In any
case, regardless of what the situation may have been in , when the rules
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for writing poetry had been laid down, by the spoken language had
changed considerably, just as the English of differs from the English of
. As a result, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, a typical Bardic
poem would have been pretty unintelligible to anybody who hadn’t received a
special education in the language and metres found in this kind of writing.
We also have to bear in mind that poetry can never be said to be typical of
the language as a whole, because it is an artificial creation. The composers of
Bardic poetry were under pressure to conform to very strict metres and
rhyming schemes. This led them to rearrange the normal word order of
sentences. Consider the following couplet:
() Flaitheas nach gabhaid Gaoidhil
sovereignty that.not possess Gaels
geallmaid dóibh i nduanlaoidhibh.
we.promise to.them in poems
‘We promise a sovereignty which the Irish do not possess to them in
poems.’
(Mac Cionnaith : )
In Irish, the verb normally comes first in the sentence, followed by the subject
(if there is one), followed by the object, followed by the rest of the sentence. So
the above verse, in normal prose, would read:
() Verb Object Rest
Geallmaid flaitheas nach gabhaid Gaoidhil dóibh i nduanlaoidhibh.
we.promise sovereignty which the Irish to them in poems
don’t possess
Even when written like this, it still is difficult for the modern reader to make
sense of the whole, but at least the verb and object are in the right place in the
prose version, whereas in the poetry they have been moved about. In the same
way, the English poet Milton uses a highly unnatural word order in Paradise
Lost:
() Of Mans First Disobedience . . . sing Heav’nly Muse
The normal word order at the time (seventeenth century) would have been:
() Sing, Heav’nly muse, of Mans First Disobedience
In other words, poetry of any period in any language does not give us a very good
idea of how people actually spoke, and this is especially true of Bardic poetry.
The Irish poets also had to make use of a highly stylized vocabulary, which
made reference to figures from literature and mythology. There were set ways
Other documents randomly have
different content
case of need, and to carry in a bag two vertebræ of the mastodon,
which were overlooked in the hold of the ark when the rest of the
skeleton was hauled to the doctor’s house.
Captain Royce had that day given each arksman his share of the
proceeds of the voyage; and John Kenton, Clark MacAfee and
Merrick also went along with the boys, bent on celebrating the
occasion at the “Sure Enuf Hotel,” kept by a tremendously stout
pioneer woman, known as “Old Ma’am Colby.” This was a place of
common resort for flatboatmen, and was in a locality called “The
Swamp,” at the farther end of Girod Street.
But the three boys went on with their bear past the American
quarter, and entered the city proper by the Tchoupitoulas gate.
There chanced to be a festival in progress, which, judging from
the date, may have been “King’s day,” a fete celebrated by the
negroes with songs and dances.
A group of shouting youngsters set upon the boys, pelting them
with little bags containing sugar and rice, also dust and snuff, that
caused boisterous sneezing. The revelers began chanting an
improvised song about les jeunes Kaintocks. This may have been
good-natured chaff, but our young arksmen did not like it; no more
did Napoleon, who was distressed by sneezing with a muzzle on his
nose.
They got away from this first group of roisterers, and hastened
toward the doctor’s house; but near the market they encountered a
greater and much more formidable crowd, in fantastic dress,
wearing masks and bearing grotesque effigies aloft on poles.
To eyes unused to such parades, the spectacle was a startling one.
The maskers wore all sorts of frightful head-gear—cocks’ heads, with
huge red combs and bills a foot long, lions’ heads and tigers’ heads,
bulls’ heads and dogs’ heads, Indians, crocodiles, serpents with
forked tongues; and all were crowing, growling, bellowing, barking,
whooping and hissing, with an added chorus from scores of horns
and conch-shells. The uproar, indeed, was incredible. In this
fantastic mob our young friends found themselves suddenly
engulfed, and became objects of most undesirable attention.
“Mira a los Kaintock malos!” (Look at these Yankee rascals!) cried
a tipsy Spanish sailor, and immediately an eddy of maskers circled
round them, bawling forth a song then much in vogue:—
“’Mericain coquin,
Bille en nanquin,
Voleur du pain,
Chez Miche d’Aquin!”
which, freely translated, signifies that the “Americans” are rogues
who dress in homespun, steal bread from the bake-shop, and are all
jail-birds! This was not complimentary—if the boys had understood
it.
They cared less for abusive songs, however, than for the horns
that blared in their faces, and two “Indians” who danced about
them, brandishing tomahawks. When Lewis and Moses caught sight
of these pseudo-savages they made ready for trouble.
CHAPTER XIII
“VIVE NAPOLEON!”
he boys had never seen anything like this
before—such horrible heads and faces—or
heard such a din. The tightly-muzzled
“Napoleon” rose on his haunches, rolling his
eyes wildly round. Accustomed to play with
the arksmen, he was not much afraid of
anybody; but now he attempted to bolt. The
boys held him with difficulty.
They still thought that it was probably
“fun.” But when those two “redskins” rushed
toward them with tomahawks they were
alarmed, the whoops were so ugly, the
hatchets looked so wicked! Out came Moses’
old dueling pistol, which—like a boy—he had
taken with him under his deerskin smock.
Lewis’ hands were so wound in the bear’s chain that he could not
draw his; but Wistar, with his heavy bag of mammoth back-bones,
gave one “Indian” a “smash” over the head that felled him.
Fortunately for Moses, trouble with the hair-trigger resulted in his
discharging the pistol harmlessly into the ground.
But the fracas now began in earnest, and it might have ended
badly for our young Kaintocks had not a loud laugh been heard and
a high-pitched but powerful voice bawled in a queer mixture of
Spanish and French: “Paz! Paz, mes enfants! Paz, mes
petits!”—“Peace! Peace, my children!”
This timely outcry came from a veranda close at hand, where a
stout old priest in a brown gown, and a tall, dark man, wearing a
military cloak, stood watching the revelers. Immediately the former
came through the throng, stretching out his arms, pushing them all
aside as if they were in very truth his “children.” His big, kind face
shone in the torchlight like a benevolent gargoyle, and his voice was
as oil on angry waves.
“Paz! Paz!” he murmured, soothingly, in that odd jumble of French
and Andalusian. “No sangre! Todos de bon coeur!”
With his hands he patted one after another, even Napoleon, who
snuffed him thoughtfully through his muzzle.
Beyond doubt this was kind old “Pere Antoine,” who, for forty
years, was so amiable and ubiquitous a figure in the New Orleans of
those early days; “Pere Antoine cheri,” whom, although he was a
Spaniard by birth, the Creoles loved to adoration; the brown-gowned
old Capuchin who married all the young couples, white, black and
yellow, and christened all their children as fast as they came into the
world; who heard and sympathized with them in all their troubles,
griefs and sins.
He was the unselfish, incorruptible guardian and lover of the city’s
poor, who handled alms-money by the hundredweight, but lived in a
little hut in the suburbs and slept on two bare boards; who used to
have a great brown leather bag at his girdle for a purse, often so full
by mid-week of voluntary silver and gold that, big as he was, he
could hardly carry it, yet always quite empty—such was his charity—
by Sunday evening; the “cher Daddy Antoine” of the street gamins,
who tagged after him for his blessing and lagniappe—and never
failed to get both.
The dark man in the military cloak, who laughed so heartily at the
warlike attitude of the three youngsters in coonskin caps, was Señor
Casa Calvo, the Spanish commissioner, who continued to live in New
Orleans after the transfer of the territory to the United States.
Feeling sure, from his kindly face and the respect accorded him by
the revelers, that they had made a friend worthy of confidence, the
boys spoke to the priest of Doctor Buchat, and by signs gave him to
understand that they were taking the bear to his house. Wistar also
showed him the two huge vertebræ.
So greatly piqued was their curiosity, that both the priest and
Señor Calvo accompanied the boys to Doctor Buchat’s house. So
much animated talk ensued over the mammoth skeleton that it was
not till late in the evening that the good doctor found quarters for
Napoleon—so late, indeed, that the old naturalist kept his youthful
visitors overnight and to breakfast on the following morning.
This was the boys’ last trip to the city, for that day Captain Royce
had completed his preparations for the long voyage up the river, not
forgetting numerous presents for the people at home. Wistar, Charlie
Hoyt and Lewis, who had saved their profits from the venture, also
bought similar gifts.
Of Kenton, MacAfee and Corson less kindly mention can be made.
Like many other arksmen of those times, they had squandered much
of their money at saloons and gaming-places in “The Swamp”; and
becoming much dissatisfied, they determined to quit their more
prosperous comrades, and go home on foot through the wilderness,
by the “Natchez trail.”
Putting together what they had left from their dissipations, they
bought a horse and set off, Corson first riding for two hours, then
hitching the horse beside the path, and going on afoot. When
Kenton and MacAfee came up, MacAfee mounted and rode for two
hours, then left the horse hitched for Kenton, who was coming on
behind. By the time Kenton had ridden two hours he usually
overtook Corson, who then took his second turn. This was termed
“whipsaw traveling”, and must have been hard for the poor horse.
They expected to reach home in thirty-eight days, and long in
advance of their former comrades on the “horse-boat.” Captain
Royce sent a message home by them, and also a letter to Milly Ayer.
He had previously sent word home by two Cincinnati boats;
neither of which, however, had been able to forward the message.
Nor did the word or letter sent by Corson and his companions come
to hand, for the three arksmen never reached the settlement on the
Ohio; what became of them is not known. Savages or outlaws may
have murdered them; or, owing to dissatisfaction, they may have
gone to “East Florida” or the Carolinas to live.
The Milly Ayer, as her youthful captain had chivalrously christened
their new keel-boat, was not ready to leave New Orleans for the
homeward voyage until January 24th; and still another day was lost,
waiting for a passenger who had offered Captain Royce a hundred
and fifty dollars to be taken to St. Louis.
This passenger was none other than the waggish Lieutenant
Charles Grimsby, who is supposed to have carried a despatch from
General Wilkinson to Captain Amos Stoddard, the first American
governor of St. Louis. Captain Stoddard, however, did not assume
the duties of office until the 10th of March following.
The French settlers of St. Louis, indeed, were still in ignorance of
the sale and transfer of the Mississippi Valley to the United States,
and the horse-boat of our young arksmen was destined to bring
them the first positive intelligence of this event. Like the Creoles at
New Orleans, they were awaiting the arrival of a French army to
take possession of the country in the mighty name of Napoleon
Bonaparte.
On the morning of the arksmen’s departure—January 25th—an old
acquaintance returned in great haste and jumped aboard the boat,
resolutely bent on rejoining his former messmates. This was none
other than Napoleon, the pet black bear, whom they had presented
to Doctor Buchat.
When first seen by Lewis, the bear was coming back at a clumsy
gallop up the levee, dragging his chain and pursued by a hundred
young darkies, who were hastening his flight with stones and clods.
Instinct, or keen scent, had brought him to the Milly Ayer. He leaped
aboard, whimpering from mingled fear and gladness at recognizing
his old friends of the ark.
But they, truth to say, did not want him. Word was at once sent to
Doctor Buchat. It then transpired that the worthy savant of Good-
Children Street was not desirous of recovering him; in fact, the
doctor begged that Captain Royce would make some other
disposition of the animal. He had turned cross in his new
surroundings, and had been near devouring one of the doctor’s maid
servants.
Shadwell Lincoln suggested a rifle-ball as offering an easy way out
of the difficulty, but Moses and Lewis would not hear of this. They
still retained an affection for their former pet.
Finally, since the bear was aboard and objected strenuously to
going ashore, Lieutenant Grimsby proposed that he should take him
to St. Louis as a present to the new governor; and with this
destination in view, Napoleon began his return voyage up the
Mississippi.
At last the long voyage began. The horses were fresh, the gear
worked well, and the little craft plowed her way gallantly up the
river, making fairly good time for many days, with few accidents.
Besides Lieutenant Grimsby, and Napoleon, twelve still remained
from the crew of seventeen, which gave four shifts of three men
each for duty—the lookout, the steersman, and the driver for the
two horses.
Wary in all matters that touched the safety of his boat, Captain
Royce had protected the horse-power on each side with thick planks,
that no Indian or outlaw bullet might disable his team when at work.
The stalls aft, where the resting animals stood, as also the cabin for
the crew, were likewise covered in.
Twelve hours a day was the usual traveling time. They then tied
up to the bank for the night, at some point chosen with an eye for
defense and shelter.
Commanded with such sagacity and prudence, the Milly Ayer
reached the confluence of the Ohio with the Mississippi on February
22nd, having lost but four days, which had been spent in fishing and
hunting to replenish the food supply, and in foraging for the horses.
Here for once Marion Royce seems to have departed from his
usual rule of carefully avoiding quarrels. He had never forgiven the
brutal assault upon Corson at “Cairo.” Corson’s sightless eye had
been a constant reminder of the indignity.
The evening they reached the confluence of the rivers it was
agreed to give Cairo a surprise. We are at liberty to surmise,
however, that the waggish Lieutenant Grimsby had something to do
with this practical joke. His record afterward would seem to justify
such a conjecture.
During the small hours of the night, after the thin mists began to
rise from the river and lowlands, the Milly Ayer, using its sweeps
instead of the horse-power, approached where the big “broadhorn”—
which still sheltered Cairo and its queer population—lay moored to
the muddy bank. Charlie Hoyt then quietly boarded it from the skiff.
At that hour every one appeared to be asleep. Stepping aboard
cautiously, Hoyt first secured his skiff, then made one end of a
hawser, which he had brought along, fast to the foot of a stanchion.
This done, he crept along the shoreward rail, and with a large, sharp
knife, severed the two old cables which held Cairo to the shore; then
decamped in the skiff as silently as he had come, paying out the
hawser.
This was some three hundred feet in length, and as soon as Hoyt
got back to the keel he and his friends made the other end fast
inboard, poled off from the bank, and then, heading down-stream
again, set the horses at work with a free application of the whip.
The Ohio was then rising, and the old broadhorn was afloat at its
moorings. Yielding slowly to the pull from the horse-boat, it floated
out and away—as a coal barge is towed by a tug.
In great but silent glee, our boatmen touched up their horses.
They meant to tow Cairo down into the Mississippi, then cut adrift
and let it go on a voyage of discovery.
Before they had gone far, however, somebody waked up. First
there were drowsy shouts astern, then louder ones and more of
them, and then indeed pandemonium broke loose on the old craft.
Lights glimmered in the misty darkness and candles were seen
dodging to and fro. And now, hearing the clatter of the horse-power
and the noise of the paddles from the keel, the Cairoese began
hailing vigorously, to learn what was the matter.
“Ho, the barge!” they cried. “You’ve run foul of us! You’ve carried
us clean away! Avast thar! Heave-to!”
They thought that some river craft had run into them, and did not
for a considerable time discover the hawser, but continued shouting
for help to get back to their moorings.
Nearly bursting with suppressed laughter, our arksmen said
nothing, but kept the horses hard at work. And with the strong
current helping on, both craft were now going down-stream at a
great rate.
The Cairoese presently discovered the hawser, and divined the
nature of the prank that was being played on them. Their hails for
aid and information suddenly changed to threats and execrations not
to be recorded here.
Soon, too, a rifle flashed and a bullet sang past; then another, and
loads of buckshot began to whistle and to pepper the keel. Our
delighted arksmen were all lying low, however, and had the horses
well protected. They still held on, and kept the old broadhorn
hurrying down the river at twelve-knot speed.
But the denizens of Cairo were not to be long trifled with. Many of
them had experience as rivermen, and some were desperate
characters. Instead of casting off the hawser, or cutting loose,
numbers of them suddenly began hauling their end of it inboard,
and despite the draft on it, soon shortened the distance between the
two craft, with the evident design of boarding the horse-boat.
But this was what Captain Royce and Shadwell Lincoln had been
looking for, and before much progress had been made, the former
quietly cut adrift himself, and veering off, let Cairo go on its
involuntary voyage down-stream.
Rifles still continued to crack, and not a few bullets came aboard
the Milly Ayer. Captain Royce got away from his queer “tow” without
much difficulty, however, and when day dawned was ten miles on his
way up the Mississippi, bound for St. Louis.
It is said that Cairo did not get back to its former moorings for a
week or more. And for years afterward rivermen were wont to relate
the story of the joke which “Mack” Royce played on the “town.”
The Milly Ayer was five days going from the confluence of the
Ohio up to St. Louis. But, at a little before noon on the 27th, it
arrived in sight of the pretty clearing on the west bank of the
Mississippi, where stood the hundred and eighty houses of squared
logs which comprised the St. Louis of 1803.
Pierre Laclede, a French trader, cleared a site and built the first
houses here in 1764. In 1803 the houses of the French traders and
principal citizens stood along Main Street, each at the center of what
is now a city block, surrounded by high palisades, or stone walls, for
defensive purposes. Fruit and vegetable gardens were within these
enclosures. There were two small taverns, a bakery, two smithies
and two grist-mills. Many of the people were traders, and kept a
stock of goods at their houses.
The luxuries, and even the necessities, of life were excessively
dear; coffee was two dollars a pound, and sugar equally high-priced.
A knowledge of this had led Captain Royce to lay in a stock of these
staples, after consenting to take Lieutenant Grimsby as a passenger.
And, as the event proved, he was able to clear a dollar a pound on
four quintals of each.
At the outset, however, a mad prank on the part of the lieutenant
came near getting them in trouble. Knowing that the French at St.
Louis cherished a vast admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte, and were
expecting that he would shortly take possession of the Mississippi
Valley, Grimsby bethought himself—since their pet bear was named
Napoleon—to have some sport from the coincidence. He said
nothing to Captain Royce, but persuaded Lewis and Moses to assist
him, and told them what to shout as they drew in to the landing-
place.
“NAPOLEON IS HERE! VIVE NAPOLEON!”
In those days the arrival of a keel-boat from New Orleans was an
event. Not more than ten came up in the course of a season. As
soon as the Milly Ayer was sighted, nearly the whole population
came running to the river bank, and were both astonished and
immensely delighted to see Moses and Lewis waving the tricolor
from the top of the deck-house and hear them shouting:
“Vive Napoleon!” “Napoleon est ici!” (Napoleon is here!)
“Napoleon chez vous!”
This was sufficiently bad French, but it was understood. And the
effect ashore was tremendous!
CHAPTER XIV
CONCLUSION
apoleon has come! Napoleon est ici! Vive
Napoleon!”
For a time the simple French habitants
were mute with astonishment. Then an
answering shout rose: “Vive Napoleon! Vive
la France!” It was like putting a match to
fireworks. An indescribable excitement
ensued. The settlers crowded the river bank.
Trappers fired their guns in the air. And now from all the more
distant houses, from the fort and from the watch-tower, many others
—traders, soldiers, and even the governor and his secretary—came
hastening to the landing-place.
Within five minutes more than a thousand people collected, all
vastly astonished and overjoyed at the strange tidings.
A babel of eager questions now burst forth. Was it true? Where
was the mighty Frenchman? And who was worthy to entertain him?
All looked to Governor Delassus. With inward consternation the good
governor bethought himself as to his somewhat scanty
accommodations. In short, the prank was even more successful than
the waggish Grimsby had anticipated. Intent on securing the full
dramatic effect of his joke at the proper moment, the frivolous
lieutenant had kept the bear out of sight, in the horse stalls, till the
boat drew in to the bank. Then hauling him suddenly forth by his
chain, he made him rear on his haunches in plain sight of all and
shouted, “Voila Napoleon!”
Lewis and Moses, from the deck above, also cried, “Here’s
Napoleon!” and burst into shouts of laughter.
A jest of this kind was quite in keeping with the rough humor of
frontiersmen, but with these French people it fell very flat. They
neither understood nor appreciated it; they were simply bewildered.
“Un ours!” (a bear!) they murmured, with glances of displeasure
and many shrugs of disgust.
“Un ours!” What did it all mean, and what in the world were these
Americans laughing at? Where was the joke? They failed to see
anything laughable. “Un ours!”
No one laughed, and at last the lieutenant tried to explain his
joke. “Son nom est Napoleon!” said he, pointing to the bear. “That is
his name! Napoleon! He has come to see you!” and Grimsby burst
out in another laugh.
Dismal silence continued to prevail ashore, except that several,
still shrugging with comical little grimaces, muttered that Monsieur,
l’Americain, appeared to be un farceur—a joker!
“Ah, well,” cried Grimsby, disgusted in turn by their lack of humor,
“you had better take a good look at him! It is the only Napoleon that
you will ever see come up the Mississippi! Your grand Napoleon has
sold you out to the United States. Within ten days your new
American governor will be here!”
At this juncture Capt. Meriwether Lewis, who had recently come
there, made his way down to the bank, and hailing Captain Royce,
whom he had previously met at Marietta, lent his aid to explain the
matter to the governor and others. Captain Lewis was at this time
completing his preparations for the famous Lewis and Clark
expedition, which, under direction of President Jefferson, set off
from St. Louis on the 10th of May following.
Lieutenant Grimsby had not seen the last of his joke, however. On
setting off from the Milly Ayer the next morning, to lead Napoleon to
the governor’s house, at the northeast corner of Main and Walnut
Streets, he was stoned by some young loafers; and in his efforts to
catch one of them he lost hold of Napoleon.
The bear, alarmed by the stones, galloped up the street and
turned in at the open gate of one of the palisaded courtyards.
Immediately a great outcry ensued inside. Children and women
screamed, and presently a gun was fired. Napoleon was creating a
terrible commotion, and it was uncertain what damage to life or
property he might be doing. But Grimsby, being overmatched by his
assailants, was unable to go in pursuit of him. After a scuffle the
lieutenant ran back to the river bank and called on Moses, Lewis and
Wistar Royce to return with him.
The four set off together at a run, and on reaching the scene of
the skirmish, found that Grimsby’s assailants had beaten a retreat,
and a worse outcry than ever was issuing from within the courtyard
of the house where the pet bear had taken refuge. But now the cries
were those of pigs instead of human beings. The gate had swung to
and latched, and the palisades were too high to scale.
After some delay Grimsby and his friends forced the gate,—for the
case seemed urgent,—and found an odd state of affairs prevailing
within. In one corner of the yard was a sow with a large litter of
young pigs. To these Napoleon was paying assiduous attentions. But
for each one that he seized he was forced to fight a pitched battle
with the sow, which, in defense of her young, attacked him with
great intrepidity, squealing and clacking her jaws in a most ferocious
manner. With a stroke of his paw the bear was able to prostrate the
sow, but immediately she was on her feet again, quite as fierce as
before.
There was such an uproar that the rescue party did not at first
notice what had become of the people of the house till they heard
them calling out from the roof.
The man, a French trader, had a gun, the flint-lock of which he
was endeavoring to put in order. He had fired once, but had failed to
do the bear much injury. The trader’s wife, children and two or three
female servants were behind him on the roof, and they all besought
the arksmen to drive out the bear and save their poor pigs.
Grimsby and Moses laid hold of the chain and tried to pull
Napoleon away, but he had become excited in the affray with the
sow. He was bleeding from several slight wounds; and, moreover,
had had a taste of young pork. He turned upon his masters so
savagely that they were obliged to let him go, but they finally
succeeded in driving him out of the enclosure.
Attracted by the clamor, a considerable crowd had collected in the
street outside the gate, and when the bear rushed forth another
hubbub rose. Napoleon ran up Market Street, however, which was
then a mere country lane, and escaped through the broken gate of
the stockade which enclosed the hamlet.
Outside the stockade there were clearings, fifty or sixty acres in
extent, where the people raised wheat, corn and vegetables. It was
while cultivating these crops a few years before that the settlers
were surprised by the savages from the British post at
Michilimackinac during the American Revolution. Across this cleared
tract Napoleon was now escaping. On reaching the gateway of the
stockade, Lewis caught sight of his shaggy black coat as he bounded
over the charred logs that still encumbered the fields.
They all gave chase after him, for Grimsby was very desirous of
presenting him to Major Stoddard; but the bear ran fast and reached
the woods. For the time being, at least, he appeared to have had
more than enough of civilization and its dubious luxuries—including
young pigs with savage mothers. Lewis and Moses called after him
in most endearing accents, but he still ran on. They could hear his
long chain jingle as it dragged over logs; and now and then they
sighted him, but could not overtake him.
Thinking, however, that he would stop after awhile, they followed
on for several miles, through what was then a virgin forest of
chestnut, walnut and sycamore.
At last they crossed a creek and saw the bear ascending a hill.
Near the top of this hill they came upon him, hung up hard and fast
by his chain, the ring in the end of which had caught between two
fallen tree trunks. He was panting hard, and appeared to have had
all the exercise he desired. He licked Moses’ hand when the boy
patted his head, and went back with them in a very docile frame of
mind to the governor’s house.
The arksmen were far too desirous of reaching home to dally
longer than was necessary in St. Louis. Having landed his passenger
according to agreement, and disposed of his venture in coffee and
sugar, Captain Royce lost no time in returning down the river. He
was not sorry to part company with the waggish Grimsby, whose
propensity for practical joking rendered companionship with him
both embarrassing and unsafe.
Having now the river current in aid of the paddle-gear, they
reached the confluence with the Ohio in a little more than two days.
After what had taken place there a week or more before, they
judged it prudent to go past “Cairo” during the small hours of the
night. Beyond doubt this was a wise precaution. It was learned
subsequently that the population of the old “broadhorn” was
watching the river for them. Practical jokes have an unpleasant habit
of coming home to roost.
On March 19th they “cordelled” up Letart’s “Falls,” the scene of
their encounter with the Shawnees, and a little before sunset, three
days later—just a year and two days from the time when they had
started—the Milly Ayer rounded the bend below Fish Creek, and
came in sight of home.
As the familiar hillocks and clearings came into view, Lewis, Moses
and Wistar waxed wild with excitement and delight. They danced
and whooped; Moses actually stood on his head, and Marion Royce
felt his own heart beating hard and fast. But he was pondering
gravely on all that might have happened during their long absence,
and on the evil tidings that he must bear to the mother of Louis Gist
and the wife of John Cutler.
Not one word from home had reached them in all that time; but
he supposed that Corson and MacAfee had arrived long ago, bearing
his message that the horse-boat was on her way.
In point of fact, however, no news had come to the home people
since that black day in early June, when Gist had found his way back
and reported the capture of the ark by the Indians.
Gist’s account had been doubted by many, and for a long time
those anxious little homesteads had waited and hoped that further
tidings would come. But when September and October passed and
winter drew on, even the most sanguine grew hopeless; and how
disconsolately the spring opened! For, not only had these pioneer
families lost the fruits of two years’ hard labor, but also their most
efficient young men. There seemed nothing left them with which to
begin another year; not even heart and courage to labor on.
In the Royce and Hoyt families there was mourning for both their
sons; and at the Ayer farmhouse grief more silent, perhaps, but
even more poignant, was felt. Milly was among those who had
hoped bravely on till midwinter. She and Molly Royce were the last to
give up faith that Marion, Lewis and Moses had somehow escaped
and would yet come back.
But when March passed and no tidings came, despair fell on them,
too, and the despair of such hopeful young hearts is sad to witness.
The little settlement was in mourning none the less sincere that
there was no black crape or sable plume for outward symbols of it.
Yet one emblem of their grief these sad-faced women and girls
were able to contrive. They wove and fashioned little shoulder capes
from homespun linen, and dyed them black with an “ink” made by
boiling the twigs of the swamp-maple. Nine of these little black
capes were worn that spring, and one of those pathetic little tokens
of pioneer sorrow is still in existence, the property of a lineal
descendant of Milly Ayer.
That afternoon Milly and Molly chanced to be coming from Mrs.
Merrick’s cabin, when, as they climbed the hillside, where a vista of
the Ohio opened to view, Molly saw the “keel” rounding the bend.
“There’s a boat coming, Milly,” she said, soberly enough; but Milly,
thinking of one that would never return, had hardly the heart to
look.
Boats on the river were always objects of interest then, however,
and Molly presently turned.
“It’s a keel,” she said. “It must be a horse-boat, too, it comes so
fast.”
“A Pittsburgh keel, it is likely,” Milly replied, apathetically; “or,
maybe, Marietta.”
“Perhaps it is from New Orleans,” said Molly. “Oh, I wish we could
hail them and ask if they had ever heard anything.”
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