The shape of the language (1500–1600)

3.2.1 Conservatism, innovation, and genre

Unlike political and social history, there was no major change in the language itself in the period–. EMI is usually said to have lasted until c..

This statement is based on the written records which have come down to us, and on Bardic verse in particular. The poets continued to write poems in classical Irish right through the sixteenth century, and there is virtually nothing in the language of these poems to distinguish them from similar compositions written years earlier.

With respect to prose texts, the situation is similar to that in the period

–. Some texts contain highly conservative and even archaizing lan-guage. These are usually versions of traditional tales, saints’ lives, or annal entries. On the other hand, translations aimed at the common reader some-times reveal developments that were taking place in the spoken language.

One such text is Aibidil Gaoidheilge agus Caiticiosma [Irish alphabet and catechism] (Ó Cuív ). In the introduction to his edition of this work, Ó Cuív discusses the spelling found in the book and what it tells us about the spoken Irish of the day. One example will illustrate the kind of information that can be derived from such sources.

From independent evidence, we know that in the period – the pronunciation of Irish changed with respect to certain groups of consonants containing <h> and another consonant, e.g. <gh>, <dh>. Around the year

, these were both pronounced in the same way, like the <ch> of Scottish loch, but with the vocal cords vibrating (this is one of the most challenging sounds for learners of Irish). By, <gh> and <dh> were no longer being pronounced in the middle or at the end of a word, and the vowel near them was lengthened by way of compensation for this loss. Therefore, by the traditional spelling was highly misleading as far as pronunciation was con-cerned. We can see this if we compare the spelling of late EMI with MI:

() EMI MI

a. bailighim bailím b. cruinniughadh cruinniú

In b, a sequence of seven letters, <ughadh>, has been replaced by a single long vowel, <ú>, because the <gh> in the middle and the <dh> at the end are no longer pronounced. Clearly, the older orthography was cumbersome and downright misleading, but it continued to be used long after it ceased to reflect pronunciation.

THE SHAPE OF THE LANGUAGE(–) 

In Aibidil Gaoidheilge agus Caiticiosma, the author tried to write in the traditional way, but sometimes his misspellings reveal something about his pronunciation. The consonant groups <dh> and <gh> are still written in the middle of a word, but as well as that, the preceding vowel is spelled with a length-mark, to indicate that it is long:

() Spelling in AGC Traditional spelling MI spelling a. fhúathaígheas fhuathaigheas fhuathaíos

ainmníghthear ainmnighthear ainmníthear b. beathúghadh beathughadh beathú

ghortúghadh ghortughadh ghortú

(examples from AGC taken from Ó Cuív: )

The hybrid spellings of the translator of Aibidil Gaoidheilge agus Caiticiosma show that the change discussed above had taken place by the late sixteenth century, but the traditional spelling masks this to some extent.

Another area where translations prove innovative is in the introduction of loan-words. A lot of religious material was translated into Irish by both Catholic and Protestant clergymen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Not surprisingly, this material contains many loan-words, usually taken either from English or Latin. Here are some which accord-ing to Ó Cuív (: ) are first attested in Aibidil Gaoidheilge agus Caiticiosma:

() aldarman ‘alderman’, caiticiosma ‘catechism’, coimisinéar ‘commissioner’, cusdum ‘custom’, prionnda ‘print’, priuáideach ‘private’, reuerensach

‘reverent’, translásion ‘translation’

By and large, though, the prose texts of the Tudor era, like the poetry, belong to the higher register, and hence tend to be more formal and conservative in terms of language. Only in a very few items do wefind anything that might be said to reflect everyday speech. One fascinating source of information is a kind of guide-book to Ireland for English people, written by Andrew Boorde and published in. It contains what must be the first ever phrasebook of Irish for visitors, entitled A talk in Irish and English. Below are some examples of what were considered useful expressions for tourists in the sixteenth century.

I give the original spelling and gloss, and below them a putative transcription in standardized EMI:

() a. English Irish

You be welcome to the town De van wely

Dé bheatha do-chum an bhaile

 ^{THE TUDORS}(–)

b. How do you fare? Kanys stato?

Cionnus a-tá tú?

I do fare well, I thank you. Tam agoomwah, gramahogood A-táim go maith, go raibh maith agat.

c. Wife, have you any good meat? Benitee, wyl beemah hagoot?

[meat = food inth-cent English]

A bhean an tí, an bhfuil bia maith agat?

Sir, I have enough. Sor, tha gwyler.

?Sor?, a-tá go leor.

d. What is it o’clock? Gaued bowleh glog.

?Gad? buille den gclog.

It is vi. o’clock She wylly a glog.

Sé bhuille den gclog.

(based on Boorde []; quoted in Crowley : ) When the spelling is normalized, the above phrases and dialogues are more or less intelligible to somebody who knows MI, in fact, some of them, like (b) kanys stato, are still to be found in text-books of Irish. We alsofind here the character of bean an tí‘hostess’, a figure who was to become familiar to generations of schoolchildren in the twentieth century. Finally, note the presence of the lexical item sor‘sir’. Irish at the time lacked a neutral form of respect for addressing strangers, so it was only natural that it should borrow this item from English.

The above phrases provide a tantalizing glimpse of the potential there was for Irish to develop in the sixteenth century. In the mini-dialogues of Boorde’s book, we have moved outside the inward-looking, hermetic world of Bardic poetry, with itsfixed formulae and conventions, to the world of cultural and linguistic contact, such as was to found in other societies at the time. Had the circumstances been different, one could imagine Irish being adopted by the New English in the towns and smaller urban centres that were being built at the time, which would have led to a considerable broadening of its register to embrace such areas as commerce, administration, law, education, and printing—in short, what we nowadays would call the public domain.

Another kind of writing which offers us valuable insights into the less conventional language are private letters. With the spread of education in Europe in the period–, letter writing became much more common between ordinary people. Collections of letters from thefifteenth and sixteenth centuries are a valuable source of information for historians of various lan-guages. For example, the letters of the Paston family in England provide us with much data for the study of Early Modern English. Epistolary material in

THE SHAPE OF THE LANGUAGE(–) 

Irish is much more meagre, but a few letters from the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries have survived. Here is an extract from one sent by the Ulster chieftain Seán Ó Néill to the Lord Justice of Ireland, the Earl of Sussex, in:

() Beandacht ó Ua Néill docum an Iústís mar dhligheas sé agus dochum na coda ele don Chomhairle: agus atáim agá fhiarfaighe díobh créd do rinne mé do ní do rachadh a n-easonóir nó a ndíghbháil don Bhanríoghain nó dhaoibhsi as ar bhriseabhair orum gan fhátha gan ádhbhur, agus tairgsin gabháltus do dhénamh orum gan ghiolla gan liter do chur chugam ó do thángabhair a nÉrinn.

[Greetings from O’Neill to the Justice as is his due and to the rest of the Council: and I’m asking you what did I do that would dishonour or harm the queen or yourself, which led you to attack me without reason or cause, and try to seize my lands without sending messenger or letter to me since you arrived in Ireland.]

(Ó Lochlainn: ) One difference between this letter and the more common prose texts like tales or saints’ lives is the relative directness and brevity of O’Neill’s style. In the above passage, the only redundancy is in the use of a pair of synonyms in the phrase gan fhátha gan ádhbhur‘without reason without cause’. Other-wise the writer gets to the heart of the matter almost straight away. Apart from the spelling, the language is reasonably comprehensible to a modern reader.

True, there are some verbal forms which might be puzzling to students familiar with standard MI: dhligheas (= dhlíonn), bhriseabhair (= bhris sibh), thángab-hair (= tháinig sibh). All of these forms, though, are to be found in twentieth-century dialects. Another feature worth commenting on, and one which is found in other letters written around the same time, is the use of the second person pl in addressing a stranger. Both bhriseabhair and thángabhuir are plural in form, but singular in meaning—they refer to the Lord Justice. This is a common device in many languages, the so-called polite form of the second-person pronoun (usually equivalent to the second-second-person plural) for addressing strangers. In French we have vous, in German Sie. MI and Modern English are unusual in not having a polite form of the second-person pronoun. It is clear that in the sixteenth-century Irish was well on the way to developing a polite-familiar system like other languages did at this time. Later changes in the social circumstances of Irish speakers meant that such a system became unnecessary, as Irish became used less and less in formal or impersonal contact.

Now compare this letter to a passage from a text written nearly forty years later, Turas na dtaoiseach nUltach as Éirinn [The journey of the Ulster chief-tains from Ireland], describing the voyage of Hugh O’Neill and Hugh O’Donnell to France in:

 ^{THE TUDORS}(–)

() Timchiol medhóin oidhche éirghiss in fhairrgi i n-a tonnoibh tul-borba tinneasnacha trén-tuinnsemhacha dóip. Trócaire na Trínóite ri-s-tesairc gan in long co n-a mbuí innte do bháthadh.

[About midnight the sea rose towards them in rough, violent, strongly buffeting waves. It was only the mercy of the Trinity that saved them, and [prevented] the ship and all who were in her from being drowned.]

(Ó Lochlainn:) We can observe here a stylistic feature much beloved of EMI writers, namely the use of strings of alliterating words: tonnoibh tul-borba tinnesnacha trén-tuinnsemhacha. The three adjectives tul-borba, tinnesnacha, and trén-tuinn-semhacha are near synonyms, and the presence of the last two is not really necessary as far as the content is concerned. Literary devices like this cause considerable difficulties for modern readers, if only because the compound adjectives like tul-borba or trén-tuinnsemhacha are no longer to be found in Irish, and there is no proper dictionary of the older language.

Another complication of the above passage is grammatical in nature. The verbal form éighiss is an old third-person sg past tense, used in narrative. Even by the fifteenth century it was obsolete (see Ó Catháin ; Ó Maonaigh

). And yet writers like Tadhg Ó Cianáin, the author of the above passage, continued to use it right into the seventeenth century. The verbal form in l., ri-s-tesairc, is equally archaic. The -s- in the middle represents the object pronoun,‘them’, which is as it were inserted into the verb, between the particle ri- and the main part of the verb, tesairc (a similar phenomenon in French involves the placing of object pronouns between the subject and the verb, e.g.

je-t-aime ‘I-you-love’, where -t- ‘you’ comes before the verb aime). These infixed pronouns were the norm in Old and Middle Irish, but by  they had been replaced by independent object pronouns placed after the verb, e.g. insaig-siu é ‘attack it’ (Breatnach : ). However, the poets and other literati continued to use infixed pronouns for  years after they had disappeared from the spoken language.

The above brief discussion once again illustrates how difficult it is to make hard-and-fast statements about Irish in the period–. Some texts are archaic, while others more or less reflect contemporary developments. It is therefore vital that historians of the language have an intimate acquaintance with the sources that they are dealing with.

3.2.2 Diglossia and bilingualism

We saw in the previous section that the majority of texts, whether poetry or prose, were written in a language that was largely unintelligible for an average

THE SHAPE OF THE LANGUAGE(–) 

speaker of Irish. This was not just a question of literary style. One might also argue that nowadays certain novelists or poets writing in English are hard to understand, but this is (usually) more a question of style and vocabulary than grammar. However, as we have just seen, the actual grammatical forms being used in literature had become very far removed from everyday speech by.

In Chapter, I referred to the concept of diglossia in sociolinguistics. This comes into play when two different language codes are in use in a speech community. Very frequently, one of them is a high register, and the other a low one. One oft-quoted example of diglossia is standard written Arabic versus local dialects. Speakers of modern Arabic dialects have to learn the standard written variety in a formal educational setting. Some people would go so far as to claim that traditional written Arabic is a dead language. Thus one author, discussing the attitudes of twentieth-century Egyptian nationalists to the tradi-tional written register, remarks that for them it had‘fossilized to the point where it could be declared (almost) a dead language’ (Suleiman : ).

By , it seems that a similar kind of diglossia had developed in Irish.

Those who went through the formal education of the poetic schools were able to understand, and to some extent reproduce, the fossilized grammatical forms that I discussed in the previous section. The rest of the population was unable to enjoy the products of the literati. This is overtly acknowledged both by native and foreign commentators. Edward Campion in his Historie of Ireland comments as follows:

The [Irish] tongue is sharp and sententious, and offereth great occasion to quick apothegms and proper allusions, wherefore their common Jesters, Bards, and Rhymers, are said to delight passingly those that conceive the grace and propriety of the tongue.

But the true Irish indeed differeth so much that they commonly speak, that scarce [one]

amongfive score, can either write, read or understand it. Therefore it is prescribed among certain [of] their Poets and other Students of Antiquity.

(Campion) []; quoted in Crowley : ) In a number of Bardic poems from the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, the poet refers sarcastically to the necessity of dumbing down for the new audience. Here is an extract from one such composition:

Do thréig sind sreatha caola foirceadal bhfaobhrach ffrithir ar shórt gnáthach grés robhog, is mó as a moltar sinde.

[I have given up the delicate lines of pithy lessons for a common kind of facile composition, and I get more praise for it.]

 ^{THE TUDORS}(–)

Maithim, giodh mór an sonas, énbhonn feasda dá thoradh, má théid énrand gan tuigse dom dhánsa ó dhuine ar domhan.

[I will not take a single groat of profit, though it were good for me, if as much as a single verse of my poem is not comprehensible to anyone in the world.]

(Bergin: –) Formerly, the whole point of Bardic poetry was to be as obscure as possible (an activity that most poets seem to have excelled in). Now, because of the lack of patrons, they were forced to try to make their work accessible to all. It would be sometime before accessibility became reality rather than mere rhetoric, but eventually poetry adapted to the new conditions, and started using a language closer to the spoken Irish of the day.

Bilingualism is simply an extreme form of diglossia, involving two different languages, rather than two registers. As we saw earlier, bilingualism was on the increase in Ireland in the Tudor era. From about  onwards, we come across evidence for the kind of English spoken by Irish speakers who had to learn the other language. However, we have virtually no records of Irish spoken by English speakers, with one exception. This is a work by the character we have already introduced in section .., Richard Weston, the intermediary between Hugh O’Neill and the authorities in Dublin. After he left Ireland in, Weston composed a poem addressed to the family and friends he had left behind. As Mac Mathúna () points out, the poem provides fascinating evidence of the kind of Irish spoken by bilinguals in seventeenth-century Ireland. The following verse is illustrative:

() B’éigean dom fágbháil mo bean

was.necessary to.me leave.INF my wife

is gan gabháil mo cead leis,

and not take.INF my leave with.him

ná fuirreach d’éis Ó Néill sa tír

or stay.INF after O’Neill in.the land

och a turrus is bocht sin.

oh VOC journey is poor that

[I had to leave my wife without saying goodbye to her, or stay after O’Neill in that land, oh journey, that is sad.]

(Ó Fiaich: ) When somebody speaks or writes a language that they have learned, they normally make mistakes, and the same is true of Weston. Two kinds of errors can be identified in the above quatrain. First, there are deviations in the shape

THE SHAPE OF THE LANGUAGE(–) 

of individual words. After the possessive pronoun in the first-person sg, mo

‘my’, a following consonant undergoes a modification called lenition. This sound change is marked in spelling by the presence of <h>:

() Unlenited consonant Lenited consonant

bád mo bhád [vawd]‘my boat’

cat mo chat [hat]‘my cat’

Judging by the spelling throughout the poem, Weston failed to lenite his consonants. In both l. and  above, there is a possessive in the first-person sg, but no lenition is marked: mo bean instead of mo bhean (l.), mo cead instead of mo chead (l.). Another error is the use of the masculine leis ‘with.him’ in l., referring to the noun bean‘wife’ in l.. Here and in other places in the poem the two genders, masculine and feminine, are confused with each other.

The second kind of error concerns word order. To illustrate this, I need to introduce a little bit of new terminology. Consider the English sentence:

() I had to leave my wife.

We have two verbs here: have and leave. When a verb occurs with to before it, we call it an infinitive. So in () above to leave is an infinitive. Irish also has infinitives, and there is a special ending for them:

() Verb Infinitive a. fág fág-bháil leave leave-INF

‘to leave’

b. gabh gabh-áil

b. gabh gabh-áil