ALVMNVS BOOK FVND
BIOLOGY
IRISH SPELLING
A LECTURE
Delivered under the title "Is Irish
to be Strangled ? " as the Inaugural
Address of the Society for the :: ::
Simplification of the Spelling of Irish
On the 15th of November, 1910
BY
OSBORN , BERGIN
BROWNE AND NOLAN, LIMITED
DUBLIN BELFAST CORK WATERFORD
1911
PRICE 3d.i by Post, 4d.
AN CtfNGGAR
(PART I.)
Compiled by
R. O'DALY, D.D., Ph.D., O. J. BERGIN, Ph.D.,
and SHAN 6 CUIV.
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CEACHDA BEOGA GALUINGI
IRISH READING LESSONS.
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Compiled by
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With Illustrations by JACK B. YEATS. Edited in Simplified
Spelling by OSBORN BERQIN, Ph.D,
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FABLES IN IRISH Part* I. to V.
By Very Rev. PETER CANON G'LEARY, P.P.
Edited in Simplified Spelling by OSBORN BERGIN, Ph.D.
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IRISH SPELLING
:**..
A LECTURE
V . V '3. t'V' 1 ,^ $4
Delivered under the Title " Is Irish
to be Strangled ? " as the Inaugural
Address of the Society for the :: :*-
Simplification of the Spelling of Irish
On the 1 5th of November, 1910
BY
OSBORN BERGIN
DUBLIN ^
BROWNE AND NOLAN, LIMITED
AND AT BELFAST, CORK & WATERFORD
IQII '**
'**
KU*/
PREFATORY NOTE
IN my Inaugural Address I had intended to deal chiefly
with the historical basis of Simplified Spelling. As ex-
plained in the opening paragraph, it was decided that it
would be better to come at once to the practical problems
of the present day. The manner in which these were dis-
cussed was greatly influenced by the fact that the lecture
had to be delivered before an audience which was largely
hostile. Public feeling the feeling of the small public that
cares about such matters was somewhat excited. Under
a misapprehension, I believe, of our aims and methods, the
body then officially representing the Gaelic League had
just condemned our work as unnecessary and dangerous.
Since the time when the lecture was delivered much of
the opposition we had to meet has disappeared. On the
one hand it is now universally admitted that, for various
reasons, old methods are not succeeding. The critical
state of the language, hardly realized last year, is now a
commonplace. And this leads many to welcome help where
they had feared rivalry. On the other hand the encourage-
ment we have received from Canon O'Leary, and the pub-
lication of some of his writings in Simplified Spelling, have
served as a guarantee of good faith, and brought us valuable
686744
4 IRISH SPELLING
support from quarters that were strongly prejudiced against
us a year ago. Lastly, the publication of Glor na Ly has
convinced many waverers that an accomplished fact can
no longer be regarded as an impossibility. To-day there is
less call for polemics, and it would be easier to plead the
cause of the Society on its own merits. But I have thought
it undesirable to recast the lecture, for I believe the facts
are still as I have stated them.
IRISH SPELLING
WHEN I was asked to give a public lecture on behalf of
An Cuman um Letiriit Shimpli, it seemed to me at first
that the most appropriate way to deal with the object
for which the Society was founded would be to trace the
main lines in the history of Irish orthography, to show
how it has been changing slowly it is true from the start,
and how various attempts have been made to improve it,
some of them successful, others doomed to untimely failure.
Such a study might be made the basis of an appeal for the
extension of the same liberty to living writers as was con-
ceded to their predecessors in the past. But a brief con-
sideration showed that the subject was too vast and
complex for the occasion, that it was better suited to the
classroom, or to a university dissertation, than to a public
hall. For this reason I do not mean to inflict an academic
discourse on you, but to keep closely in touch with the
problems that confront workers in the language move-
ment in this year of grace 1910, and to ask your attention
to historical investigations only in so far as they are likely
to help us in solving those problems. It may be that
there are some present who feel tempted to ask : " What
have you to do with those problems or their solution ?
That is the business of the Gaelic League." Well, to such
a question I answer without the slightest apology: ' Yes !
keeping the language of Ireland alive is the business of
the Gaelic League, but it is more than that ; it is the
business of every Irish man, woman, and child. It con-
cerns us all, inside or outside any particular league or
society, whether this, the chief token of our race and
nation, is to fade for ever within a couple of generations.
For my part, although various reasons have made it
impossible for me during recent years to take the same
6 IRISH SPELLING
personal share in the work of the Gaelic League as I had
done at an earlier stage, still I maintain that the nation
is greater than any league can ever be, and I claim the
privileges as well as the duties of nationality in dealing
with national questions.
Let me come to the point at once. The question that
must be faced is simply this. Is the language movement
so far a success ? To answer this question properly we
must free our minds of prejudice, and carefully exclude
all topics that serve to dazzle the eyes. It is not a question
of essential Irish versus compulsory Latin, or of school
programmes, or of public processions, or of feiseanna, or
of war-pipes or four-hand reels. It is not and this I
wish to emphasize it is not a question of industrial re-
vivals and wearing only clothes of Irish manufacture.
These things are good in their way. Evening classes and
music and dancing and little competitions and prizes and
public gatherings have added a new interest and a bright-
ness to the lives of many of us. Without industries the
nation cannot even exist, and it must at least exist before
it can become a Gaelic nation. And last, but not least,
the University students are likely to leave their mark on
the country before many years. But all these things are
not the things the language movement was started to
promote. Is the language itself, the spoken language, still
dying ? Is it a fact that its decay has not even been
arrested ? That Irish-speaking children do not take the
place of Irish-speaking, not to say English-speaking,
parents ? That the movement has not yet really touched
the Irish-speaking districts, and has had merely a super-
ficial effect on the anglicized districts ? In short, is it
true to-day, as was publicly stated six or seven years ago,
that the vessel is leaking faster than we can fill it ? An
affirmative answer to these questions implies that the
methods now used to save Irish where it is still spoken,
and to spread it to places where it has died out, are doomed
to certain failure. Now, I do not want to discourage honest
workers. They will need all their enthusiasm. But the
truth must be faced, particularly when the governing
THE LANGUAGE MOVEMENT 7
body of the Gaelic League think it their duty to issue a
public warning concerning the malpractices of an obscure
body of faddists, who might if left alone actually increase
the pace of the machine to quite an appreciable extent.
But at any cost the pace must be increased.
Seventeen years ago the Gaelic League was founded.
1 can well remember the time. For four or five years we
were a feeble folk, an obscure body of cranks and faddists,
quite as absurd as any spelling reformer can be in these days,
but we had the enthusiasm of youth and the faith that
moves mountains. After the first Oireachtas of 1897 and
the starting of Fdinne an Lae in 1898, the Gaelic League
came into the light of day, and made such a stir that some
of its members expected miracles. The proverb tells us
that " every beginning is weak/' but, as is often the case
with proverbs, the reverse is also true. The beginning of
every movement is strong with a strength that belongs
to the beginning only. Twelve years ago it was possible
it cost a good deal of energy and enthusiasm, but still
it was possible to get together one hundred eager students
of Irish, where only one had existed twelve months before.
This apparent increase of 10,000 per cent, actually led
some leaders in the movement to prophecy that we were
near the hill-top, and that in ten years all Ireland would
be Irish-speaking. It is easier nowadays to calculate the
normal rate of progress. Think of all the labour, the
energy, the enthusiasm, the money expended in this city
of Dublin during the last ten years. I will not say it has
been in vain, for whether the progress made be fast or
slow, devoted service to an ideal is its own .reward. But
apart from the workers, has the movement as a move-
ment been successful ? 1 know there have been pro-
cessions, and plays, and ornamental lettering over shop
fronts and at street corners, and much enjoyable com-
panionship. But has a single street been GaeHcized ? A
single household ? Or, put it this way is there a single
individual of those who entered a Gaelic class in Dublin
ten years ago who knows Irish to-day as well as he or
she knows English ? For that is the goal. If there is
8 IRISH SPELLING
such a man in Dublin I should like to meet him and to
.shake hands with him.
The idea of geometric progression in the movement was,
of course, quite delusive. At the end of the second year
you may find one hundred fresh members, but by this
time eighty or ninety of the first batch have lost heart,
lost interest, and fallen away, and the increase is now at
the rate of 10 per cent, per annum, not 10,000. Has the
average branch of the Gaelic League in such a place as
Dublin been able to keep up even this increase of 10 per
cent. ? a modest increase, truly, for those who mean to
alter the map of the country. No ; Irish may disappear
from a whole countryside in one generation. That has
happened, and is still happening. But to Gaelicize the
Pale will take far more than a generation.
The only possible battle-ground is the Irish-speaking
districts. In many of these Irish is simply dying as fast
as it can, faster even than the older generation of native
speakers. In others the language is said to have a chance
of holding its own. But I wish to point out that the
character of these latter districts is rapidly changing. At
present there is still a certain percentage who speak Irish
only. These are invaluable depositaries of idiom, phonetics,
tradition, and so on, but you cannot rely on them for help
in the future, because there will be no such class in
existence. The people who speak Irish only to-day are
not those who have deliberately chosen Irish, but those
who have not had the chance of learning English. And
does anyone here imagine that in these days of compulsory
education, and inspection, and industrial movements, and
agricultural societies, any child born in Ireland this year
is destined to grow to maturity without learning English ?
Apart from the question whether this is morally or edu-
cationally desirable, will such a thing be physically possible ?
Why, the very bilingual schools for which you have been
fighting will settle that matter. Believe me, unless a
radical alteration is made in our methods, in a few years
Ireland will be divided into two main districts. In the
first, comprising nine-tenths of the whole country, English
THE IRISH-SPEAKING DISTRICTS 9
only will be spoken, in the remaining tenth Irish will be
understood ! And once that stage is reached " the
rest is silence."
Now, do not imagine that I have brought you here in
order to belittle the work of the Gaelic League in your
presence. The work has been a great and a noble one.
But there is so much still to be done ! The Gaelic League
has now passed the mad fervour of youth, and is thought
in some quarters to be slowing down. Whether this is a
fact I cannot say, but I am quite sure of this the rate
of progress is too slow. Only by a violent acceleration
can we hope to achieve our purpose. The time is short.
We are not yet even in sight of the hill- top. We have a
long march before us. We are badly provisioned. Our
only possible guides, the native speakers, are dropping
one by one, and at the present rate, long before we can
reach the promised land of Gaeldom, the Gaelic nation
will have perished, as a nation, in the wilderness of
anglicization.
The case, it seems to me, is worse than I have stated.
The odds against us to-day are far greater than they were
ten years ago. Everything that has been done since that
time to help the people of Ireland on the road to pros-
perity local government, land purchase, industrial develop-
ment, agricultural organization, down to the old age
pensioner's pass-book has tended to encourage the use
of English in Irish-speaking districts. People talk now
about making Gal way a Transatlantic port. No doubt
that would put new life into the decaying town, and rouse
the neighbouring countryside from the torpor of centuries.
But that life would, under present conditions, be anything
but a help to the Gaelic League. It needs very little
exercise of imagination to call up a picture of a glorified
Claddagh, a new Queenstown, crowded with well-dressed and
prosperous citizens, caring as much and as little for Gaelic
as the crowds on the band promenade of the old Queenstown.
At the present day the language just lingers on, but where-
ever it has been brought into competition with English,
the weaker has gone to the wall. This is inevitable. As
io IRISH SPELLING
long as those who ought to know best insist that Irish is
a quaint and beautiful survival of the Middle Ages, which
must be carefully guarded against the rough usage to which
all modern languages are exposed, they should not complain
if the bilingual speaker draws the logical conclusion that
Irish is a rather expensive luxury, while English is the
real language of practical work and business.
" Quicken the pace /" is our motto. Whether at this
eleventh hour we can ever make up for lost time is more
than I can promise, but at least we can do something to
lighten the burden of the Gaelic host, and to smoothe the
road before them. This can be done by making the language
easier to learn, easier to read, easier to write, easier to
print, easier to adapt to modern requirements. I say
easier not easy. Some of you have heard the phrase,
" Irish made easy," applied in the initial stages to our
attempt to simplify Irish orthography. The phrase was
an unfortunate one, but it must be remembered that the
spelling reformers were not responsible for it. Irish is
indeed a very difficult language. We can never make it
easy, in the sense in which Italian and Spanish and
English are easy. But we can at least make it easier.
If you won't make it easier, or allow others to make it
easier, at least you would do well to consider the magni-
tude of the task before you, and count the cost of your
undertaking. You are seeking those of you who con-
scientiously object to any form of simplification you are
seeking to pit a weak and terribly complicated language
against the strongest language in the world, and one of
the simplest, with a hundred million speakers and most
of the printing presses in the world behind it, and you
insist on fighting with old-fashioned out-of-date weapons.
You are using bows and arrows against machine guns.
Such a display of reckless courage in these prosaic days
has something about it that is inspiring. It is admirable.
It is magnificent but it is not war !
What I mean by strangling the language is this. Up
to our own time it was dying peacefully of neglect in a
corner. The Gaelic League came forward and strove with
GIVE THE PATIENT A CHANCE n
heart and soul to bring the language out into the fresh
air. Unhappily, at the same time the League took pre-
cautions to prevent the patient from breathing. The rags
and the accumulated dust of centuries were also to be
carried out and kept in position. In the eyes of some
of the most devoted students and workers the rags and
the dust are as precious as the patient, more precious
indeed.
Now we want to clear away the dust and the rags,
and give the patient a chance in other words, to treat the
language as of more importance than the spelling.
I I am convinced that much of the opposition to reform
is due to misapprehension of the real objects of the reformers.
It is taken for granted that we mean, not to simplify the
old orthography, but to cast it aside and devise a new
one based entirely upon the English values of the letters.
In this connexion I may be permitted to quote a remark-
able assertion by a strenuous opponent of simplification,
Dr. Seaghan P. Mac Enri. In the New Ireland Review
for June, 1910, page 231, he writes : " Like all those who
advocate this so-called reform, Mr. Synan apparently
writes from the point of view of the person who has been
educated in English, has learned the English values of the
letters, and who cannot conceive that a letter or a com-
bination of letters can have any other value than that
assigned to it by the Englishman." We have here a
curious confusion of thought, for it is not the reformers,
but some of the opponents of reform, who "cannot conceive
that a letter or combination of letters can have any other
value than that assigned to it by the Englishman." Of
course letters are mere conventional signs. But some
people imagine that, while it is easy to give the true bljfs a,/
to such a word as p\$Mit, already in Middle Irish
shortened and no great harm done to jM^it, if you
extend the process of simplification and write fail, following
the example set by Stapleton more than two hundred and
seventy years ago, some magic power in the letters will
force you, whether you like it or not, to pronounce the
English word fail. The absurdity of this view is as
12 IRISH SPELLING
evident to the advocates of reform as it can possibly be
to Dr. Mac Enri.
To avoid misconception, then, let me say that our
Society was not founded to advocate the spelling of Irish
words as if they were English, with English values of the
letters. This has, of course, been done frequently. Most
of the Irish Catechisms that appeared in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries were printed in roman type,
and in a phonetic, or semi-phonetic and unhistoric spelling.
A couple of specimens may be of interest. The first is
from a translation of Butler's Catechism by " Muirertach
Ban O'Ceiliochuir, 6 Heaumpull Cluaindrohid." I quote
from the edition printed " A Gorcuig san mlian, 1792,"
page 26 :
" C. Creud e an nee Dochus ? "
" F. Suailkeas Diaga, veireas muineen laidir duin
chun na beaha sheereegh, agus na meoin le na
Vaighmeed ee."
Here you see a mixture of Irish and English orthography.
A better example is this from a Connacht catechism of
the early nineteenth century. It was translated from the
English of Dr. Kirwan by Thomas Hughes, a parish clerk
of the Diocese of Tuam, who was living in 1848. I quote
from the third edition, page 25 :
" K. Ke phackees ni an gra ? "
" F. An tea meen fou go yea, na yau choarso ega."
You don't like this spelling ? Well, no more do I. It is
not beautiful. It is grotesque. But it could be easily read
by native speakers, and this book passed through several
editions, without, as far as I am aware, spoiling the Irish
accent of the Diocese of Tuam. And observe that the
Irish represented in this uncouth fashion is genuine Irish.
I admit that it would not pass muster in a Gaelic League
Feis. Any competitor who should write an tea meen fou
ega instead of An c A mbionn J?U.AC Aige would at once
be disqualified. It would pay much better to write even
an c6 Ac.d (!) puAt Ai$e, which, by your leave, is not Irish
at all, though prizes are often given for the like.
THE ROMAN ALPHABET 13
These little books, however, though interesting and
often important monuments of dialectic usage, are really
examples of a method which is not ours. They are speci-
mens of what we are not doing. What then are we doing,
or trying to do ? We are trying to simplify the existing
orthography. And to do that we want to encourage the
use of the international form of the Roman alphabet, with
Irish sounds apportioned to the letters. Dead letters we
propose simply to drop.
The idea of using the ordinary modern form of the
Roman alphabet for writing Irish stirs up a surprising
amount of heat in many quarters. It is supposed to be
a kind of treachery to the national sentiment, for of course
the Roman alphabet is an English invention, and belongs
properly to the English language ! As an excellent Irish
speaker said to me once with a shake of the head, " 'Tis
very hard to bring the Irish sounds out of English letters/'
The obvious retort was that Irish sounds must be brought
out of Irish lips. We may be sure that the authors of
the numerous Irish catechisms to which I have referred
had no fear of the result.
Letters, as I have said, are merely conventional signs.
The word cu does not become an English word if we write
it tu. We might use the Greek alphabet or one of the
Sanskrit alphabets without altering the language. We
might even, strange to say, express our words by some
completely new system of strokes and dashes and curves,
some form of shorthand. And shorthand would no more
alter or damage the language of Ireland than it has altered
or damaged that of any country in the world.
The Roman alphabet is not an ideal one. It is not
particularly well suited to represent the numerous fine
shades of sound which are such a marked feature of the
Irish language. But it is in possession. It is known all
over the world. Those who use it have at their disposal
the experience derived from centuries of penmanship and
type-founding, with endless experiments in the direction
of clearness and variety of shapes and sizes. Yet many
of you protest that modern Irish must be excluded from
14 IRISH SPELLING
the right, conceded to every other language in Western
Europe, of using the best known alphabet in the world.
We must not use the Roman alphabet. We must write then
in a different alphabet ? No ! in a medieval form of the
very same alphabet !
What is now commonly called the Irish alphabet is
not of Irish invention. Our ancestors never laid claim
to the honour which some of their descendants covet on
their behalf. Their own name for the form of writing
in Irish manuscripts and in most modern Irish printed books
was in aibgitir latinda " the Latin alphabet." We have
simply been more conservative in Ireland than in the rest
of Europe, so that an Irish manuscript of the sixteenth
century looks, at a glance, like a continental Latin
manuscript of the eighth.
The first book printed in Gaelic was Carswel's transla-
tion of John Knox's Liturgy, which appeared in Edinburgh
in 1567. Though published in Scotland it was written
in the literary dialect common to Ireland and Scotland.
Probably it would have been better understood in Ireland.
Indeed, as far as language and style go it might have been
written by Keating himself. In this book the ordinary
modern form of the Roman alphabet was used, and it set
a fashion which has been followed ever since in Scotland.
I should be ashamed to discuss seriously before you
the question whether Irish books printed in this fashion
are Irish or not, or to answer objections like that of an
anonymous writer to the press who protests " it makes
me quite sick to see Irish printed in English letters." This
is an extreme case, which I prefer to leave to my colleagues
of the medical faculty. Or perhaps one might show the
patient a copy of Dr. Hyde's great collection of folk-tales,
An Sgeuluidhe Gaodhalach, and before the sight of the
" English " letters had done any great harm, one might
display the title-page and the imprint Rennes. If he could
stand another shock the same day one might then show him
a modern version of the story of Deirdre, also edited by
the President of the Gaelic League, and published in a
German periodical at Halle.
IRISH IN MODERN LIFE 15
Once you admit that the use of the ordinary international
form of the Roman alphabet will not turn Irish into
English, any more than it will turn Irish into French, the
way becomes clear for considering some of the advantages
of the course we recommend.
In the first place, the modern form of the Roman
alphabet is in possession. No publisher finds it worth his
while to lay in a large stock of " Gaelic " type of various
shapes and sizes, and no type-founder can be expected
to experiment in new founts.*
Those who would like to see Irish used in the political
and public life of the country should remember that few
men will be content with a newspaper report of their speeches
in the words " Mr. So-and-So spoke in Irish." That is
about all a public man can expect at present. To satisfy
him you must allow reporters to desecrate the language
by using a script unknown to the schools of the Gaelic
race from the time of Feinius Farsaidh to our own days.
And after the reporter comes the compositor. A speech
in English is on sale a few hours after its delivery. It
takes, as a rule, two or three days to set up an Irish speech,
even when the manuscript is handed to the press. For
how many newspaper offices in Ireland can afford double
sets of linotypes ? As long as Irish is rigidly confined
to the medieval form of the alphabet, it must of necessity
be entirely ignored in ninety per cent, of the periodicals
printed in Ireland, or where it does get a footing it is put
into some back corner, and kept only on sufferance.
For commercial purposes the older form of the alphabet
is equally impracticable. Can you imagine any firm going
to the expense of double sets of typewriters, and cutting
itself off from the telegraph system of the world ? In
this matter of telegrams I am glad to say that common
sense is generally too strong for the logical application
* The so-called Irish type is cast in England. The first specimens
of Irish printing are a poem and a catechism which appeared in 1571.
The type used was a mixture of ordinary roman, italic, and Anglo-
Saxon, the medieval Irish and Anglo-Saxon hands being practically
identical.
16 IRISH SPELLING
ef the exclusion policy. When telegrams have to be sent
across the Atlantic the most devoted antiquary in the
Gaelic League remembers that after all we are living in
the twentieth century, and Irish is a modern language.
As for using the medieval alphabet in scientific work,
I need only say that, in dealing with my own subject the
scientific study of the earlier forms of the language itself
and the literature produced in it the Roman alphabet
is the only one in use. Medieval script must be studied
for paleographical purposes, but scarcely anyone now
dreams of printing Old or Middle Irish in anything but
the modern international alphabet.
There is, however, one department of modern life in
which the so-called Irish or Gaelic alphabet has been tried,
we are told, with success I mean that of education.
Thousands of children in the primary and secondary schools
have learned to read and write Irish as it is generally
printed. Why make any change now ? Well, I am
willing to give all the credit to our opponents that is
implied by such statistics. And I will not ask here what
proportion of these children have really learned, or, what
is far more important, what percentage of them ever acquire
such a liking for the subject that, when the school course
is over, when they have served their country by adding
to the numbers on some official return, they can ever be
induced to open an Irish book. Whatever the percentage
is, I am sure all the publishers will agree that it is not as
large as they would like to see it.
But I will content myself here by stating that I hold
it to be educationally unsound to teach children to read
or write in two different alphabets, or two different forms
of the same alphabet at the same time. This is especially
bad for their handwriting. They scarcely ever learn to
write a good Gaelic script. In my experience the majority
merely develop an unsightly scrawl which is called Irish
because it is certainly not English. No doubt the complete
absence of good copy-books is a contributing cause. Of
the copy-books in use the worst, with their hideous looped
n's, are modern fabrications. The best are unfortunately
IRISH IN THE SCHOOLS 17
modelled on the large book-hand of the medieval scribe,
a hand well adapted for writing with a quill pen on a
sloping sheet of parchment, but almost impossible to re-
produce with a steel pen on a flat sheet of paper. Few
teachers and fewer pupils ever see a good specimen of the
modern Irish hand, say, of the seventeenth century. They
cannot expect to invent it, but they do their best. I have
heard, indeed, of a school in which writing in Irish was
considered as a useful exercise in drawing.
But, after all, most of us, fortunately for the country
in general, have to read considerably more Irish than we
write, and it is in reading that young and old find the
charms or the fatigues that printers and publishers have
in store. Now the best Irish or Gaelic type is beautiful
to look upon, more beautiful than the ordinary modern
Roman, just as a good manuscript ranks higher artistically
than the printed transcript. But those who ought to
know best will confess that the older form of the alphabet
is more trying to the eyes. You may not notice this in
skimming a page or two, but in hard reading, where close
attention is needed, where the meaning of the sentence
may depend on the presence or absence of an aspiration
mark too weighty a burden, surely, for a sign so easily
omitted or overlooked then the inconvenience of the
Gaelic lettering is only too evident. Any of you who
have had much to do with proof-reading know well the
constant worry caused by the confusion between f and t\,
c and c, 1 and t, above all by those terrible dots breaking
off or going astray. After reading carefully one's proofs
and revises and re-revises one can only hope that " not mqre
misprints have slipped through than are to be expected in
an Irish book/'
Of course, there are people who cannot believe that " Irish "
letters are less legible than "English." Well, I invite such
good patriots to make two easy experiments in legibility.
First, let them go to one of the streets in Dublin in which
the name has been put up in Irish and English if possible,
a strange street and standing opposite the name-plate,
let them honestly test the respective distances at which
3
18 IRISH SPELLING
they can spell out the rival names in the rival alphabets.
The second experiment is better made indoors. Take a
book with Irish in medieval lettering on one page and
English in modern type on the opposite, such as one of
the volumes of the Annals of Ulster , and try to pick out
the proper names. Readers who have much indexing of
this kind to do turn instinctively to the English side, where
the names stand out more clearly. It is inevitable that
this should be so. It has nothing to do with language,
as you will see if you have to work at those parts of the
Annals which are written in Latin. The Latin is printed
in the so-called Irish letters that is, in an imitation of
the medieval Latin script but it is just as troublesome
to find the place in such a text, or to pick out the Irish
names, as in the Irish text itself. It is a question of type.
On the one hand, the capitals and lower-case letters are
too much alike, and too much space is wasted in order
to leave room for aspiration marks in case they should
be wanted. On the other, you have, as I have said, the
fruit of centuries of experiment in many lands in the
direction of clearness and convenience, with all manner
of special types italic, clarendon, egyptian, and so on-
to draw on when necessary. All these are to be branded
as English. The language of Ireland is too good for them
or is it not good enough ?
" Oh, but the old letters have an aesthetic value. If
you abandon them you destroy the beautiful appearance
of the page."
When a grown man talks like that and I have actually
heard the like from time to time I try to bear up under
the weighty objection with becoming fortitude. But it
is hard to keep patient. This is no question of schools
of art or museum cases. Crumbling ivy-clad ruins are
also beautiful and picturesque to look upon. But you
can't live in them. I don't ask you to blow them up with
dynamite. That would be a desecration. But only a
homicidal lunatic would force a weak or dying friend to
pass a cold night in one of them. You cannot live in
ruins. They suggest not life, but death. They are bound
IRISH AS A PICTURESQUE RELIC 19
up with the past, not with the future. They may be,
and ought to be, preserved as relics, but it is the preserva-
tion of the mummy. Treat Irish as a picturesque relic
and you strangle it.
I can appreciate beautiful manuscripts and ornamental
letters as well as the most orthodox opponent of reform.
By all means preserve them, and publish sumptuous fac-
similes. But that is not saving the modern spoken language,
or giving bilingual speakers and writers a fighting chance
of using it in competition with English.
Just fancy an admirer of beautiful ornamental letters
going into the office of a Dublin merchant, busied -with
his correspondence, and urging the latter to give up writing
Dublin, one word of six plain letters, in favour of t)Aite &t&
CUAC, three words with a total of thirteen ornamental
letters ! Suppose he goes on, " Hallo ! what is this ? A
telegram form. You mustn't send telegrams. That would
never do. No telegraph operator in the world could express
by his tap-tap the beautiful semicircular curve of the c,
or the dot over it. Better write your message on a parch-
ment scroll, and send it across country by hand." At
this stage I should think the average merchant would
show our aesthetic friend an open door, and help him to
get through it too.
But perhaps we may leave Dublin out of the question.
Imagine a bilingual speaker, a product of bilingual schooling,
in such a place as Ballina. You go to him and say, " I
entreat you not to write Ballina in your address. Spell
it t)6At At A ATI f?eAt>A.* Do this in the interests of
history and tradition, of art and science, of orthography,
etymology, Gaelic calligraphy, and Celtic philology ! "
You furnish hini with a bow and arrow in one hand and
a repeating rifle in the other. The bow may be richly
ornamented with interlaced bands, the arrow may be
* This is the old name, see O'Donovan, Tribes and Customs of Hy
Fiachrach, page 424. It is now locally shortened to b^At An ACA, just as
mAinicif eAn tttuige (Fermoy) becomes An ttlAirufCip, and t)Aiie
i beAnA (Castletownbere) becomes t)Aile ATI C
20 IRISH SPELLING
gaily decked with coloured feathers, but if the man wants
to hit the mark he will drop the bow and arrow, and use
the plain dull Birmingham gun metal. He would be a
fool to do otherwise. Why, the Coisde Gnotha, the
executive body of the Gaelic League itself, show a good
example. The other day they caught sight of a small
band of mischievous busy bodies trespassing upon what
they, the Coisde Gnotha, no doubt honestly regarded as
1heir own preserve. It was no time to mince matters. They
threw down their quill pens, shut their standard dictionaries
with a slap, and launched forth a manifesto in the language
of -'Birmingham ! The shot seems to have missed its
mark, but at least it went off with a great bang. The
advocates of reform are duly grateful for the advertisment.
Perhaps I have said enough about alphabets. One
might have thought this was merely a matter of con-
venience and economy. But so far from being a non-
controversial question, there are many who seem to regard
it as the most important of all the crucial question.
And it is a curious fact that among those who regard the
work of our Society with suspicion and alarm are several
persons who have no intention of learning to read a word
of the language. " We know no Irish," they complain,
" but at least do not rob us of our alphabet." Such persons
are not at all interested in spelling, but in spite of them
I must pass on to that most exciting subject. I want
to show that our Society is not so reckless and revolutionary
as some of you imagine.
People who talk about " departing from the time-
honoured system of the last thousand years " would do
well to control their antiquarian enthusiasms by a patient
examination of the facts. During the last thousand years
there have been many changes. A thousand years ago,
for example, the sound of t>, except at the beginning of
words, was commonly represented by p, and that of t>
by t>. The initial changes of aspiration and eclipsis were
rarely expressed in writing, and when they came to be
expressed the value of the symbols used varied greatly
from time to time. Thus, in Old Irish, the symbol rh stands
THE SPELLING OF THE CLASSICS 21
for an eclipsing m, never for an aspirated one. The modern
A rh^tAip was represented by AmActiift, and modern A mbfvAc;^i|\
by ArhbtUctnfA. For centuries p stood for both the
aspirated and eclipsed p, and even in the time of Keating,
whose spelling was not that of his editors, the eclipsed
p might be represented by pp, op, bp, up, unp, and other
varieties which cannot be represented in ordinary type.
Aspirated p is more often expressed in the best manuscripts
of Keating by cf than by f alone ; tp and tip were also
common. As for the use of v for b, which my friends and
I are accused of introducing into the spelling of Irish
words, we deprecate the praise or the blame of such a rash
innovation. It must have come in at least five hundred
years ago, for it is very common in late Middle Irish and
early Modern Irish manuscripts. Of course the Irish
scribes of the period, like their contemporaries in the rest
of Europe, write the consonant v and the vowel u alike,
except that they sometimes distinguish the consonant
value of the letter by putting the mark of aspiration above
it or ti after it. Some scribes are particularly fond of
this symbol, which they use in all positions, e.g., veicM
(=beit), in uen ( ATI bean), uej\, upep ( = bpe-AtA), T>O ui
(=00 bl), *001U, T>6lV, -0611111 ( -OOlb), CAU-A1H (=CAbA1f),
and the like. Some of you may have looked into
one of the manuscripts, which Dublin is fortunate
in possessing, in the handwriting of that most diligent
scribe, Michael O'Clery. Few will accuse the chief of the
Four Masters of hostility to Irish tradition, or a hankering
after foreign models. Yet this particular symbol is not
uncommon* in his transcripts. I do not mean to imply
that he avoided the use of b. In his time there was no
attempt at uniformity of spelling. But he certainly had
no prejudice against the letter v. Later on, in the
catechisms and other devotional books printed in roman
type, with a simplified or semi-phonetic spelling, in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this letter is,
of course, fully recognized.
Altogether it is time for our opponents to revise their
dates. The current system has not been in use as long
22 IRISH SPELLING
as they imagine, and, of course, was not at the start an
Irish system at all. Founded on the Roman spelling of
Latin, with a British pronunciation, it was gradually adapted
to suit the language. Improvements were introduced from
time to time, and the spelling varied and altered more or
less with the pronunciation. But at no time, from the
introduction of the Latin alphabet with Christianity down
to the present day, has there been a fixed standard of
spelling.
As long as the native system of culture lasted, that
is, up to about the middle of the seventeenth century /there
was a standard literary dialect with a standard of usage
and pronunciation, but within the limits fixed by the
schools there was ample scope for those who retained the
" historic " spelling to vary it according to their individual
preference or passing fancy.
Thus, in Keating's time
fceut fceul
fcc6t fCC6Al recent r-cc6ul
were all regarded as " correct," and the same scribe often
used one or another as it pleased him. In the case of
longer words, such as rs&AtdigeACc, the limits were wide
enough in all conscience. Thus :
f 5 t A 1 5 e* C c
c 6-d o ti 10 en "o
cc eu u t)
eu "on
I will not keep you here while I write out the possible
variations, but if the compulsory arithmetic I learned a
good many years ago has not misled me, the total, not
counting abbreviations, works out at 1152 possible spellings
of this one word in the literary dialect, all of them intended
to represent one pronunciation. Those were brave days
for the phonetician ! Even now there must be over a
dozen of these spellings in common use.
SPELLING OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 23
Up to the time we have been considering the spelling
had been at least partially phonetic, if such an epithet
can be applied to a system so loose as to admit of endless
variations in the writing of common words. It was in
this vague sense phonetic as regards the standard dialect,
though it no longer represented the spoken language of
any particular district. It admitted simplified and short
spelling of a number of words without regard to their
etymology, such as Af\if for earlier aridisi, O. Ir. afrithissi,
Aici-o for Aicitnt), O. Ir. accidit from the Latin, peAfo^,
earlier fodesta, fodechtsa, hifechtsa, etc., ^ne, Mid. Ir.
inne, inde. As several sounds originally distinct had long
before this fallen together, in doubtful cases none but
the best scribes possessed scholarship enough to choose
the historic form.
After the downfall of the native schools in the seventeenth
century, the historic system in the older sense was no longer
possible. No ordinary writer in the eighteenth century
could be expected to know whether fin-Oe or ftuje, unt>e
or tinge was correct. Both t> and 5 were silent, and even
when they were still pronounced t> had taken the sound
of 5 as early as the twelfth century. In such words as
ptnt>e the best scholars in Keating's day cared very little
whether they wrote -6 or 5. But it was chiefly in the
eighteenth century that the plague of silent -6's and 's
sprouted forth. For fear of leaving out anything " historic "
writers began to sprinkle additional dead lettering over their
pages, turning, e.g. :
bim into bitnm
SeAn ,, SeAgAti
Site ,, Site
CtAO1
Another difficulty in connexion with the historic spelling
arose after the loss of the standard dialect. Writers who
had to fall back on the spoken language of their own district
often wanted to write down words and forms which had
24 IRISH SPELLING
not been sanctioned by literary usage. There was no
" historic " spelling. What were they to do ? To spell
as they pronounced would have been contrary to their
general methods, and indeed, owing to the vague way in
which many symbols had come to be used with no fixed
value, it would have been hard for them to express clearly
in writing exactly what they meant. The result was further
confusion.
Let me give an example. The word for " swords " in
the classical language of the seventeenth century was
cioi-bifie, representing no doubt the Old Irish claidbiu,
accusative plural of claideb. What is the plural now ?
Well, in the dialect best known to me it rhymes with ctunce,
and is commonly spelled cUit>ifice. If people say that
a system is phonetic in which ui and Ait>rii may stand
for one and the same sound, they must attach a meaning
of their own to the word phonetic. But talking of
" historic " forms and the tradition of a thousand years,
would anyone knowing only ctAitttfice have guessed
claidbiu ? To be sure the t> and rh of ctAit>ttite are sup-
posed to be historic, because they show the connexion
between clAi-fctfice and the singular ciAi-Oe^rti (which
itself ought " historically " to be ciAi-be-aa), just as if
one should write fooeet in English instead of feet, to show
its connexion with the singular foot.
Or take the modern word outtAifc. This is analysed
by the speakers of some dialects as -o'uOAifc. Consequently
by a very simple analogical process the negative becomes
nio|\ uttaifrc. But the modern classical form is ni outtAiftc.
Writers of certain dialects finding this too unfamiliar to
their own speech, and unwilling to give us what they really
say, have produced the mixed form nioft t>u&Aifc, which
is commonly written and printed to-day in Connacht Irish.
Whether the mixed form has any real existence I have no
means of judging. But for some districts at least it is
as unhistoric and as unphonetic as Keating's own form
would have been, had he chosen to write ni -06^11 OAifc
in order to show the connexion between his own ni
and the earlier ni erbart.
GAELIC LEAGUE SPELLING 25
We have seen that the historic spelling was breaking
down in the seventeenth century. Since that time the
language has changed considerably, or rather the spoken
language with its local varieties has been freed from the
domination of the old literary dialect. What was too great
a strain in the seventeenth century is likely to prove a
wearisome burden indeed in the elementary schools of the
twentieth. In my opinion it is a useless burden. Some-
times it is worse.
I have here a pamphlet on Irish Orthography, issued
a few years ago by a sub-committee appointed by the
Executive of the Gaelic League. The names of the seven
members of the committee, given at the head of the
pamphlet, are a guarantee that it represents the results
of the best modern Irish scholarship. It is written, of
course, in defence of the traditional spelling, but its tone
is moderate, and there are frequent appeals to respectable
precedent in favour of simplicity. Yet even on their
own grounds it can be shown that the reasoning of its
compilers is often unsound.
Thus, on page 8 I find recommended "i mt^AC" not
" Am^fVAe." Well, Keating might write Am^AC, as many
generations had done before him, but we are supposed
to know better ! Our infant schools are more classic than
the classics themselves.
On page 7 I find the future of the substantive verb
introduced thus : " The future stem of t>i is t>6 (formerly
IDIA), not t>eit>. The various persons of the future and
conditional should be spelled accordingly. [The e of the
future stem is short in Munster.] " The paradigm which
follows is simple, but the forms given are not the classic
forms, nor are they, so far as I know, supported in their
details by the modern pronunciation. If a child says
bfeimi-o or &eit>ir, by all means let him write it. That
would be reasonable enough. But if a child, in or out of
Munster, says beimi-o and tiei'oir-, why should he write
6 in the first syllable ? To show the etymology ? To
preserve the old form? Well, but the point is, that the
first syllable was short even in Old Irish, and with all due
26 IRISH SPELLING
respect to the sub-committee who are responsible for the
pamphlet, the future stem is not t>6. You don't want a
lesson in Old and Middle Irish subjunctives and futures
to-night, but it can be shown that this is a case where the
scholars were at fault.
There are other " historical " arguments in this pamphlet
that one might quarrel with. Perhaps the most flagrant
instance is on page 3. "Vowels/' we read, "lengthened
by a glide (tt, , t>, tti) . . . should not be marked long ....
But vowels historically long should be so marked e.g.,
t>iti$it> not Dftisi-o." By a curious fatality the authors
of the pamphlet have hit upon an example which exposes
the weakness of their position. For the first vowel in
t>t\i$it> is historically short ! It is Brigit in Old Irish
orthography. 1 dare say our friends took it for granted
that it came from b|\io, which would, of course, give i.
But it is not derived from bnio$ ! The etymology of this
name is well known to comparative philologists. This is
not a philological lecture, and I cannot stop to show the
relation between Brigit and the Welsh braint, or the Sanskrit
brhatl. But there is no doubt whatever of the fact.
o
The best scholars of the Gaelic League have shown
that they do not themselves know the " correct " or
historic spelling of a well-known name, the name of the
most famous woman in Irish history. Truly this historic
spelling of our ancestors is an expensive luxury, which
few of us can afford. Let those who are willing to pay
the price see that they get the genuine article.
I do not make these remarks for the pleasure of
criticizing the work of men, some of whom are colleagues
and friends of my own. Anyone may make mistakes.
And indeed from my point of view the difference between
t>ttl$it> and t)ni$it> is not worth quarrelling over. But
take the case of a little girl who wants to know the right
way to spell her own name. What is she to do ? Shall
she study Old Irish and comparative philology ? That
is perhaps asking too much. Or shall she apply to the
Gaelic League ? You have seen the result. Would it
not be kinder to let the little girl spell it "bfvro, without
IS THE OLD SYSTEM PHONETIC P 27
prejudice to the historic or prehistoric forms, which she
may study when she grows up and enters the University ?
Why lay burdens upon the shoulders of children which
you cannot bear yourselves ?
It would be strange if the historic orthography had lasted
so long without some attempt being made to simplify it
in accordance with the development of the language. But
before describing to you one of the earliest attempts to
reform that spelling I must deal briefly with a few char-
acteristic objections to change of any kind.
Objection i. "The old system suited the language
very well. It was the Irish system as long as Ireland
was Irish."
This is the hackneyed excuse of the sluggard. " What
was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us."
But we cannot live like our fathers. In the Middle Ages,
when the old system was flourishing, very few people could
read or write. Literature was the monopoly of a small
aristocratic class. When Ireland was Irish there were
few books in the land, and no newspapers. Above all,
there was no English. But it is dull work arguing with
a sluggard.
Objection 2. " But the old system is really phonetic
when you understand its principles."
Is the conventional system really phonetic ? If so, what
does phonetic mean ? Take a single sound, a very common
one in the language, that of u in cu, cu, cut, ut>, etc. The
same sound is also represented by :
i. utj n
2.
3.
4.
5-
6. ut> tl cput> (horseshoe)
7. ut)^ ,, -Amut>,d
8. ut> ,, cput> (milking)
IRISH SPELLING
o,. uj-At) in cAotujjAt), etc
*
10.
ii.
12.
These are fair samples. The list might be considerably
extended if we went deeper into dialects, which after all
no one can altogether avoid now, for the dialects are the
language. In various dialects we should find the same
sound u represented in the conventional spelling by UA,
o, 6, , 10, etc. And many of these combinations of
letters are also used to represent quite different sounds.
Compare muptA-bA and e&iAt>A, co-otAtui^ and LAD.AIJA. Or
take the sound i in oi, -pig, ^105, cige, fU$it),
olige-At), itnpi-oe, itnpi-6im, if$e, Sifvgitn, pite-A-DA,
pot), 01-oCe.f
The conventional system of spelling contains at all
events one remarkable sign which must surely be unique
among " phonetic " systems. That is the symbol t>, the
algebraic x of Gaelic orthography. Where this letter has
any historical justification at all it comes from an old
spirant T>. But the one thing you may be positive about
is that it is never pronounced as a spirant t). It may,
however, represent the sound of a spirant guttural, voiced
($) or unvoiced (c), or a guttural that is no longer a spirant
(5), or a labial spirant (o), or it may be a kind of vowel,
and form part of a diphthong (^t)). Or it may be equivalent
to the aspirate (n). Or it may be silent, lengthening a
preceding vowel. Or it may be silent without lengthening
the vowel. Sometimes when a word ends in -o you must
parse the word before you can pronounce it. Gaelic
* The older spelling is
f Professor O Maille draws my attention to the Connacht phrase
nA|\ f-A'bAi<> cu, in which f % AjbAi > 6(!) represents the sound a. And even
here the A should not be accented in the " historic " spelling, as it is short
by nature, and only lengthened dialectically by the loss of the following
. The early modern form was f"AA.
LITERATURE AND ETYMOLOGY 29
orthography has been praised as a kind of touchstone which
enables the learned to display their learning, and convicts
the ignorant of ignorance. If that is the true function
of orthography, then undoubtedly this "6 serves a most
useful purpose, though one somewhat embarrassing to its.
admirers.
Objection 3. " The people of Ireland are devoted to
the old spelling."
In a sense, I could wish this were true. Unfortunately
the people of Ireland, as any publisher of Gaelic books
will tell you, care precious little about the old spelling.
If they are so devoted to it, why has the Gaelic Journal
been allowed to die ? Why could not a great organization
like the Gaelic League find support for a small monthly
organ ? Outside the schools and classes, and apart from
the various examination programmes, is there any reading
public, any demand for books in Irish, which would pay
the expense of publication ? You know there is not.
Those who profess to speak on behalf of " the people of
Ireland " and their " national sentiment," are either unable
or unwilling to face the facts.
Objection 4. " You want to destroy all our old books
and manuscripts, and to cut us off from all the literature
and all the writers from the time of Cormac mac Airt (or
Cormac mac Cuileannain) to the present day."
I must really apologize for discussing such absurdities.
But this objection has repeatedly been urged in all serious-
ness by persons who were at least old enough to write
letters to the papers.
I should be the last to permit the destruction of old
books and manuscripts, which it is my business to study
and expound. This fear of being cut off from our ancient
literature generally marks the critic who has yet to make
its acquaintance. If such a person as Cormac mac Airt
wrote his name in Ogham characters, it was probably as
much as he could do. As for the famous King-bishop
with whom some of our critics confuse him, Cormac mac
30 IRISH SPELLING
Cuileannain, I shall be glad to help any of you who wish
to read his glossary, and the poems attributed to him.
But you will find that he does not spell like the Gaelic
League, the only editions are printed in the ordinary
roman type, and to appreciate his style you will first have
to study a form of Irish about as different from that of
the twentieth century as Latin is from French. In fact
this talk about the ancient literature has nothing to do
with present-day problems.
Objection 5. " You will destroy the history of the
language, and the etymology of its words."
We might as well say, " Do not put a bridge over the
Liffey, or you will destroy its geography/' So far as the
objection has any meaning at all, it introduces a subject
which ought to be kept distinct from the practical question
of spelling. We don't speak in order to show the etymology
of the words we are using. Why should we write in order
to do so ? I have already shown what a burden this craze
for scholarship may become. Even if it could by any
possibility attain its purpose, is there not something absurd
in this learned affectation which would make every line
in our prose and poetry, in our books and papers, and in
our private and commercial correspondence a gratuitous
lesson in the history of the language ? Of course the
attempt fails. No one who takes etymology seriously
will stop at Modern Irish. The first question will be,
" Does the word occur in Old or Middle Irish ? " It is
idle to discuss the origin of At\if till you get back to
afrithissi. No reader could guess from the spelling -o^A-ntm
that the word is a compound of 5111 orh. For etymology we
need all the help that can be got from the earlier forms
of the language, and from cognate languages. Etymology
is an interesting subject, but its interest is academic, not
popular, and I cannot deal with it now. Otherwise I
might attempt to show that in tracing the history of the
language, particularly for the last five hundred years, we
have to rely largely upon the blunders of ignorant scribes
or on deliberate simplifications like those of the early
" WHAT ABOUT THE DIALECTS?" 31
catechisms. For the historian wants to get at the facts
as they are, not as such and such a writer or scholar
thinks they ought to be. To those who fear that the
history and etymology of the language are at stake I would
reply that their apprehensions are groundless.
Objection 6." What about the dialects ? "
Now I might dismiss this point summarily by answering
that the question of dialects does not concern us. But it
will be better to consider the question in its various bearings.
Two charges have been brought against the reformers :
" By abandoning the historic spelling you create an endless
multiplicity of dialects." " You are trying to force one
pronunciation upon us, and to stamp out the various
dialects."
Though the dialect question is ever with us, though no
student of the modern language can get away from it,
clear thinking on this subject is not so common as one might
have expected. The other day a pamphlet was published
with the object of proving, if I am right in my recollection,
that there are no dialects in Irish, what are called dialects
being merely different ways of saying the same thing in
different places. Well, we shall not quarrel about names.
These different ways of saying the same thing, associated
with different parts of the country, are what is generally
understood by the word dialect. When the local differences
have become so pronounced that the inhabitants of one part
are unintelligible to those of another, we say that they
speak not different dialects but different languages. Of
course it is impossible to draw a hard and fast line, or to
say at what stage dialects are to be regarded as distinct
languages.
What have we then in Ireland ? I should say, using
the word in its ordinary sense, that we have dialects, and
nothing else. Since the fall of the native schools in the
seventeenth century, there has been no standard generally
accepted by the educated classes all over the country,
indeed no educated classes educated, I mean, in Gaelic
to follow such a standard. It is idle to assert the
32 IRISH SPELLING
contrary. Why, you cannot even name the language
without using one dialect or other. The old standard
name was 5^ 01 * e ^5- What is it now? Is it
or AotAitin, or S-Aetig, or S^etse or ^Ae^le, or
Or shall we say Gdilig with the Scottish Gaels ? or
with the Rathlin Islanders ? These local differences appear
in the simplest phrases. The only natural form in one
district is CAI, in another cA me. The southern ni
HAttAtnAifv sounds at least queer to the Donegal speaker
who is used to CA jtAfc trmix>.
What has this to do with spelling ? Well, it is often
claimed for the conventional system that it is so skilfully
adapted to the genius of the language that it suits all
dialects, without suiting any one of them so well as to be
unfair to the others. Each reader can pronounce the
words according to his own dialect, and thus everyone is
pleased, while the written language has the great advantage
of being uniform and free from dialect. This scheme for
pleasing everyone by pleasing no one could only be
justified by success. It is carried to its logical conclusion
in the case of Chinese characters and Arabic numerals,
which represent ideas, not sounds. The scheme is successful
in dealing with certain classes of words, mostly short,
such as GAOL, where the dialectic differences of pronuncia-
tion are regular and distinct. In longer words I doubt
whether the desired uniformity would repay the strain of
memorizing an unphonetic system. But in practice this
uniformity is unattained and unattainable, for this reason.
Dialectic differences are never confined to the pronuncia-
tion of single words. They include differences of vocabulary,
of accidence, and of syntax. And here the conventional
orthography is no safeguard against the realities of the
living language. You may in the interests of uniformity
perpetuate spellings like iom>6A and t>eAi\&t\AtAii\. But
no conceivable spelling can represent both CA-O and c&Afvo,
both fsoileAnriA and fgoitce-AfcAi, both ni f\AttAtnAifi and
CA t\At> mtn-o, both ti$-fe and t6i$ cufA. Where we come
to differences of vocabulary, like the northern cApAtt for
the southern UIJA, the trmi$e of one district for the
THE DIALECTS ARE THE LANGUAGE 33
of another, only picture-writing will veil the dialect.
As a matter of fact all the Irish written at the present
day is dialectic, no matter how it is spelled. Perhaps I
ought to make an exception in favour of certain recent
imitations of 'Keating, unsuccessful imitations in my
opinion. But I am thinking now of the living
language, not of deliberate archaisms. If you speak
or write natural living Irish, you cannot avoid dialect.
Nothing else is left. The dialects are the language. Saving
the language means saving the dialects. When they go,
the language itself is gone. A common standard is of course
much to be desired. But this is not to be manufactured
by the aid of archaic lettering, or by pretending that nothing
has changed during the last three hundred years. Which-
ever dialect has most writers and most readers has a chance
of being accepted as the standard if it can only be kept
long enough alive !
This brings me back to the question: "What will be
the effect of a simplified spelling on the dialects ? " I
cannot do better than quote the answer of Dathi 6
hlarlatha in a series of articles on the spelling of Irish
which he contributed to the Gaelic Journal. In November,
1905, he wrote :
" But, it will be objected, we shall in this way have
not one language, but an indefinite number of dialects,
and our efforts to attain a standard literary medium will
be farther off than ever. The reply is that the exact
representation of words as they are uttered, as far as this
is attainable with the material at our command, will neither
increase nor lessen the dialectic varieties existing, it will
merely enable the reader to pronounce with certainty
where he may now be in doubt, while sparing the writer
a considerable amount of worse than useless labour."
The advocates of spelling reform are prepared to face
this question boldly. As long as there is no generally
accepted standard, if we are not ashamed to speak in dialect
we need not be ashamed to write in dialect. And surely
a simpler and more accurate method of writing the spoken
word would familiarize the reader, to an extent impossible
34 IRISH SPELLING
under the conventional system of orthography, with the
forms actually in use outside his own district. But our
critics and opponents urge that a writer who has the
temerity to write as he speaks will be obscure or unintelligible
except in his native province. This objection is not so
easy to answer offhand. It depends partly, I should say,
on the writer, partly on the extent to which the dialects
have diverged from one another. And on this latter point
the evidence is conflicting. On the one hand we have
the Secretary of the Gaelic League scouting, in the public
press, the assertion that Irish is split up into widely
different dialects, and maintaining that speakers from
the two extremes, from Kerry and Donegal, have no diffi-
culty in understanding one another. On the other hand
we have the demand for alternative courses in three dialects
in public examination programmes and that even with
the " historic " spelling ! You cannot have it both ways.
Face the facts. But remember that if the dialects have
really drifted so far apart that alternative courses are
required, and that the natural speech of one province is
too hard for the readers of another, you must give up all
thought of preserving or reviving " the national language."
In that case there is no national language, but several
provincial ones.
While you are making up your minds as to which is
the true view, I would suggest two points for consideration.
First, that the use of the Roman alphabet would not
interfere with any dialect ; and, secondly, that there are
many simplifications, such as that of the hundreds of
words ending in -ugAt), which would relieve all dialects
impartially.
I think I have shown that the old system is not without
serious defects. I now come to that part of my subject
of which I had originally intended to treat in detail, the
historical justification for endeavouring to remove those
defects. It is always a comfort to timid folk like us to
be able to point to respectable precedent in favour of our
methods. Unfortunately I have left myself little time
to deal with the work of the most important of our pre-
STAPLETON'S CATECHISM 35
decessors. But I must not leave you under the impression
that our views are altogether original.
The truth is that Irish orthography is several centuries
behind the spoken language. It is easy to prove that
three hundred years ago it no longer represented the
popular pronunciation.
In the year 1639, Father Theobald Stapleton (" Teaboid
Gallduf, Sagart erennach," as he calls himself) published
at Brussels a catechism in Latin and Irish. He deliberately
used the roman and italic type, and, as he tells us in his
preface, simplified the spelling to bring it nearer to the
pronunciation.
" & ut melius ab iisdem Hibernis aliisque facilius legi
ac intelligi posset, charactere Romano exaravi ac imprimi
curavi. . . . ortographia quidem non mere Hibernica, sed
duntaxat, ut verba vulgo pronunciari solent, quod ex
industria factum esse, ut facilior cunctis patefiat modus
legendi linguam Hibernicam animadverteres Lector, qui
modus post indicem reperies."
" & chum go mo feairde do thuicidis e, 6- fos each ele :
do shaorthuidheas d chur a leitrecha Coitcheanna Romhanacha
. . . gidheagh, ni do reir churtha sio* & ortographi na Gaoilaga
gu ro chinnte ach amhain mar chantar 6- labharthar na
briartha go coitchiann, cy as do aontoisc do rinnas so, innas
go mo follas do gach aoin modh leite na teangan Ghaoilaige
fa mar do gheabhair foillsethe tar eis an chldir."
Stapleton tells us that the artificial style of many Irish
writers in prose and poetry has injured the language. Their
love of cruos focal has made them obscure and almost
unintelligible. For himself, he aims at simplicity and
clearness.
This rare and valuable book is of extreme importance
for the history of the language. Of course the author's
main object was not to reform Irish orthography. He
is inconsistent in his alterations. The same word appears
sometimes in the old form, sometimes in the simplified.
And, as might be expected in a book printed on the
Continent, misprints are frequent in the Irish part. Still
it is evident that in bringing the orthography into closer
IRISH SPELLING
relations with the language of his time Stapleton was
guided by two main principles. The dropping of dead
letters, and the introduction of epenthetic vowels. The
old spelling was in some respects too long, and in others
too short, for there are many vowel sounds which were
in Stapleton's time, and are now, an essential part of
popular speech, but which did not occur in the older language,
and are therefore rigidly excluded from the conventional
orthography.
We may take some striking examples of each class
from the Catechism :
A. Dropping of Dead Letters:
lu
ardu
neartu
leasu
meadu
mall ft
fiosoru
sealabhu
slanu
gortu
oibriu
foillsiii
rniniu
amii
ur
docul
iomaduil
barulach
oiriunach
duramair
tiura
sui
fiafrui
gui
for
"O OCA til At
iotr>A > OAtriAit
5111-66
REFORM OVERDUE 37
simpli for
criostui
unsui
siorrui ,, piof\tvAi > 6e, fiot\t>Ai > 6e
riocht ,, |\io'OA(ic, -pio$A6c
achunicha ,, ,AtCuineA6A, AtCtungfOeACA
diobhail
fail
tuice
telici ,, ceitste
uafais
ceana
B. Insertion of Vowels :
lorag, lorug for
anama ,,
balabh
marabh ,,
eagana
feirig
orom ,,
freagara ,,
seacharan
marathach ,,
fearagach
serebhis ,,
uruchoid ,,
In the face of examples like these from a contemporary
of Keating, will anyone maintain, after the lapse of two
hundred and seventy years, that the time is not yet ripe
for a general move in the direction of simplicity ? Surely
even the most cautious may, without any sacrifice of
principle, admit that reform is overdue.
I cannot conclude without drawing your attention to
the fact that the door for reform has been kept open chiefly
38 IRISH SPELLING
by one man. That one man is Canon O'Leary, whom I
make no apology for calling the greatest living writer of
Irish. Canon O'Leary has all along refused to be bound
by the decrees of the " scholars," whose methods have
often been anything but scholarly. Of course it was natural
that one whose chief interest was not " scholarship " but
the rights of the spoken language, should often be incon-
sistent in his way of spelling, but on the whole Canon
O'Leary's influence and example have been in favour of
making the orthography the servant of the language. Here
are some examples of his method, which I have taken
from the first hundred pages of his Niamh :
.Arnu' for
xMlfO
btmuf
-Cip
conuf- ,, cionrmf
oioLc-Af
"OOt-Al
CANON O'LEARY'S SPELLING 39
for
leon ,,
tiu ,,
TTUtum ,,
,, r
1A1 05-64
Lastly, as a rumour has been going round that Canon
O'Leary is opposed to the Simplified Spelling, I am
authorized to state that this rumour is unfounded. Canon
O'Leary is not opposed to the Simplified Spelling.
Since this lecture was delivered Canon O'Leary himself
has given public expression to his approval of the Simplified
Spelling. In the course of a letter which was published in
the newspapers on the ist August, 1911, he wrote : " From
what I have seen of the Simplified Spelling I am satisfied
that a great responsibility would be incurred by any person
who should prevent this spelling from being used to spread
the living Irish speech."
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