The Secret Languages of Ireland

SHELTA 153

mtdher with their dth and loher the fair, drunk. If you [play]
their glox-thrihli, if you kradl, the devil with them, and light
you'll bug the ladher thwurk. upon their men-folk, [and] if
Gre, swubli, mislt muilsha T you stay, you'll get the dirty

time. Up, lad ! I'm going my-
self/
(1) Stesh solk'd gloxs lubba, I took the man's advice,

gred and misltd od lytmon. rose, and went two miles. He
Thdns: * Na havara miltlsha bug says: 'At home I'll give you
your It and your gripa srag- your bed, and your supper
aster'. I bugd karb od nyuk a.nd [and] breakfast.' I gave the
misltd, stesh the karb*s staffaris. old woman twopence and went
I'd as hef have the mtdher's with the old woman's blessings.
staffaris as the karb's staffaris, I'd as lief have the devil's

blessings as the old woman's
blessings.

III. Construction of the Language

In the first enthusiasm of the discovery of Shelta, it was claimed,
by no less a scholar than Kuno Meyer, to be a relic of high
antiquity, identical with the secret languages, of which we hear
from time to time, in Irish hterature, and, though now degraded
to the jargon of itinerant tinkers and other vagrants, to have
once been the freemasonry sign of the scholars and craftsmen of
ancient Ireland. The disreputable vagabonds from whom Sampson
acquired his knowledge of the tongue were the heirs of a state of
society when masters of science and of art ranked by virtue of their
attainments with nobles, and even with kings: and when those
wonderful works of art were executed, which have come down
to us out of the early Christian antiquity of Ireland.

Leland, writing to Sampson in 1899, said: 'It is one of the
awfully mysterious arcana of human stupidity that there should
have existed for a thousand years in Great Britain a cryptic
language — the lost language of the bards — ^which no scholar ever
heard of, and of which Borrow was totally ignorant : that I should
have discovered it and hunted it up: that you should, with
K. Meyer, have made such marvellous further discoveries, and
shewed what it was : et pour combler and for a crowning sheaf of
stupidity, that neither you nor I have ever published a book on'
the most curious linguistic discovery of the century. For even
yet there is hardly a scholar who knows of its existence — of the
fifth British Celtic tongue ! '

That there is some material of great antiquity in Shelta is

154 SHELTA

unquestionable: but the following analysis will probably make it
clear to the reader that, at least in its present form, it cannot
as a whole be considered as a heritage from a remote past, and
that in any case to describe it as * a Celtic tongue' is hardly
admissible.

PHONETICS

The present writer is partly a compiler and editor from the work
of others, and has not acquired a first-hand knowledge of the
Shelta language as it is spoken by those to whom it belongs. It is,
however, possible to form a fair idea of how the words are pro-
nounced, by taking the average of all the varied spellings used
by different observers. In the following vocabulary, an attempt
has been made to present every form in which the words appear
in different collections, in addition to the phonetic spelling
which those forms suggest. Those from Dr Sampson's collections,
pubHshed and unpubhshed, are left unmarked: the others are
assigned to their authors by initials (for particulars and references
see the opening section of this chapter). These are as follows:

A = Arnold K' = Carmichael [MS.]

C = Croft on [MS. book] L = Leland [Pennsylvania list]

C ==Crofton [in Academy] L' = Leland [Aberystwyth list]

F =ffrench N = Norwood

G = Greene [in Bealoideas] R = Russell

G' = Greene [MS.] W = Wilson
K = Carmichael [pub. by
MacRitchie]

The usually obvious etymology of the words helps to determine
their phonetic form ; but this is not invariably trustworthy. It has
been found impossible to determine the true vowels in many cases :
they are given by different collectors almost at haphazard.

In the consonants, there are two outstanding difficulties. The
palatalized consonants have proved a serious stumbling-block to
collectors, and evidence for this Gaehc characteristic, which is
taken over into Shelta, has to be carefully looked for. Thus, the
word for 'bad' is usually spelt garni: but it sometimes appears as
gyanii, which indicates that the g is palatalized. A study of etymo-
logies makes it clear that what collectors write as ch ( = c as in
'church') or j are really palatalized t and d respectively. For
example, the word given as pimik ' to swear ' must be derived from
the Irish moidighim 'I swear'. The -im is the personal ending:

SHELTA 155

the ~tgh- is represented by the Shelta -ik : the Shelta jum is a
reversal of the Irish moid [mod'], and the _; is therefore not d^,
butd'[ = dy].

The second difficulty which faces the editor of these collections
is that singular phonetic freelance the English r, which intrudes
unbecomingly where it should be absent (*my idear is'), and
absents itself disconcertingly when it should be present {* that's
tiad^ [= rather] fine'). In many cases I suspect that collectors
have inserted it merely to lengthen a preceding vowel — just as
those who write the 'answers to correspondents' in popular
periodicals shock us with such statements as, 'The word should
be pronounced sonartar\ This letter behaves with perfect pro-
priety in Irish, in Irish-Enghsh, and presumably also in Shelta:
but it seems to deviate from the paths of rectitude when Shelta
is written down by non-Irish collectors. Thus, we are told that
grimsha [grim^a] means 'time'. Obviously this comes from Irish
aimser [ams'er] ; from which it follows that the word must surely
have been pronounced, and ought to have been written, grintSer,
On the other hand, grostar 'satisfied' clearly comes from Irish
sdsta, and should therefore be written grdsta or grdsta, Leland
seems to have been very deaf to this letter, and he often drops
it where it must have been present on the hps of his informants.
The word 'Shelta', which owes its current form to him, is a case
in point: it ought to be Sheldru.

The following are the phonetic sjrmbols used in the Vocabulary,
[In the 'Connected Specimens' of the language, printed above,
it has been considered advisable to reproduce the spelling fol-
lowed by Dr Sampson.]

Vowels

a Short a, as in pan,

a Long a, as in father,

k A more closed long a, as in awe,

e Short e, as in pen,

€ Long e, as in pain,

i Short i, as in pin,

i Long i, as in machine,

o Short o, as in pod,

6 Long o, as in mode

u Short u, as in pun,

u Long u, as in moon,

9 The neutral vowel-sound.

156 SHELTA

The diphthongs are

ai or ei i in pine,
oi oy in boy.

au ow in cow.

In the phonetic representations of Irish (not Shelta) words,
nasahzation is indicated by the symbol ^,

A dot is used to discriminate syllables where necessary, especially
when two consecutive vowels do not form a diphthong as in
tdrvin. A diphthong is implied by the absence of the dot between
vowels.

Consonants

b, p, k, as in English,
g, always hard.

d, t, always as in Irish, the tip of the tongue
being pressed against the roots of the teeth. These are the charac-
teristic dentals of the so-called 'Irish brogue' [Irish-English
phonesis] : to write them dh, th is quite misleading. The ordinary
English d^ t are absent, both from Irish and from Shelta.

All consonants have a second set of sounds (palatalized). This
may be described as being, as it were, the normal sound plus a *y \
as in the provincial English cyow^ cyard for coWy card. Palatalized
consonants are here indicated by a mark resembling an acute
accent {c'ow, c'ard). The sounds of g', d', approximate sufficiently
to one another to cause confusion; thus gilixon ( = g'ilixon) *a
book' is sometimes written jiltxon ( = d'ilixon), which seems at
first sight to contradict the statement that g is always hard.

The sound 6 {ch as in ' church ') is here represented by c, which
is not otherwise required. But in any case it is not really a Shelta
sound, appearing only in some borrowed words : the sound written
ch by collectors should really be regarded as t'. In some cases,
however, it seems to mean x — by which character Dr Sampson
is here followed in representing, conveniently but not quite ac-
curately, the guttural sound h (ch in 'loch').

The sjTiibols 6, tS are used whenever necessary to represent the
sounds of English Ih (in think and this respectively). The Irish th,
which is an h rather more fully breathed than in English, is
denoted phonetically by h.

Liquid consonants (/, w, r), when immediately following a long
vowel, tend to become vocalic (I, n, r), as in the Dubhn street
child's pronunciation of 'aeroplane' in five distinct sj^llables
{e-r-d-ple-n) or 'It's going to rain' {9is gd7i to re-n). This is why

SHELTA 157

collectors so constantly write di~U, or dht-tl, and similar cumbrous
forms. In the phonetic transcript here this tendency is indicated
by an apostrophe (di'l). An apostrophe is also used to denote a
swabharakti vowel, which if written in full tends sometimes to
obscure the etjmnology. Thus munk'ri is written instead of
monkery 'coimtry*.

The 'broad' (unpalatalized) liquids are pronounced in Irish
rather further back in the throat than in English. This has in-
duced collectors to insert an h after them in some cases {glorhi
*to hear'; rtlhu 'mad'). It is here omitted, as being unnecessary
and misleading : the liquids, like other consonants, when not dis-
tinguished with the mark of palatalization, must be pronoimced
in the way indicated.

The symbol § is used for palatalized s. Properly speaking it
should be s' ( = sy), but even in Irish this difficult sound has
become practically indistinguishable from ^ (sh).

The accentuation of syllables is denoted (with an acute accent
on the vowel) only when it falls otherwise than on the first
syllable.

For the sake of simplicity the semi-vowels w, y are used in
preference to w, j.

ACCIDENCE
The Article

There is no article native to Shelta, either definite or indefinite.
In Irish, the absence of an article or of any other defining word
is equivalent to the indefinite article. This idiom is common in
Shelta : but the English indefinite article a is sometimes borrowed,
as in the common phrase he bog'd a milk of his d'i'l 'he took hold
of him'. Both usages are illustrated by )8 80, glox nid'es a glox
*a man is not a man' [unless, etc.].

The definite article is often omitted where both Enghsh and
Irish usage would require its presence. Thus j8 8, n'urt I'esk
mwilsa tul, taris b'or', means 'now tell me [the] price, says [the]
woman'. Otherwise the Irish article an, usually shortened or
carelessly pronounced in^- or the English the, are borrowed in-
definitely. An example is tripus in glox ' fight the man '. The Irish
article appears more frequently in the genitive case. This is an

1 This cannot be regarded as a sarvival of the Old Irish form in, ind:
rather is it a reversion thereto.

THE SECRET
LANGUAGES OF IRELAND

/

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Macalister, Robert Alexander ^ Stewart, I87O-I950
The secret languages of Ireland.

^^^"^"^^^^ ^937 ed. published by the University
pPress, Cambridge. ''

l._ Shelta. 2. Irish language-Writing. 3. Cant,

t' q^t T^^";^'*^'^- 5. Druids and druidism.
II. Sampson, John, 1862-1931. II. Title

- icaBW o- 6hik-6u.^-^ (lib.bog.) ^

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE
TO THE ORIGIN AND NATURE OF

THE SHELTA LANGUAGE

partly based upon Collections and Manuscripts of
the late

JOHN SAMPSON, Litt.D.

Sometime Librarian of the University
of Liverpool

by

R. A. STEWART MACALISTER

Litt.D., LL.D.

Professor of Celtic Archaeology, University CoUejie
Dublin

Limited 100 Copies

Manufactured in the United Sutes of America.

Folcroft Library Editions

Box 182

Folcroft, Pa: 19032

CAMBRIDGE

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1937