Irish Dialects Should Be Discouraged.
AT the request of some friends who are interested in the preservation of the Irish language Mr. T. O. Russell sent the following letter to the Gaelic League, Dublin, on January 26th, 1903:
To the members of the Council, Central Branch of the Gaelic League:
Ladies and Gentlemen—Please permit me in the most friendly manner to call your attention to a placard recently issued by the Gaelic League, in which it was stated that the paper on which the "Gaelic Journal" was printed was made in Ireland. The Irish word used for "was made" was seineadh. It should have been ninneadh or righneadh. Deineadh cannot be found in any grammar that I know of; is a local and incorrect form of the perfect passive of deannahn—I make or I do. See Keating's "Three Shafts of Death," appendix, page xxviii.; see also O'Donovan's Irish Grammar, page 262.
On the title page of the "Gaelic Journal" the word uibreach appears as the genitive singular of the noun uimher or uimhir, but the genitive singular is uibhre or uimhre. See Coney's Irish Dictionary; see Irish Bible, Exodus xii., 4, both in Archbishop MacHale's and in Bedel's Irish versions of the Pentateuch.
The above examples are given merely as illustrations of what has been practiced in the publications of the Gaelic League since its foundation, and what has in recent years been practiced by the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, namely, printing incorrect dialect IriSh without a word of explanation as to what dialect it belonged, and leaving the reader to suppose it was correct Irish
It is interesting and instructive to know the dialects of a language, but to print and publish them without note or comment, as your society has been doing for many years, and as the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language has lately been doing, seems so very unwise that it must give pain to those who think seriously about it, and who are interested in the matter of the resuscitation of our national language.
I am sorry to have been driven to the conclusion that the Irish language can never be permanently resuscitated on the lines that your Society and the one already mentioned are following at present. To endeavor to keep the language alive in those parts where it is still spoken should, by all means, be an object of primary importance, but it is greatly to be feared that it cannot be done; for never has the Irish language faded away more quickly, been neglected more wantonly, where it had been spoken for scores of centuries, than since the establishment of societies for its preservation. This fact Is well-known to everyone conversant with the places where Irish was generally spoken thirty years ago, and where hardly a word of it is heard today.
The one great, paramount cause of the decadence of the Irish language during the last century was its utter neglect by the educated classes. Until they take an interest in it, the Gaelic League, were those who control and guide it even a hundred times more devoted, enthusiastic, and hardworking than they are, cannot save the language from death.
But how can the educated or the uneducated classes who want to learn Irish take real interest in it when they see it written in dialects—Munster dialects, Connacht dialects, and Ulster dialects— without a word of explanation as to what dialect is written. If Irish had no standard; if there was no approach to classic correctness, in any work in modern Irish; if it was as much in want of a standard as English was in the time of Chaucer, there might be some excuse for printing unexplained dialects; but modern Irish has a classic standard in the works of Keating, Donleavy, O'Molloy, Bedel, and many others. In their works there may be said to be but one frequently employed word that is really unknown In the modern language, and that is the preposition re in Latin letters, "re" too; its compounds need hardly be included.
When we look abroad we find that many languages of peoples subject to the rule of alien governments are in a flourishing condition, and to an Irishman they form a painful contrast with the state of his national speech. But it is easy to know why Bohemian, Welsh, Polish and Basque live and flourish, and why Irish is dying. It is because the flourishing languages mentioned have not been ignored by the educated classes of the countries where they are spoken, while in Ireland Irish has been ignored by the educated classes for more than two hundred years, and consequently it is fading away. If you want the Irish language to live you must have the aid of the educated classes, and to get their aid, Incorrectness of speech, vulgarities, and dialects must be avoided as much as possible, and one, and only one, Irish language placed before them to induce them to study it.
The uselessness of printing dialect Irish, especially without saying what dialect is printed, must be apparent to anyone who thinks about it. The people of Munster will never use the dialects of Ulster, and the people of Ulster and the northern part of Ireland will never use the dialects of Munster. Why, therefore, print dialects at all, except as curiosities? You cannot but know that localism and provincial differences have been from the earliest times the curses of Ireland and the primary causes of her loss of nationhood and of her present unhappy political and economic condition.
Small as the differences may be between the dialects of Irish, their cultivation, especially in print, can do no possible good in a literary point of view, and may lead to the resuscitation of provincial hatreds, rather than the resuscitation of the Irish language. You cannot but know that the person who knowingly writes incorrect, dialect Irish, with a view to its acceptance as a general standard, can neither be wise nor patriotic, for he tries to put his own province over the rest of Ireland, and is, consequently, unfitted to take any part in the resuscitation of the national language.
As one who assisted at the foundation of your Society, and of the older one I have mentioned, I beg of you, in the most earnest and the most friendly manner, not to allow any more dialect, incorrect Irish, to appear in any of your publications as correct language. If you allow it, you will perplex the ignorant and disgust the learned, and make the praiseworthy object for which you are so earnestly working all the more difficult of attainment—Believe me, very sincerely yours,
T. O. RUSSELL.
