On an Irish Island by Robert Kanigel Read Free Book Online Page B

the king replied with consummate grace, the Norwegian language was quite a nice one.
    Since at least the late 1800s, scholarly interest had grown in the origins of language, in early Irish texts, in Old andMiddle Irish and their origins in a conjectured root language common to most European tongues. Scholars plumbed the sacred texts of the early church. They studied fragments of Irish bardicpoetry that had come down through the centuries. Later, the world would marvel at the extraordinary contribution of this small country to English-language literature, theater, and poetry, at Synge, Yeats, Beckett, Shaw, Heaney, Joyce, and the rest of the great Irish pantheon.
    But theirs was
written
language. Just now, at the time of Marstrander’s visit, English’s grip on the country having tightened for three hundred years, the Irish language was hardly written at all. Virtually no Irish-language literature was being produced. There were a handful of Irish-language newspapers, a few Irish-language scholarly journals. TheGaelic League inspired a degree of fervor, but its achievements, set against the sweep of recent Irish history, were still tenuous and slight. And the few tens of thousands of people, mostly in the west, who spoke Irish daily mostly couldn’t read or write it; this was true on the Great Blasket just as it was in Kerry generally and the other Gaeltacht areas of the country. What was left of Irish was thespoken language—not, it should be said, as a sad second-best to the written, but as something full and rich in itself. It wasthis Irish that Synge had traveled to the Aran Islands and the Blaskets to learn. Now so did Marstrander.
    To learn the spoken tongue meant learning itsvocabulary, of course, but also, with greater difficulty, learning its sounds. Much in Irish would prove daunting to any newcomer, but the words themselves were probably the least of it. Irish is part of a family of Gaelic languages, with strong links toScots Gaelic,Welsh,Manx, andBreton, spoken across theEnglish Channel inBrittany. More broadly, it is part of the larger Indo-European family of proto-languages; some of its grammatical features and even vocabulary are shared with linguistic distant cousins, including English,Italian, andRussian. “Two” in English is
dva
in Russian,
due
in Italian—and
dó
in Irish. “Mother” in English is
mater
inLatin—and
máthair
in Irish. Scholars have found all sorts of linguistic connections, many of them transformed or misshapen, to Irish’s roots in what some have calledCommon Celtic. At least when pointed out, then, some Irish words can seem to an English-speaker surprisingly comfortable and familiar. The word
patir
in early Celtic, “father,” became
pater
in Latin, but along the way lost its initial “p,” turned into
atir,
and finally into the Irish
athair.
Irish, then, was not Korean or Swahili; its kinship with other European languages meant its vocabulary, at least, was not always so fearfully alien.
    Its pronunciation, though, was another story.
    All languages have their distinctive sounds, even before you can make sense of them; every journeyman actor invoking a cruelGerman
Kapitän
or snootyFrench waiter capitalizes on that fact. A set of the mouth, a play of the tongue, French nasality and rolled “r”s, guttural German, musical Italian. Clichés, certainly, but they emerge from characteristic sounds. English has forty-four distinct sounds, or phonemes; Irish, depending on the dialect, has sixty—which, absent firm command of the phonetic alphabet, can be difficult to describe and classify. There could be a whispery twang to Irish. There were sounds reminiscent of the Scottish
loch,
and variations-on-a-nasal-theme that might remind you of gargling, vowels getting lost in the back of the throat never to return. Even ears new to the language would never confuse it with German, say, or English. You could listen to Irish in full flight and come away certain that none of its