DR. JOYCE ON THE ANGLO-IRISH DIALECT.* ENGLISH visitors to the
sister-isle are not infrequently surprised to find the natives speaking a dialect which is at once purer from a literary standpoint than that to which they are accustomed at home, and yet is decorated with all sorts of quaint and outlandish turns of speech. If they give the subject any thought at all, they are probably content to set down these vagaries to the perfervid in- tellect of the Celt, coupled with the fact that the peasantry have learnt English as a foreign language, and therefore speak it in less slipshod style. Others of us have had an instinctive inkling that the peculiarities of the Anglo- Irish dialect must be translations, sometimes consciously resorted to, but more frequently bequeathed to the present generation from the ancestors who first introduced them. And this view is amply confirmed in the set of papers recently contributed to the Educational Gazette by Dr. Joyce, the well-known scholar, and author of that most admirable work, The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places. What * The-English in Ireland. Papers contributed to the Irish Educational Gazette, February to June, by P. W. Joyce, LLD. distinguishes the English spoken in Ireland from that spoken in Wales or Scotland is this, that in the former country only a very small portion indeed of the inhabitants speak it without any admixture of Gaelic idiom. This influence is shown in the speech of the masses in Scotland, but in Ireland almost every one, gentle or simple, comes under its sway. As Dr. Joyce says at the outset of his investigation, "the better-educated have less dialect; but it is only the rare few amongst us—those who travel much, mix much, and read much—that speak English absolutely pure." The dialectical peculiarities of Anglo-Irish speech arise chiefly from the influence of the Irish language, but, as Dr. Joyce points out, they are due, in part at least, to the retention of obsolete English words, phrases, and methods of pronunciation. The peasantry to this day say, "I had as lief," and employ the Shakespearian forms " afeard," " wrastle," " shipwrack," and " sliver ;" while in talking of " tay " and " say " for " tea " and "sea," they are only faithful to the pronunciation which obtained generally in polite English society in the last century. These two in- stances are now only observable in the speech of the peasantry ; but even amongst the " garrison " certain old-fashioned tricks of pronunciation have lasted on. In some respects the Irish are Anglis ipsis Angliares.
By far the larger number of the characteristic peculiarities of this dialect, however, are due to the cause already indicated. Erse has affected the English spoken in Ireland in three ways, in pronunciation, in vocabulary, and in idiom. As regards pronunciation, the chief stumbling-block is the English th, whether hard or soft. The words, "And thereto I plight thee my troth," are distressingly difficult to poor Paddy. One bridegroom that we know of managed to get the sounds, but in the wrong order, remarking : "And thereto I plight thee my throat." Such difficulties, however, constitute the line of cleavage between the masses and the classes in Ireland. It is quite otherwise with regard to vocabulary and idiom. Irish gentlefolk habitually employ words of Gaelic origin in their speech, not merely for the fun of the thing, but because they practically form part and parcel of their working vocabulary. An Irishman of education, when at home, will prefer the word ommadlutun to "duffer," or any slang English equivalent. He will not talk of a small boy, but a gorsoon or gossoon. He will speak of a shkelp for a piece or a blow, and employ the term inch, where, on this side of St. George's Channel, we should speak of a water- meadow. Lower down in the social scale, these peculiarities of speech abound in profusion, and admirably expressive many of them are. What more eloquent term exists for a soft, flabby fellow than bosthoon ? A little while ago, Mr. Balfour was alluded to at a National League meeting as a miserable sprissaun—literally, a twig, and so, by transference, a worthless popinjay of a fellow. Gombeen—i.e., "usury "—is a word that has lately come into great prominence, and belongs to the same class. But not only do Irishmen of all classes employ, when speaking English, a variety of Gaelic words ;—" Our peasantry," writes Dr. Joyce, "and not a few of our educated people, use in their conversation numerous Gaelic idioms in English words, which English people, hearing them for the first time, find it hard to understand." In so far as these Hibernicisms are vulgar and ungrammatical, they ought, argues Dr. Joyce, to be banished. But in a great many cases they are neither : they merely represent the effort to make the new vehicle of thought conform to the old one,—to reproduce in English the characteristic turn of the Irish idiom. They are not only interesting to the student of language, but they are often exceedingly picturesque and effective. Whenever an Irishman is found:trying to hide his nationality by avoiding these peculiarities, he is pretty sure to belong to the class satirised by Thackeray, whose chief aim in life is to speak with a " genteel " English accent, and whose success is usually on a par with that of the ostrich in its efforts to conceal itself.
Nothing betrays the Irishman more surely than his inability to give a monosyllabic answer, and this peculiarity, which so often excites the attention and amusement of the Saxon, is simply a survival of the Irish usage, there being no particles in that tongue to correspond to our " yes " and "no." In Irish, you must necessarily answer a question by a sentence, a logical proposition. Dr. Joyce illustrates this very aptly from Donlevy's Irish Catechism, in which the answers throughout are of this character,—e.g., "Is the Father God?" "lie is, certainly." Another characteristic peculiarity of the present dialect is the use of "in" to denote identity. The idiom has an analogue in such English expressions as "Come in your thousands ;" but many of its uses are quite un- familiar to English ears. Thus, instead of saying, "Oh ! it's you," an Irishman will say, "Oh! 'tis you that's in it," which is a word-for-word translation of the Irish idiom. The next idiom that Dr. Joyce examines is the phrase, not unknown in parts of England, "the dear knows "--vide Mrs. Ewing's Six to Sixteen—which turns out to be nothing but a misspelt translation of an Irish euphemism. "The Irish for 'God knows' is la fios ag Via, pronounced colloquially thauss ag Dhee. Now, God knows is a solemn expression, which many people would not like to use on ordinary occasions, as bordering on profanity. Therefore, they substitute fee (Irish fiadh, a deer) for Via or Dhee, God, and in its new form, thaws ag fee, it means the deer knows—a kind of objurgatory blank car- tridge that may be fired off without danger. When speaking English, the people always say the deer knows, or deer knows ; but those writers of Irish stories who perpetuated the expres- sion in the first instance, not being aware of its origin, wrote it the dear knows ; which is now the form always used in books." Amongst other expressions which are perfectly correct in Irish are : "you thief of a vagabone "—we suppose that the favourite phrase, "you thief of the world," comes under the same category, i.e.," you great thief "—to be "kilt dead ;" "all to," i.e., "except ;" and "venomous," for energetic, vehement ; and we may surmise, although Dr. Joyce does not allude to them, that such characteristic Hibernicisms as "to throw a lep," i.e., to jump, and to "have conduct," i.e., to behave properly, are to be explained in the same way. Another special feature of the Anglo-Irish dialect is the use of the tenses. Irish has no perfect or pluperfect, and the familiar Hibernicism, "I am after having my dinner," or, "He was after going home," is a mere translation of the Irish peri- phrasis. The Irish consuetudinal tense is represented by the quaint coinage, "I do be." "0 Misther Scott !" said an ex- pansive young woman to a clergyman, "I do be so hongry in chorch. I take a little piece of bread, and I put it in me pawkut, and I eat it in the Lieu." Other reproductions of Gaelic idioms are the phrases, "It is dead I should be," " himself " or " herself " for the master and mistress of a household—a survival of the signature of an Irish chief, "myself, O'Neill "—and the redundant use of pronouns.
The results of Dr. Joyce's inquiries are not only interesting, but reassuring to the patriotic Celt. Erse as a spoken and living tongue is dying slowly but surely, and the efforts of a handful of sentimental enthusiasts are powerless to galvanise it into wider life. But the traces that it has left on the pre- vailing language are deep and enduring, and cannot be obliterated even by a wilderness of Balfours, a lo United Ireland.
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