Opinion: this may be a winner for anyone looking to expand their vocabulary, fluency and understanding of the development of Irish
New year, new you! 2022 is the year you'll quit smoking, run a marathon, master sourdough, find love and fulfilment and radically transform your life. Well, perhaps not entirely. Maybe your resolutions will be less ambitious - take up a new hobby or learn a language?
If you choose the latter, there's every chance it’s one studied previously and not a new language. This prior contact makes you a false beginner, even if you don't remember much and sometimes feel you’ve never actually met this strange and exotic tongue before.
If that language is Irish, the opposite could be true and you might remember plenty. You might have gone along to a Pop Up Gaeltacht, and recovered verbs and nouns lying dormant in your brain but still, surprisingly, within reach. No shortage of Irish people regret not being able to speak Irish. However, many fluent in the language lament the lack of opportunities to use it.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's The Business, Liam Geraghty pops into the Pop Up Gaeltacht
Trips to the Gaeltacht (physical or pop up) are all well and good, but are usually ephemeral encounters with the language. Part of the problem is the emphasis placed on speaking in the first place. Most Irish learners fail to dedicate sufficient time to reading. It could also be fairly claimed that many of their teachers don't encourage them to read. This is to be regretted. With limited opportunities to speak the language in some idealised, relaxed setting outside the education system, reading is an obvious alternative path to greater fluency.
Encouraging reading ties into larger questions relating to culture and society generally. The average person's ability to read reasonably lengthy pieces of literature, such as a novel or even a short story, is compromised by engagement with the glut of brief and mindless content their phone or laptop pushes on them. None of us is immune to this erosion of concentration.
Many returnee Irish learners succeed in attaining a decent level of fluency. Often, those who do seek out reading material often complain there's nothing for them, or nothing worth reading. Sure, Harry Potter has been translated, but they can just read the original. Peig or An Triail only bring up grievous memories of secondary school.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Ryan Tubridy Show, Sinéad Ní Uallacháin on a TG4 documentary looking to change how we think about Peig Sayers and her life
The great pity is that modern Irish literature does have some outstanding works. Belated recognition of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille, in a variety of media and via translation, is evidence of this. Although appearing in a literary vacuum when published in 1950, Ó Cadhain's masterpiece reflects his understanding of and debt to earlier Irish literature, along with his ability to make fun of it when he wished.
But for language returnees looking to expand their vocabulary, their understanding of the development of Irish, and ultimately their fluency, perhaps a step further back in time, even beyond Ó Cadhain, is needed. The Irish language in the form we know it is said to have begun around the mid-17th century and scholars call this Modern Irish.
The preceding four hundred or so years (c.1200-c.1650) is called Early Modern Irish and a huge vernacular literature survives from that era. In one sense, this is hardly surprising, considering that Ireland was overwhelmingly a Gaeltacht before such a term existed. But because access to education was greatly restricted, such cultivation of letters is also somewhat astounding.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Davis Now Lectures, journalist and author Breandán Ó hEithir on the impact of Máirtín Ó Cadhain's novel Cré na Cille.
Key to this was the role of the poet in Irish society. His education and mastery of the complicated medium of syllabic poetry gave the Early Modern Irish poet high status and great financial reward. To earn his keep (and it was a male-only profession), he composed praise poems for his patrons, often quite lengthy. Whether or not these same poets composed the many prose texts of that era is a much-debated question. Beyond doubt is the varied and vibrant nature of the literary corpus which Early Modern Irish has bequeathed to us.
Reading Early Modern Irish presents considerable challenges. To tackle this, the Léamh project, initiated by Prof Brendan Kane, has been developing an innovative series of learner aids to reading the language. These range from annotated poetry and prose texts to grammar quizzes and games, and even a palaeography tool to facilitate reading the original manuscripts. While conceived and developed in America, Léamh is a truly international, collaborative endeavour, involving scholars and institutions from all over Ireland and elsewhere, and always welcomes new participants.
A poem attributed to Séathrún Céitinn, author of Foras feasa ar Éirinn, the mammoth history of Ireland, speaks of the sweetness of the Irish language being 'a voice without foreign aid' (guth gan chabhair choigcríche). In reality, Irish has frequently benefitted from interested outsiders. The scientific study of Early and Medieval Irish was begun in the last century by scholars from German-speaking countries, like the great Rudolf Thurneysen, and remains heavily indebted to their efforts.
For Early Modern Irish, Léamh is building on the foundational work of influential Irish scholars like Eleanor Knott, Osborn Bergin and others by making this priceless heritage accessible and user-friendly not only to scholars, but to the interested public, Irish or otherwise. If you're short on resolutions for 2022, it’s a good place to start.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
