The irish Language

by Sheila Connolly (aka Sile ni Conghaile)

I'm in the midst of copyedits for the first book of my forthcoming County Cork Mysteries, Buried in a Bog, and I'm in a quandary.

 

The thing is, I'm trying to write about native Irish characters.  I've spent time in Ireland, and I've listened to a wide range of people speaking; I've watched Irish movies (love The Commitments!) and television shows (Ballykissangel in particular), and I like to think that I have a good ear for languages.  But setting them down in print is something else altogether.

 

Obviously I have choices.  I can write in ordinary American English and let readers fill in the accent on their own.  But that looks wrong on the page.  Dialogue, internal or external, does not follow tidy grammatical rules.  People stop and start, drop syllables or word endings, and interrupt each other.  If they all spoke properly, no one would believe them.

 

That's true of dialogue in general, but writing slang or dialect creates additional challenges.  You may hear it in your head, plain as day, but set down what you hear and you leave people scratching their heads.  Huh?  If they have to stop and sound out what you've set down in order to understand it, you've dragged them right out of the story, and you don't want to do that.

 

Worse, how do you the writer distinguish among individuals and social classes by how they speak?  More complications.  Word choice and pacing help, but that doesn't convey the sound of the words.  Put two guys face to face on the street, one in a nice suit, one homeless and panhandling:  are they going to sound the same?  Of course not. But it's even more difficult when you're in the midst of a different culture and you don't know the social indicators.

 

The Irish have a long tradition of respect for language—theirs is a culture of poets and storytellers who valued oral traditions.  They also have had a long and complicated history with their language. It's the spelling that is a mess. 

 

Irish was still the majority language through the eighteenth century, but it became a minority language in the twentieth century, thanks in part to the English government, which insisted that only English be taught in schools. To be fair, the problem probably began with the Great Famine in the mid-nineteenth century, when which many native Irish speakers (primarily from poorer areas) either died or left the country. There are ongoing efforts to keep the language alive and encourage its use (I've benefited from Boston-area Irish language classes), and it is taught in most schools in Ireland (which does not mean that students speak it with any fluency).  There is an all-Irish-speaking school in each of Ireland's counties. Irish is a required qualification for applicants to the Garda Siochána, the Irish police force.

 

In the 1950s, an Official Standard for spelling was introduced, in theory to simplify spelling and make it easier for regions with different dialects to communicate.  There was also a change from the traditional Irish script to modern Latin script.  If you compare some words in the old script to those in the new, it's clear that trying to make the language "modern" only made it more complicated.  Which in turn alters how anything is read on the page.  When, for example, you look at a poem on the page, you see an unlovely jumble of letters, half of which are not pronounced as they appear (why does "mh" sound like "w"? or "bh" like "v"? In the Old Days, the original m or b would have had merely a dot over it, which would indicate a change in pronunciation—simple.)  But listen to the same poem read out loud, and you hear the rhythm and the flow.



Christian Brothers First Irish Grammar, ca 1920

 

Not that it was ever easy.  Here's a pair of pages from a Christian Brothers First Irish Grammar, dating from (I think) the 1920s—in other words, before the English-imposed changes in spelling.  Note this is the "First."  Not an simple language, is it?  Unless, of course, you grew up speaking it and didn't worry about the formal rules of grammar.

 

Despite all of the technical hurdles, one of the glories of the Irish language is its musicality, the lyricism of its inflections.  There's a wider range of pitch in any Irish conversation, a different pacing, an altered structure (for example, many conversational sentences will begin with "so,…" and end with "then." "So you've been to Dublin then, have you?" It's a "soft" language that flows off the tongue easily.

 

But there's danger for the writer trying to capture this in any authentic way: it often looks silly when you write it down.

 

And then there's pronunciation, and that's where I'm stuck.  An Irish person outside of Dublin would not say, "how are you?"  They'd say, "how are ya?"  But is "ya" the right transliteration?  There's my problem.  Is "how are yeh?" better?  That's what I'm struggling with.

 

Which writer's use of dialect do you admire?

 

Scéalta Póilíneachta

by Sheila Connolly

Betcha that title's got you scratching your head!  It's Irish, and it translates to "Police Stories".

As I may have mentioned before (several times, no doubt), I take Irish language classes.  I've been doing this for over five years now, and I'd say my progress is snail-like, but every now and then I actually recognize what a sentence is saying.

The problem is, our teacher is a lovely older woman with rather fixed ideas about how to teach the language.  I enjoy her company, and that of the shifting cast of other students (half of whom were born or lived in Ireland, which I think is an unfair advantage).  But there are few published books available to us in Irish, and there's not much money for materials, so usually we make do with photocopies.  And most of the photocopies she chooses are of classic "literary" selections.

Now, when you're still at the "I see an cow" stage in reading Irish, being treated to the elegant prose of, say, Pádraig Mac Piarais is kind of wasted on you.  I will freely admit I don't recognize most verb tenses in Irish (like past imperfect or subjunctive), and a metaphor (many of which seem to include bird symbolism) goes flying right over my head.  Joke, that.

So it was something of a treat when recently our muinteoir (that's teacher) brought us something new and different, all the while wrinkling her nose in contempt.  We've been reading chapters from a contemporary police procedural!  Now, we've been given discontinuous chapters, and nowhere near all of them, so the plot is kind of patchy.  Plus our teacher is so disgusted with the whole thing that she hasn't bothered to identify either the writer or the title of the book--not that I could ever find it in a local bookstore, or even one that specializes in foreign books.

But I don't care, because it's so much fun.  I'm learning all sorts of useful vocabulary like "prostitute" and "drug dealer" and "petty criminal."  Seriously, these are terms I might actually get to use in modern Ireland, whereas it's highly unlikely that anyone on a Dublin street will quiz me on the lonely seagulls of the Blasket Islands.

And in a way, the simpler declarative statements typical of a basic procedural are easy to read.  For example, here's a typical section:

D'oscail se a shuile.  Agus seo is an Garda seo, de Londra, ag labhairt aris.


"Feach, a Larry!  Ta tu i driobloid mhor.  Iomportail drugai, daileadh drugai, dunmharu Willie Braine, gunna midhleathac i do sheilbh agus a lan eile."


Dhun se a shuile agus smaoinigh se.

I've left out all the accents (which affect pronunciation), but if you read it out loud you get the drift.  It says, more or less:

He opened his eyes. And there was the policeman from London, speaking again.



"Look, Larry! You are in big trouble. Importing drugs, drug distribution, murdering Willie Braine, illegal guns in your possession and many other crimes."

He closed his eyes and he thought.


There's another fun section where Larry surveys the dead bodies of his colleagues in crime lying on the floor, and several of them have large holes in them.  I won't trouble you with that.
 
If there's a message lurking in here somewhere, it's that the mystery/crime genre appears to transcend language.

By the way, the cover above isn't for this anonymous book we're reading, but it is a vintage Irish publication, whose title translates to "Three Whole Murders."  I think.