[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Nation, to let such a Language go to wrack.
(Donlevy 1742:507)
John Free, an anti-Catholic propagandist, asserts the same point in his
Essay Towards an History of the English Tongue. Writing on the SCOTS from
Ireland; and the Extent of the Erst Language , he claims: I think much may
be gathered concerning the original Antiquities of a People, where their
HISTORY is dark and obscure, by considering the Nature of their
LANGUAGE (Free 1749:71).
Broadening the point, Archbishop O Brien argued in his Irish-English
Dictionary (1768), that the Irish language could help to clarify British
history since
the Guidhelians or old Irish, had been the primitive inhabitants of Great
Britain before the ancestors of the Welsh arrived in that island, and that
the Celtic Dialect of those Guidhelians, was then the universal language
of the whole British isle.
(O Brien 1768:i)
106 Forging the nation
The works of both O Brien and Free take us to the edge of the Celtic
revival, but before we pass on to that we can note another point of focus
marked out by one of these early scholars of Irish. For along with the
stress on the language being the key to the history, there are other points
which will recur in later debates. Two such are made by Donlevy as he
writes of the English language in Ireland. He asserts that it has suffered
vast Alterations and Corruptions; and be now on the Brink of utter Decay,
as it really is, to the great Dishonour and Shame of the Natives, who shall
pass everywhere for Irish-men . He then adds as a rejoinder: Although
Irishmen without Irish is an Incongruity, and a great Bull. Besides, the Irish
Language is undeniably a very Ancient Mother Language, and one of the
smoothest in Europe (Donlevy 1742:506). The assertion that an Irishman
without Irish is an incongruity is one which could perfectly fit into the
nationalist pamphlets of the Gaelic League, some 150 years later. And the
claim that Irish is a Mother Language , that is, not compounded and
therefore pure, is one which was to bear a great deal of weight in the
debates which occurred in the period of the Gaelic revival.
In this section we have traced briefly the historical emergence of a
polyglot situation in Ireland in which Irish was positioned as an inferior
and subjugated language. This process occurred as a result of the practices
of political and cultural colonialism. We have also noted, however, the
appearance of a formal interest in the language which was set against the
prevailing tide of history. That interest spawned important topics of
concern which were to appear later during the period in which the task of
gathering the threads of the web which had been rent, became that of
sewing together the cords of the nets of language, nationality and religion.
It is to the beginning of that task that we now turn.
A LANGUAGE NEAR AS OLD AS THE DELUGE
The Celtic revival was both a local and a European phenomenon.
Stimulated by earlier antiquarian work and the Ossian forgeries of the
1760s, it was aided in no small part by the wide-ranging vision of
Romanticism allied to the particular importance afforded to all languages
by the new science of comparative philology. No longer did the classical
languages dominate at the expense of all others; for what both
comparative philology and Romantic philosophy argued was the
specificity and consequent value of all languages and cultures, no matter
how regional or local. Moving from the turn to the East and the discovery
of the significance of Sanskrit, to the turn to the North marked by Bishop
Percy s Northern Antiquities, this new intellectual interest was characterised
by a search for linguistic or cultural authenticity, which was usually
realised in the discovery of antiquity. In Ireland, the revival s beginning is
marked by Conor s Dissertations on the Ancient History of Ireland (1753),
Forging the nation 107
O Brien s Irish English Dictionary (1768), the various works of Vallancey,
and the publication of Charlotte Brooke s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789).
One of the most striking and durable characteristics of the early revival
is precisely this search for the old. For there, in antiquity, was to be found
the essence of identity, whether of nation, people, culture or language. The
most antique: the most authentic; this was an equation which was to have
deep effects in fields as apparently diverse as theology and archaeology,
geology and politics. By a curious paradox at the heart of this logic, it was
proof of antiquity that was to engender revolution, the old that was to
justify the new. For the test of age was to upset all sorts of chronologies
and the hierarchies which accompanied them. If a language could be
shown to be older than another, then the logic of this pattern was that the
primary language in some sense must be purer, or more authentic. It was
of course a theory of origins which was based on the scarcely veiled
Christian principle that there was an original language which was
disrupted.
The early Celtic revival in Ireland was marked by precisely this search
for antiquity, and the results were hugely significant. Vallancey, a
correspondent of Burke and William Jones, was the leader in a field which
was to produce a number of extraordinary claims. Sweeping away the
familiar chronology of Western European history, Vallancey asserted in
1786 that the very ancient language of Ireland& [was a] language replete
and full, before the Greeks and Romans had a name (Vallancey
1786:170). It was this belief that led a later commentator to argue that the
Iliad had been composed in Irish and later translated into Greek (MacHale
1844:4). Following on from this, Vallancey later posited the affinity of
Irish with Sanscrit, Hindoostannee, and Egyptian [sic] (Vallancey
1804:xxiii); and on various occasions he classified Irish with the Punic
language of the Carthaginians (Vallancey 1772:vii). Such beliefs had
important historical and cultural implications, particularly if it were true
that the ancient Irish must have been a colony from Asia, because nine
words in ten are pure Chaldic and Arabic (Vallancey 1802:14); or that
druidism was not the established religion of the pagan Irish, but Budhism
[sic] (Vallancey 1812:56).
What is important about these assertions, however, is not their truth-
status, but the motivation which lay behind them. For what we see here is
an attempt to validate a language, and by corollary a culture, by way of an
appeal to history. To be able to show that Irish pre-dated the great imperial
languages of Greece and Rome, and that it was related to the ancient
religious languages of Sanskrit, Hindi and Hebrew, was to accord it a
tremendous importance. Antiquity signified credibility; let other languages [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl chiara76.opx.pl
Nation, to let such a Language go to wrack.
(Donlevy 1742:507)
John Free, an anti-Catholic propagandist, asserts the same point in his
Essay Towards an History of the English Tongue. Writing on the SCOTS from
Ireland; and the Extent of the Erst Language , he claims: I think much may
be gathered concerning the original Antiquities of a People, where their
HISTORY is dark and obscure, by considering the Nature of their
LANGUAGE (Free 1749:71).
Broadening the point, Archbishop O Brien argued in his Irish-English
Dictionary (1768), that the Irish language could help to clarify British
history since
the Guidhelians or old Irish, had been the primitive inhabitants of Great
Britain before the ancestors of the Welsh arrived in that island, and that
the Celtic Dialect of those Guidhelians, was then the universal language
of the whole British isle.
(O Brien 1768:i)
106 Forging the nation
The works of both O Brien and Free take us to the edge of the Celtic
revival, but before we pass on to that we can note another point of focus
marked out by one of these early scholars of Irish. For along with the
stress on the language being the key to the history, there are other points
which will recur in later debates. Two such are made by Donlevy as he
writes of the English language in Ireland. He asserts that it has suffered
vast Alterations and Corruptions; and be now on the Brink of utter Decay,
as it really is, to the great Dishonour and Shame of the Natives, who shall
pass everywhere for Irish-men . He then adds as a rejoinder: Although
Irishmen without Irish is an Incongruity, and a great Bull. Besides, the Irish
Language is undeniably a very Ancient Mother Language, and one of the
smoothest in Europe (Donlevy 1742:506). The assertion that an Irishman
without Irish is an incongruity is one which could perfectly fit into the
nationalist pamphlets of the Gaelic League, some 150 years later. And the
claim that Irish is a Mother Language , that is, not compounded and
therefore pure, is one which was to bear a great deal of weight in the
debates which occurred in the period of the Gaelic revival.
In this section we have traced briefly the historical emergence of a
polyglot situation in Ireland in which Irish was positioned as an inferior
and subjugated language. This process occurred as a result of the practices
of political and cultural colonialism. We have also noted, however, the
appearance of a formal interest in the language which was set against the
prevailing tide of history. That interest spawned important topics of
concern which were to appear later during the period in which the task of
gathering the threads of the web which had been rent, became that of
sewing together the cords of the nets of language, nationality and religion.
It is to the beginning of that task that we now turn.
A LANGUAGE NEAR AS OLD AS THE DELUGE
The Celtic revival was both a local and a European phenomenon.
Stimulated by earlier antiquarian work and the Ossian forgeries of the
1760s, it was aided in no small part by the wide-ranging vision of
Romanticism allied to the particular importance afforded to all languages
by the new science of comparative philology. No longer did the classical
languages dominate at the expense of all others; for what both
comparative philology and Romantic philosophy argued was the
specificity and consequent value of all languages and cultures, no matter
how regional or local. Moving from the turn to the East and the discovery
of the significance of Sanskrit, to the turn to the North marked by Bishop
Percy s Northern Antiquities, this new intellectual interest was characterised
by a search for linguistic or cultural authenticity, which was usually
realised in the discovery of antiquity. In Ireland, the revival s beginning is
marked by Conor s Dissertations on the Ancient History of Ireland (1753),
Forging the nation 107
O Brien s Irish English Dictionary (1768), the various works of Vallancey,
and the publication of Charlotte Brooke s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789).
One of the most striking and durable characteristics of the early revival
is precisely this search for the old. For there, in antiquity, was to be found
the essence of identity, whether of nation, people, culture or language. The
most antique: the most authentic; this was an equation which was to have
deep effects in fields as apparently diverse as theology and archaeology,
geology and politics. By a curious paradox at the heart of this logic, it was
proof of antiquity that was to engender revolution, the old that was to
justify the new. For the test of age was to upset all sorts of chronologies
and the hierarchies which accompanied them. If a language could be
shown to be older than another, then the logic of this pattern was that the
primary language in some sense must be purer, or more authentic. It was
of course a theory of origins which was based on the scarcely veiled
Christian principle that there was an original language which was
disrupted.
The early Celtic revival in Ireland was marked by precisely this search
for antiquity, and the results were hugely significant. Vallancey, a
correspondent of Burke and William Jones, was the leader in a field which
was to produce a number of extraordinary claims. Sweeping away the
familiar chronology of Western European history, Vallancey asserted in
1786 that the very ancient language of Ireland& [was a] language replete
and full, before the Greeks and Romans had a name (Vallancey
1786:170). It was this belief that led a later commentator to argue that the
Iliad had been composed in Irish and later translated into Greek (MacHale
1844:4). Following on from this, Vallancey later posited the affinity of
Irish with Sanscrit, Hindoostannee, and Egyptian [sic] (Vallancey
1804:xxiii); and on various occasions he classified Irish with the Punic
language of the Carthaginians (Vallancey 1772:vii). Such beliefs had
important historical and cultural implications, particularly if it were true
that the ancient Irish must have been a colony from Asia, because nine
words in ten are pure Chaldic and Arabic (Vallancey 1802:14); or that
druidism was not the established religion of the pagan Irish, but Budhism
[sic] (Vallancey 1812:56).
What is important about these assertions, however, is not their truth-
status, but the motivation which lay behind them. For what we see here is
an attempt to validate a language, and by corollary a culture, by way of an
appeal to history. To be able to show that Irish pre-dated the great imperial
languages of Greece and Rome, and that it was related to the ancient
religious languages of Sanskrit, Hindi and Hebrew, was to accord it a
tremendous importance. Antiquity signified credibility; let other languages [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]