These were notes to a certain Lùthais MacGriogair, certified boor, and an administrator in a prominent Celtic Languages Facebook group who was always questioning my linguistic background, assuming that I had no right, or scholarly training to make or post comments, that I didn’t have a linguistic leg to stand on. That got me in a lather. My reply grew by leaps and bounds as I hosed him down. I eventually grew weary of his overprivileged snottiness, and left the group, as he was only interested in linguistic slogging matches. I have little patience for the pejorative male ego. So much for having fun in a Facebook group, gawdforbid!
I’ve studied several versions of Irish, from Archaic to modern, skipping Middle Irish—probably the very language I needed in order to read the later manuscripts, but I did make linear translations of the early Irish epics, including the Táin Bó Fraích at UC Berkeley, where I also took a course on medieval Welsh, which didn’t stick. But we did translate a tale from the Mabinogion, and another tale.
When I was young, my Corkonian grandmother from Bantry, b. 1893—her parents spoke Irish—tried to instill in me some basic Gaelic League Irish. An gort glas. So I can read the old writing.
When I was in Leuven, there was something written in the old style script, which my Dutch friend couldn’t read, above an iron gate and I turned to my polyglot Dutch companion and told him what it said, it was an Irish college dedicated to St. James. He said you do realize it’s written in Irish, don’t you? Startled, I looked up at the gate. And thus began my lifelong interest in the Medieval Celtic realm—especially the Irish on the Continent.
When I was young, I traveled to Switzerland to work, and unfortunately I did not know that there were Irish manuscripts in the library in Saint Gall, where I was stuck for a time, but I do remember pondering the beauty of the locked doors of the library. In another Swiss village, I did find Celtic artifacts—mostly weapons—all the small Swiss museums—they have not buried their Celtic heritage. The village where I lived paid homage to their Celtic ancestors.
I began to realize all that crazy information my grandmother tried to impart in me, long before modern archaeology supported her claims, via the oral tradition, was in fact, true. In my 20s and 30s I did try to keep up my Irish studies by unsuccessfully using various learning systems, including Teach Yourself Irish, and Teach Yourself Gaelic, a Donegal primer, a Scots primer for kids, Buntús Cainte and Myles Dillon. Later, DuoLingo, etc.
Because I have been so long away from the languages—not much opportunity to converse in Archaic Irish—and since I’ve hardly used any of it, it is all in danger of slipping away. But oddly, language is persistent as well, and sometimes words rise up unbidden in the psyche, and pester me. Ear worms. Chun, for example. At least there are no eels in my hovercraft.
I can more or less slog through something written in Irish and get the gist of it and make a very rough translation. But the tenses are slipping away, especially the past tense, fittingly. I want to learn more, or keep what little Irish I do have, alive—which is more than the average bear, but bears don’t speak Irish, now do they? That’s why I joined this group.
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