Good Friday translation rant, aka an odd insomnia cure

I awoke 4 AM, with a blinding headache, from pulling recalcitrant honeysuckle vines from the engulfed Meyer lemon tree. I was in dire pain and the Advil hadn't yet kicked in, so there I was, with full-on insomnia, resurrecting my rusty Irish translation skills on a Facebook genealogy site. Perfect thing to do on the aftermath of Good Friday, no?

It's almost impossible to resurrect the meaning of Irish placenames as they've been Englishified and phoneticized to death. The English attempt to destroy a language. With no small thanks to the Royal Engineers and the 1833 Ordnance Survey. Irish playwright Brian Friel's play,Translations, tackles the systematic disembowelment of the Irish language by the English hellbent on cultural imperialism. But sometime enough of the original ghost Irish remains behind to see the meaning behind a placename.

LETTER TO COLM TÓIBÍN

Colm Tóibín, it's come to this;
a neighbor, madly in love with
the wandering road of your writing,
rang my doorbell, asking me
how to pronounce your name,
which led to an Irish linguistics course
on aspects of hidden vowels,
slender consonants, síneadh fadas,
and diminutive endings. The reason
for the shh! in my cousin Sinéad's name.
How Hebrew and Irish, despite everything,
carry the hunger of the shark-toothed sound.
And how the final -ín in Máirín, and Tóibín
are but small endearments, like cailín.
Why say the ó and not the i, she asked.
I explained the role of the fada, the haloed ó—
she got more than she bargained for,
as we wandered from the story of Brooklyn,
on how to say Saoirse, to the The Testament 
of Mary, who, despite everything, did not believe. 
What my neighbor really wanted to know
was how the syllabic dove was nestled
within the folds of your name, and Iona's naomh.
But we are also bound by testament of cold iron,
our grandparents smuggled guns to Eniscorthy.
My neighbor got a discourse on the uprising,
and hidden pocket vowels within bol-g and fil-um, 
as my grannie would say. The anaptyctic mediator
smuggling vowels and proverbial bullets
across borders. This béarla
we hold in common.

4/10/2016

Bay Area Generations #42

2/2017

SILENT HAICHES
DEEP NOVEMBER
FOUND POEMS FROM THE IRISH
Hurley: Sea Tide

SILENT HAICHES

SILENT HAICHES

My grannie taught me to write

old school Gaelic League Irish

with dots over the muted consonants; 

they were marked with a sí buailte,

a diacritic hangover from Old Irish.

Sí buailte means strike—not to strike,

no infinitive verb in Irish. Drop the fada 

Seán becomes sean, which means old, she said.

She didn't like reformed Irish at all. 

Modern typography couldn't  handle those dots

so haiches were added after the consonant.

"There are no Haiches in Irish, she scoffed. 

"Haich is a ladder to the sky, 

Haich is silent, holy, haich is like God." 

So I learned the old style writing

with long-tailed rs and esses. 

I learned to dot my Ts and Cs to soften them.

Then we had some tea with milk and sugar

as we silently worked on our letters.

Oct, 24/2015

Transliteration gone awry

I was practicing a poem aloud in Irish, but my speech recognition software, Dragon Dictate, was sneakily recording me. It made for a superb word salad of Misa Rafteri. It's so freakin' bizarre, that I had to record it three times just to see if there was any pattern or sense at all. I might go back and see if there is a phrase or two to salvage. But I think it's safe to say that Dragon Dictate does not recognize Irish. Not even tiny a little bit. So much for the Indo-European continuum. It's too weird to even steal lines from.

Cilla long dogfishes crawl the spoiler
Gonzalez to another skunk
wrong thing though she is a master list
soulless for three PhoneMag
if Tisha could get them on the fifth
and May the Mimiga Walla eggs cinnamon

the data must be finished by then
Mimiga Kuala eggs cinnamon

Michelin study Cilla long.
this is crawl the spoiler Gonzalez
to enough skunks wrong
they don't see a set of master list

soulless monthly phone
could get them on the fifth
and May the Mimiga Kawala eggs
cinnamon soiled of 4K follow

Study Cilla long Dulces's crawl
the soil or Gonzalez two and a skunk wrong
they don't see is that a master list soulless
monthly phone could get a monthly bill finish
May the Mimiga Kuala eggs cinnamon oil
the funky follow

This is the actual poem:

Mise Raifteirí, an file, lán dóchais is grá
I am Raftery, a poet full hope /love

le súile gan solas, ciúineas gan crá,
eyes without light silence without heart

ag dul síos ar m'aistear le solas mo chroí,
at going down on my journey to light my heart

fann agus tuirseach go deireach mo shlí;
faint and tired to the end of my road

féach anois me lem aghaidh ar Bhalla
look now my face at/against at Balla (a town) or wall

ag seinm cheoil do phócaí falamh.
at making /playing music with pockets empty

Longing/Saudade/Hiraeth

Someone asks about saudade. Yes, I answer, it's longing, yearning (melancholia/nostalgia). He is yearning for home = tá cumha air i ndiaidh a bhaile (literally, "there is loneliness on him after his home"). There are at least five words for that ephemeral state of being in Scots Gaelic.

In Welsh, it's hiraeth, a homesickness for somewhere you cannot return to, the nostalgia and the grief for the lost places of your past, places that never were.

The Breton for the French nostalgie is hiraezh. This could be a cognate, or borrowed from the Welsh. Hiraeth (first recorded in 1499) corresponds with Cornish hyreth, and Irish sireacht." Someone said it appears in the Book of Aneirin 'Blwydyn hiraeth er gwyr catraeth' ('a year's longing for the men of Catraeth'), which dates it to the late 13th c. Unfortunately I did not keep my reference.

The Welsh and Breton come from the Celtic root siros, from Proto-Celtic *sīr-axto-, akin to Gaulish siraxta (“longing”). I thought it was related to Latin serus. But someone astutely pointed out that the Latinate cognate is solitas.

Regardless, it’s still a full circle to Saudade.

Hiraeth

English evolved from Scandinavian?

"The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint pot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man's fate and man's follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth." T E Kalem —from Brendan Behan's play, Borstal Boy

A Science Daily post from Nov, 2012 suggests that English evolved from Scandinavian. Two professors in Norway make an interesting hypothesis that English evolved from Old Norse, making English North Germanic rather than West Germanic.

Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo said: "What is particularly interesting is that Old English adopted words for day-to-day things that were already in the language. Usually one borrows words and concepts for new things. In English almost the reverse is true—the day-to-day words are Scandinavian, and there are many of them," says Faarlund.

Here are some examples: anger, awe, bag, band, big, birth, both, bull, cake, call, cast, cosy, cross, die, dirt, dream, egg, fellow, flat, gain, get, gift, give, guess, guest, hug, husband, ill, kid, law, leg, lift, likely, link, loan, loose, low, mistake, odd, race, raise, root, rotten, same, seat, seem, sister, skill, skin, skirt, sky, steak, though, thrive, Thursday, tight, till, trust, ugly, want, weak, window, wing, wrong. —Linguist Makes Sensational Claim: English Is a Scandinavian Language

I nearly snorted and circular breathed in my cuppa tea when I read that headline. I can hear the linguistic shit hitting the fan now.

Awww, there goes Beowulf!

So, let me get this straight, Everyone in the British Isles loved the Norse so much,   (they refused to have much to do with the invaders), that they couldn't even say Gimme an egg, Sister! in their own language(s) before the arrival of the Vikings? (It was mainly the Anglo—Saxons vs the short-lived Viking Danelaw (50 to 100 years of rule); most of the Britons were holed up in Wales or Brittany.

Sister and egg aren't even loan words ferhevinsakes! I'm no linguist but even I can poke holes in this argument. People usually borrow words and concepts for new things like computer, floppy disk, USB. Not for things they already know, or already have.

What would Bede say? All this splitting infinitives and hairs sounds like the Scandinavians are once again being culture pirates. A vikingr the academics will go.

Their hypothesis: English evolved out of Old Norse several centuries later? Not congruently? What about language drift, or convergent evolution—or even being closely related via the Indo-European continuum? It's like saying English (or Irish) evolved from Sanskrit because there are parallel words in both languages.

Sister is a prime example from the Proto-Indo-European continuum: *swésōr is recognizable and sounds familiar enough to be merely a dialect, rather than another language. No matter how many dialect armies and navys are conjured up, I'm fairly certain that Old Norse did not exist during the era that PIE was evolving. And then there's egg—clearly a very close word in Proto-Germanic:

From Middle English egge, from Old Norse egg (“egg”), from Proto-Germanic *ajją (“egg”).

Well, maybe egg isn't such a good example as Chaucer uses both ey, and egg. That could be a case of Norse and Anglo-Saxon eggs side by side. One could argue that that hard gg vs soft jj sound was borrowed from the Norse. I won't mention bull eggs here. (But you can look that world up if you like).

I wonder why outlaw wasn't on that list? That and law, and penny, schilling, etc.

The article was daft. (Not as daft as the eejit who recently posted that English has always existed in Great Britain. (MJ Harper, ‘The History of Britain Revealed’) The Belgae in Gaul and Britain were Celts, not Germans, ya twit. (It reads something like How the Martians Saved Civilization.) English ain't the mother tongue. Really.) Whose tongue was in what neither cheek?

Then there's the syntax argument:

•(subject/verb/object), SVO vs. Old English verb endings. Just to liven things up, Irish is VSOP. Good initials for brandy too. The Vikings, though they settled in Ireland too, had almost no impact on Irish other than town words, nautical terms, jarl, and window.

•Prepositions at the end of a sentence (a very good thing they didn't look at Irish!)

•My personal favorite: genitive (plural)s (The Queen of England's hat).

•Split infinitives (I promise to never laugh again). Well, there are no infinitive verbs in Irish, but we're not talking Irish here.

I admit I'm shaky on syntax. I know by doing. (By writing, that is). But since I had to go and make that strange segue, apparently the Norse absorbed more Irish words than the Irish themselves did of Old Norse words: "bachall (staff, crozier) >bagall; capall (horse) > kapall; lám (hand) > lámr; tarb (bull) > tarfr; and teine (fire) > dini.

Perhaps most surprisingly of all, one Norse word for a ship lung is taken from the Irish long." —Medieval Review Ó Muirithe, Diarmaid. From the Viking Word-Hoard: A Dictionary of Scandinavian Words in the Languages of Britain and Ireland. Dublin.

I'm sure I could argue some silly string theory that Gaelic impacted Old Norse, as spoken by Vikings, who, were, after a generation or two, no longer even Norse, but Norse-Irish, and Norse-Scottish. Irish and Scottish were pretty much the same people in those days as there was no Kingdom of Scotland yet. I can't use the term "one people" because nobody was unified.

Viking men did not bring any Norse women with them when they settled new turf. They just kidnapped Irish and Scottish women—and women are the bearers of language and culture—they taught their kids to speak Irish. And to a lesser degree, Norse British/Anglo-Saxon, mix, etc. (Iceland and the Faroes have a higher Irish/Scottish mDNA, than Norse yDNA but I already wrote about that).

So why would Old English suddenly die out, leave a linguistic void, and Old Norse suddenly take its place, and then evolve into modern English? Old habits die hard. We won't mention the other four English dialects that concurrently existed in the British Isles. Who has read Beowulf, or Sir Gawain in the original dialect? Or Blind Harry's Wallace?

OK, so the "Pearl Poet" author of Sir Gawain was from ca. the 14th c., as were Blind Harry, and Chaucer a little before that, and Beowulf was written in the late 10th or early 11th c., but the texts do serve to demonstrate that several different Middle English dialects survived, Not Old Norse. BTW, Beowulf was translated into late West Saxon from an older English dialect.

Clearly this is a case of lunatic fringe instead of Celtic Fringe. Like I said, those Norse academicians are cultural pirates! I don't think anyone was hypothetically sober at the time. Bring on Monty Python's version of Njall's Saga! Skol pafiskin!

On the Scots Tongue

Most of the sentiment of an article posted on Facebook, The Scots Language and its European Roots, by Dr. Sheila Douglas, on the development of the Scots Tongue, is of great interest. But it reminds me of something my Celtic Studies professor, Dan Melia loved to quote: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy."

It seems that the author, Dr. Sheila Douglas plays a bit fast and loose with facts—perhaps trying to overprove a point for nationalism's sake. Though I agree with the author's basic premise, that Scots English evolved concurrent with what later became standard English, I find myself picking apart the argument. (Try reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—one distinct strand of the English dialect—or the works of Blind Harry) they're almost as obtuse as Beowulf in a different dialect).

For example, much of the relationship between Danish and the broad Scots tongue can be linked via the Germanic branch of the Indo-European continuum—not necessarily a direct infusion from the Danish (or Dutch).

One statement concerning Gaelic is too generalized and therefore, is misleading: "Gaelic is also a language with European roots linked to other languages like Irish, Welsh and Breton."

For starters, Irish, was also called Gaelic until quite recently. It predates Scots Gaelic—which is, in itself, a dialect of Donegal Irish, having come from Ireland to begin with.

Ireland was called Scotia Major by the Romans, and Scotland—Scotia Minor. Scotland was predominantly settled by the Irish.

Orthography (spelling) has changed since the 18th c.—especially in Irish. But the "languages" are still mutually intelligible. Ergo, they are dialects—as is Manx—though the Manx orthography is phonetic English—you have to read it aloud to hear the words.

All three languages are from the Goidelic branch of Celtic languages—they are not similar to the Brythonic branch of Celtic languages: Cumbrian, Pictish, Cornish, Welsh and Breton, though they are all Celtic languages and share the same ancestry-predating the Germanic tree, BTW.

The only Celtic language that's "European"—I think what the author means, is, from the Continent, versus insular (from Britain), is Breton—which probably evolved from a Welsh or Cornish settlement in Brittany. So it was a rather poor example—thus eroding the veracity of the argument.

Digitalizing old audio cassette tapes

For the first time in ages, I’m listening to an old, old Skara Brae audio cassette tape. Unfortunately it’s a poor copy of a copy—from my Irish class at UC Berkeley, 1998. I’m transcribing it to digital format (with an iPod speaker wire attached to my MacBook—a major technological breakthrough—thank you, Chris Breen)—thus saving all those old songs from obscurity. Caidé sin don té sin made it to YouTube, but many of the old songs in Irish didn't fare so well. In the process of salvaging obscure media, I’m also listening to Jane Bark’s tapes of her distant cousin Chrissie McDonald of Barra singing the old songs. A nugget to find Mari's Wedding in Scots Gaelic. A delight.

I experimented and took an iPod speaker splitter wire—to plug iPod into analogue stereo—and merely swapped the configuration. (Took me a VERY long while to arrive at a solution via Occam's Razor). I plugged it into the speaker output vs input—duh! I thus reversed the connection, and then plugged iPod headphone end into my MacBook line in. Half-way there. I then found a program that would record off the desktop. WireTap (old v.) will work, or open source Audacity, as does CD Spin Doctor—usually bundled with Toast. Mad audio scientist at work with no manual, as usual. We don’t need no stinkin’ instructions.

What I’ve learned is that, if you can get a sound register via the line-in, then, you can record anything, LPs too. Not great quality, but worth a try if the music is obscure enough to not make it to the digital age. I'm salvaging my old audio tapes first—obscure sean nós Irish singing tapes—most of which don't exist in digital format. Saving old audio cassettes from obscurity—bringing them into the digital age before they turn back to base iron—has been a bit of a journey with no map. But the relative obscurity and rarity of these songs makes it worthwhile to go the extra miles. 

Somewhat expanded and revised for clarification from two Facebook posts, added 6/21

DEEP NOVEMBER

DEEP NOVEMBER

Dark morning, deep November,

low clouds threatening rain.

We sat by the firebox, slurping tea from a spoon,

she twiddled her hair into long white snakes,

while arguing with the dead:

blaming Cromwell, deValera, the Anglosaxonsandjutes.

An unnamed thing stirred at the pit of the stomach.

Who were they, the long dead?

I scooted around on my back the way kids do,

my robe, a red stain on the gray floor.

The cats hunched up, wanting in. No, she told us.

A bird banged at the kitchen sill.

Too much effort to fly, the air, palpable.

Calm before the storm, my grandmother said.

That knocking is the dead wanting in.

Shivers up my spine, a ghost story in the daytime.

The rain sobbing, not God, but the rain and me

crying—for no earthly reason.

Dead man walking on your grave.

Come closer to the fire, child, she said.

The small sorrows of my seven years welled up and found a thirst.

The birds and the cats, the rain and me, all wanting in.

All t’ings come in t’rees, she warned,

she never could say the T-Haiches  right.

I wanted to undwind her hair snakes,

and laughed at her  loss of “H”es,

Tír na-nÓg, she said in Irish, Land of the ever-young.

And here we are, west of the west. Samhain.

Be careful, the door to the otherworld are still open—

She cautioned me: “H” was the letter of the Lord.

A silent ladder to the sky. The sound of breath. Inspiration.

I climbed the first leafy rung. Plucked an apple. The sky breathing.

A knocking at the door. An scéal? No news is good news.

But the gates were already open.

My drunken uncle burst through the door,

giggling hysterically, Did you hear? Kennedy was shot!

My grandmother’s small sob, played over and over,

her hands fluttering like flocks of useless birds.

A sacred letter had fallen from the sky.

2/12/03; rev. 5/11/03
SILENT HAICHES
LETTER TO COLM TÓIBÍN

FOUND POEMS FROM THE IRISH: (A WOMAN’S LAMENT)

FOUND POEMS FROM THE IRISH:

(A WOMAN’S LAMENT)

I composed a poem on the bottom of the sea:

It’s only a story of a story. An old one, at that.

You know how it ends.
I saw him once in a vision.
And it was then I knew.

I remember him standing in the white heather.

He was my hero, my lively lad,

Skin as white as snow.

Eyes, bright moons,

Arm in arm with the sun.

A shaft of sunlight fell on him.

Like windows opening on the sky.

Out of the ordinary—that quicksilver moment.

Both old and young, we were caught between two times.

What’s destiny to me? Not a honeymoon.

The walls of the otherworld are listening.

Oh love of my heart,

Can you not sing of this life?

From sunset to sun up,

He’d make a nest in your ear.

We had the current and wind with us,

We had the sun and moon with us,

But he said naught of dew nor rain.

We were waiting for spring

But the bottom fell out of the sky.

When we made a knot with our tongues,

We couldn’t untie with our teeth.

Grá. Oh pulse of my heart. Love.

I dropped that word on the ground.
And it shattered like a vessel.

He’s taken the music from the world.

There wasn’t a word left for me.

The music of the sun on the sea and land—

The birds are singing

The daftness of our words

In the face of the wind.

The three drops of a wife:

the drop of blood,

the milk of tears

the milk of sweat.

I have no cause to stay.

He’s a rock of a man, hard

and deaf as stone.

He has not rent, nor concern nor sorrow.

He wants both the hide and its price.

A man hears only what he wants to hear.

Not: You’re my music.

Not: I love you.

It’s not possible to serve two shores.

There are always longer horns on the cattle overseas.

Clear out of my net.

I have plenty else to do.

The sea was rough today.

No fair mouthings (sweet talk).

No bird music—

I had spoken harshly to him.

The heat wilted the flowers.

My garden’s a wilderness again.

No herbs nor healing against death.

The puca’s pissed on the berries.

Don’t let me hear another word!

God’s tears in the web of the little wild ox (spider)

And my mother’s fingers gulping rosary beads.

clocha paidrín.

The tide is ebbing.

The sun’s slipping under.

There’s always a bitter blade of wind.

He never said goodbye to me.

It’s not worth the wait now

(for) a place beyond death.

This world’s closing in on me.

Pray for my sake.

3/9/98