#PEIG SAYERS GRAVE TV#

Minority languages seem isolating to me, no matter how good the Scandanavians and Dutch are at speaking TV English. The enlarging union will be swamped with tiny languages. There is outcry here at present that Irish -is about to be struck off the list of official- will not be added to the list of EU working languages. I wouldn’t have studied it if it weren’t compulsory, and I don’t know if it should be forced on everyone at great state expense. Then again, I pick up languages easily and enjoy feck-acting about with words. Knowing Irish gives me a much deeper sense of the layers of this place. It is the direct translations from Irish that make the English spoken here unique in its rhythms and constructions. Though people were forced to learn English in the era of the Penal Laws, the native language was smuggled through into English. The English transliterations mean nothing, but the Irish names underneath tell the stories of our places. I can’t imagine seeing our road signs as he does. I’d had fuller conversations in the Ecuadorian Andes than I could manage here.Īfterwards, Tim asked if I thought it was right that Irish was required in school.

Was I cold now, wearing that big ski jacket and hat and it a fine day? Did I see the scar? And what were our names? His name was Pádraig O’Bríain. The operation was last year, and he didn’t feel healed yet. He had to take a walk along the road every day now since the house collapsed and his knee was so badly injured. Inis Tuaisceart does indeed look exactly like a man stretched out for a wake a _memento mori_ in a part of the world rugged enough not to need one. He pointed out the Great Blasket Island, which we couldn’t miss, and Inis Tuaisceart beside it, _an fear marbh_, the dead man. I stuttered that I was from Limerick and Tim was from Canada, edging up on the limits of my language after such a long absence. “God and Mary be with you,” he said, “and where are you from?” “God be with you,” I said to him in Irish, and he seemed delighted. He wore a rusty black suit and sandals with his socks. Walking from Ventry Harbour around to Dunquin, we met an old man limping down the road. With Irish you have to lift them up and carry them through the exams.” “Teaching English at least you know that some of them love it, and they’ll remember those books. My friend Seán, one of the most talented teachers I know, sighs now at the slog of forcing Irish on us: Over two years of study, we defaced our textbooks by doodling “PEIG” into “BITCH”. She didn’t exactly speak to our new Ireland. She was one of the last remaining islanders on the Blaskets, and her whiny-old-lady memoirs were compulsory exam material. In Dingle I visited the handsome grave of Peig Sayers, scourge of my generation of secondary school students. Given that we study it every school day for fourteen years, our competence on graduation is generally low. Those born here are not admitted to university without a second-level qualification in _Gaeilge_, and regardless of your subject, you may not teach in the Irish education system without it (to the frustration of otherwise-qualified EU nationals). Irish language study is compulsory in state schools. “Are you well?” we say, and “I am”, is the answer. There are no words for ‘yes’ and ‘no’, which accounts for our national reluctance to commit. It can sound Scandinavian, sometimes even like Hebrew.

#PEIG SAYERS GRAVE FULL#

It is full of conditional tenses, inflected nouns, and strange sub-dialects. This language does not yield easily (my name is written “Dearbhaile” in Irish). Sometimes he tries to read the signs in broad, slow Canadian, which makes me laugh more. Actually, it says Slow Down: _tóg bog é_, literally, take it softly. “What does that one say?” he asks, exasperated. These are Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking regions. In Dingle and Connemara, the road signs–bilingual elsewhere–lapse into monoglot gibberish for Tim. –James Joyce, _Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man_ –Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the world. Mulrennan spoke to him about universe and stars. Then old man and Mulrennan spoke English. He told us he met an old man there in a mountain cabin. John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned from the west of Ireland.

Peig sayers grave