3.1. LA CRISIS COMUNITARIA Y SUS REPERCUSIONES EN ESPAÑA
3.1.1 El veto de De Gaulle a Gran Bretaña
2.2.1 Early Modern Irish and Modern Irish
As mentioned in Chapter, it is common practice to refer to the language of the period– as Early Modern Irish (EMI). This might suggest that it is not that different from Modern Irish (MI), the language taught in schools in Ireland to the present day. There is some truth in this: if we compare the earlier language to the Irish that some readers will be familiar with from their schooldays, we can observe a remarkable degree of similarity.
Let’s start off with a simple sentence, The man kisses the woman, in EMI and in MI:
() a. Póg-aidh an fear an mnaoi. (EMI) kiss-es the man the woman
b. Póg-ann an fear an bhean. (MI) kiss-es the man the woman
The three key words here are póg‘kiss’, fear ‘man’, and bean ‘woman’. Two of them are the same in a. and b.: póg and fear. The only word in EMI that looks different from MI is mnaoi. The other big difference is the ending of póg‘kiss’.
In MI it is -ann, while in EMI it is -aidh. In order to illustrate how the difference came about I need to use a little bit of technical terminology.
Words like fear‘man’ and bean ‘woman’ are called nouns; they name some entity. Nouns can appear in different forms depending on the context. In English, we use the form cat (singular) when there is only one animal involved, and cats (plural) when there is more than one present in the discourse. There is a change in form from cat→ cats, indicated by the presence of -s, but we are still talking about the same animal. The change in meaning might be described as grammatical, in the sense that we are not changing the object of discourse, merely providing some extra information about it. Languages which exploit this device a lot are called (highly) inflected languages.
Nouns can have different roles depending on their place in a sentence.
A noun may be the entity initiating the action, or the entity being acted upon.
If the former, we say it is the subject, if the latter, the object. Now in English, the same form is used for subject and object:
THE ANGLO-NORMANS AND THEIR HERITAGE (–)
() a. The man kisses the woman. (woman is object) b. The woman kisses the man. (woman is subject) The same is true for MI:
() a. Pógann an fear an bhean. (bean is object) kisses the man the woman
‘The man kisses the woman.’
b. Pógann an bhean an fear. (bean is subject) kisses the woman the man
‘The woman kisses the man.’
All that distinguishes the subject from the object in MI is its position in the sentence.
EMI is more inflected than MI. Some nouns, when they are objects, take on a different form from when they are subjects. One such noun is bean‘woman’.
When it is the subject, it is bean, just as in the modern language:
() Pógaidh an bhean an fear.
kisses the woman the man
‘The woman kisses the man.’
But when it is the object, it changes to mnaoi, as in (a) above. So sometimes the inflection, the actual form of the noun, tells us what the semantic role is.
Another kind of word which takes on many different grammatical forms in the Irish of this time is the verb. In English, we usually need separate words like I, you and he/she to tell us who is doing the action (the person). These words like I and you are called pronouns. In English, the ending of the verb only changes once, when we have a subject who is a third party (not the speaker or the person being spoken to), and this subject is singular:
() clean
Singular Plural
I clean we clean
you clean you clean
he/she/Susan cleans they clean
Obviously, we need a word like I or you for most verbs, or we wouldn’t be able tofigure out who was doing the action from the form alone. If we just said clean, the subject could be I, you, we, you pl, or they. This system for dealing with the person of the verb, whereby it is combined with a pronoun, is called analytic inflection. It’s as if the verb is analysed (broken down) into two parts—the verb proper and the pronoun.
THE SHAPE OF THE LANGUAGE(–)
Some languages have a separate form for each person of the verb. We can observe this in Italian, for instance:
() comprare‘buy’
Singular Plural
compr-o ‘I buy’ compr-iamo‘we buy’
compr-i ‘you buy’ compr-ate‘you buy’
compr-a ‘he/she buys’ compr-ano ‘they buy’
Here, the endings tell us what person we are talking about: the-o in compro tells us that it is thefirst-person sg (I), so we don’t need the pronoun I as well.
Verbs which conform to the Italian system are called synthetic verbs—the verb and the ending are synthesized, or brought together.
MI is half-way between English and Italian in terms of the shape its verbs take. In thefirst-person sg and pl, we have an ending:
() glan‘clean’
Singular Plural
glan-aim ‘I clean’ glan-aimid ‘we clean’
This is like Italian: the ending-aimid for the plural tells us that the subject is we; there is no need for a separate pronoun as well. For the other persons, though, the system is like English. We find one verbal form glanann, and separate pronouns for the persons:
() Singular Plural
glanann tú ‘you clean’ glanann sibh‘you clean’
glanann sé/sí ‘he/she cleans’ glanann siad ‘they clean’
In EMI, on the other hand, all the persons of the verb have separate endings, as in Italian:
() Singular Plural
glan-aim ‘I clean’ glan-maid‘we clean’
glan-ae ‘you clean’ glan-taoi‘you clean’
glan-aidh ‘he/she cleans’ glan-aid ‘they clean’
As in Italian, the endings provide the information about who is doing the cleaning, so that wefind the verb and the person all in one single word.
When we have a noun subject like an bhean‘the woman’, or an fear ‘the man’, we can observe a further difference between MI and EMI. In MI, the common form ending in -ann is found with a noun subject, whether it is singular or plural:
THE ANGLO-NORMANS AND THEIR HERITAGE (–)
() a. Glan-ann an fear an seomra.
clean-PRS the man the room
‘The man cleans the room.’
b. Glan-ann nafir an seomra.
clean-PRS the men the room
‘The men clean the room.’
In EMI, when the subject is singular, the verb is singular, when the subject is plural, the verb is plural:
() a. Glan-aidh an fear an seomra.
clean-PRS.SG the man the room
‘The man cleans the room.’
b. Glan-aid nafir an seomra.
clean-PRS.PL the men the room
‘The men clean the room.’
This matching between the singular noun and the singular verb, and between the plural noun and the plural verb, is called agreement. We can describe the difference between MI and EMI in terms of agreement: in EMI there is agreement between subject and verb, while in MI there is none.
These are only some of the most striking differences between MI and EMI, differences in inflection. There has been a huge reduction in the number of forms in Irish for nouns and verbs since EMI, so that in one sense it is easier to learn the modern language. The student who is approaching EMI for thefirst time has to master a multitude of forms, which obviously makes the task much more difficult.
2.2.2 Spelling and pronunciation
Rules for writing were not standardized for Irish until the twentieth century, so that the printed versions that we have nowadays of medieval texts are the result of editing. The scribes of the time simply wrote as they sawfit. We can see this if we look at a verse of poetry as it appears in the original manuscript (Figure.).
Thefirst thing that catches our eye is that the letters are written differently from nowadays; in fact, it almost looks as if the alphabet were different. This is not actually so, it is simply the case that scribes shaped the letters differently in the Middle Ages. Copying a long passage was a laborious task, and medieval scribes used short-cuts, just as we use short-cuts today when texting. The Irish name for a contraction of this kind is nod. You can see some examples of these contractions in Figure..
THE SHAPE OF THE LANGUAGE(–)
Thefirst stage in editing a manuscript is to decipher the original spelling, and write the contractions out in full. With our manuscript this is relatively easy, as the scribe wrote clearly and the contractions are unambiguous. With older manuscripts, though, the modern editor has to struggle with ink-stains and other extraneous marks, with careless copying, and even with missing pages.
Afirst transcription of the verse might look like this:
() Olc do thaigrais athorna ge bheith dfeabhas healadhna tar ceann leithe mogha muigh re niall cosgrach a ccrúachain
FIGURE. Quatrain from University College Cork, Irish MS , p.
Source: Irish Script on Screen (http://www.isos.dias.ie/)
FIGURE. Examples of manuscript contractions
THE ANGLO-NORMANS AND THEIR HERITAGE (–)
This first version, where the spelling of the scribe is reproduced exactly, is called a diplomatic edition. It is certainly an advance on the original, in that we can make out recognizable letters. But even for somebody who knows EMI well, it is hard to make sense of this version. That is because in modern printed texts in all languages, not just Irish, there are various conventions which help the reader make sense of what they are reading. For instance, proper nouns, names of people and places, are written with capitals. Then there are language-specific spelling rules. In the case of Irish, these were only established in the last hundred years. One convention is that short grammatical words like the or a are kept separate from other words. Thus an‘the’ is separated from the noun that follows it, even though in speech the two seem to form a single unit. In MI we write an fear‘the man’, not *anfear. In the manuscripts, though, it is not uncommon tofind the two written as a single word, and often the <a> of an is written as <i>, so that we get infear for MI an fear.
Returning to our quatrain in Figure., we know from other sources that a personal name Torna existed in the medieval period. When addressing some-body in Irish, we use a particle a before the name, e.g. a Mháire!‘oh Mary!’
This, and our knowledge of the conventions of the scribes, enables us to rewrite the ending of thefirst line, so that we arrive at a Thorna for athorna.
We are now beginning to make progress, we know that the poet is addressing somebody called Torna. Applying the same kind of process to the other lines of the verse, we can bring them into line with modern conventions for writing, and produce a version which is more or less intelligible to somebody who has studied EMI and is familiar with its grammar and vocabulary. In thefinal version, called a normalized edition, punctuation marks have been introduced, and words spelled in keeping with modern rules:
() Olc do thagrais, a Thorna, gé bheith d’fheabhas t’ealadhna, tar ceann Leithe Mogha amuigh, re Niall coscrach i gCruachain.
[Despite your great learning, Torna, you pleaded badly on behalf of Leath Mogha with triumphant Niall from Cruachain.]
It should be noted that there are limits to how far one can go with normalizing a text. For example, in the case of Figure. above, it contains the word ealadhna, which is spelled ealaíona in modern dictionaries. The reason for not totally modernizing it is that the metrical scheme of EMI demands that it should be spelled in the old way. The old spelling indicates that the second syllable (-ladh-) has a short vowel, which is necessary for the metre. This effect would be lost if it were spelled ealaíona, with a long vowel (-laí-) in the second
THE SHAPE OF THE LANGUAGE(–)
syllable. Note also that I have only dealt with one short, simple example of editing; with whole poems offifty or more quatrains, often an editor will have to decide whether to change what was written by the original scribe or to leave it as it is. While there are general guidelines for editing, to some extent it involves subjective choices.
I have dwelt on the issue of manuscripts and editing because so much of written Irish was in manuscript form until the twentieth century, and we are only in the process of discovering what these manuscripts contain. It is important for the modern reader always to bear in mind that what we read in printed form is the result of choices made by editors over the years, and that the rules and conventions which guide them are arbitrary, and are constantly changing.
In my exposé of the structure of EMI, I have not yet touched on the most basic aspect of the language, namely pronunciation. Unfortunately, we can only form tentative proposals for EMI compared to what is possible for the twentieth century, when machine recordings of real speech became avail-able for the first time. The poems of the EMI period were written in strict metre, with rhyme between the ends of the lines and assonance (vowel rhyme) between individual words, and with afixed number of syllables in each line.
The pronunciation demanded by the verse was conservative, in that it was often based on spelling rather than on the speech of the day. Spelling often lags far behind developments in the spoken language. In English, for example, we still write a <k> at the beginning of the word knight, even though this <k> has not been pronounced since at least the seventeenth century. In Irish in the period–, many consonant sounds disappeared when they occurred between vowels. For instance, the word croidhe ‘heart’ originally had two syllables, with the <dh> in the middle being pronounced like the initial sound in British English the, so that the whole would have sounded something like /krithe/. By the fourteenth century the <dh> sound had disappeared and the vowel preceding it had been lengthened to /ee/. However, the spelling reflects the old pronunciation, and this pronunciation was maintained in the poetry. A word like croidhe would thus count as two syllables in verse, whereas its modern counterpart croí /kree/ has only one syllable. This is why modern editions of medieval poetry often retain the old spelling.
2.2.3 Classical Irish
In the introduction, I adverted to the fact that nowadays, many languages exist in two forms. One is the standard dialect, used in writing and in the public domain. The other form consists of regional and social dialects, usually associated with a more informal, spoken domain.
THE ANGLO-NORMANS AND THEIR HERITAGE (–)
If we think of standard English in the twenty-first century, we can distin-guish four main divisions of language where standardization might apply.
These are:
a. pronunciation b. grammar c. vocabulary d. spelling.
Grammar and spelling are often acquired at school. For example, a child who hears‘I done it’ at home might be corrected by their teacher, and told to say
‘I did it.’ In the same way, speakers of English are taught to write in a certain way, regardless of how a word is pronounced. Both though and enough end with the letters <gh>, even though in one case the <gh> is not pronounced, and in the other it is pronounced as /f/.
With pronunciation, the school instruction is usually less explicit, so chil-dren acquire their accent from other sources. In Chapter, I mentioned the existence of standard Irish English pronunciation, based on middle-class Dublin speech. This pronunciation is absorbed through exposure to the speech of people in positions of influence, people such as broadcasters, politicians, and increasingly media celebrities of all sorts. However, this pronunciation is not explicitly taught at Irish schools. Similarly, with respect to vocabulary, there is no dictionary of Irish words in general use. Speakers of Irish English use British English dictionaries, even though they may also use some indivi-dual words and constructions which are specifically Irish. A case in point is the so-called after-perfect, as in the sentence I’m after reading the newspaper (‘I have read the newspaper’), which is found in all regions and social classes in Ireland. Some Irish words have even enjoyed international careers, such as the word feck (mild expletive), which caught on with British TV viewers after the success of the series Father Ted.
From this brief discussion, we can see that in order for a standard to come into being, some kind of institution must exist which codifies and promotes a particular variety of language. In modern France, the Académie Française tries to regulate the French language, introducing various rules which accept certain linguistic forms and reject others. Ireland in the late Middle Ages did not have an academy of this sort, but it did have a highly organized and articulate literary class. These were thefilí (pl of file). The word file is often translated as‘poet’ or ‘bard’, but a file in the twelfth century was much more than a modern-day poet—he was more like a journalist, in that his task was to comment on current events which were of importance for his community. It is true that thefilí wrote in verse, but the subject matter was not personal. First and foremost they celebrated the deeds of the dynasty they were attached to.
THE SHAPE OF THE LANGUAGE(–)
Thefile was employed by a patron, the local chieftain, to praise him and his family, to enumerate his illustrious ancestors, and to mourn his death. The poems produced were highly conventional, and were written in special metres.
The language of the poems is based on the spoken language of c., but it represents a high register. In the same way, nowadays the language of aca-demic discourse is based on everyday speech, but differs from it in the kind of vocabulary and constructions it uses. The name given to the verse produced in this period is Bardic poetry.
Thefilí were an extremely influential group in society, and it was they who set the written standard for Irish. Poetry was a profession, usually handed down from father to son, and required a special linguistic training, which was provided in schools of poetry. Some manuals for the use of students have
Thefilí were an extremely influential group in society, and it was they who set the written standard for Irish. Poetry was a profession, usually handed down from father to son, and required a special linguistic training, which was provided in schools of poetry. Some manuals for the use of students have