October 23, 2014, 12:11 pm
The Belfast Telegraph reports on a judicial review of the case of a West Belfast woman who has complained that she was denied bilingual signage on her street — not because not enough people voted in favour but because not enough people voted."Out of 92 eligible residents 52 confirmed they wanted Irish signs, with only one opposed.
But because the other 39 did not respond to the survey the two-thirds requirement was not met."
As the Blether Region pointed out on 25 March, this policy is eerily similar to the 40% rule employed to deny Scots devolution in 1979 — the difference in this case being that the figure is a whopping 67%.
Imagine if 67% super-majorities (of eligible rather than actual electors) were required for votes at Westminster. Would homosexuality and abortion ever have become legal? Would the death penalty ever have been abolished? And would it actually be possible to pass a budget each year?
A few days ago the UK Parliament voted by 274 votes to 12 to recognise Palestine as a state — a figure described as a "landslide". Under the rules followed by Belfast City Council, however, that vote too would have been null and void, since Conservative whips instructed their MPs to stay away from what is a controversial issue.
This being Northern Ireland, of course, the council is free to twist every vote on bilingualism into a referendum on Irish unity and to project a notion of offensiveness onto the language that any reasonable person would dismiss as absurd. The truth is that having bilingual street signs is not the same as publicly sacrificing sheep at the end of the road. If people are offended by it, the problem is theirs — and theirs alone.
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October 31, 2014, 12:09 pm
Today marks the last day of existence for Ultach Trust. Back in the 1980s, the trust was one of the very first Irish-language organisations to win funding from the UK Government, and for most of the intervening years it was a centre of expertise on the cross-community promotion of the language — acumen that will be hard to re-assemble in future.
The Blether Region has had the pleasure of knowing Ultach's staff members, as well as some of its trustees, for many years, and has found them a very open-minded, knowledgeable and dedicated group of people. It would like to take this opportunity to wish them all the best for the future.
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November 5, 2014, 1:48 pm
Those watching the news or reading the papers over the last few days will have been treated to the unedifying spectacle of a former Executive Minister trotting out carefully crafted gibberish in order to disparage the language responsible for his own surname. In fact, Gregory Campbell even managed to fluff his self-penned lines (perhaps an unsurprising slip, given that he has such little regard for practical linguists).
Once upon a time it would have been acceptable to attack someone's religion in a similar fashion, and a lasting reminder of such tactics still adorns English in the form of "hocus pocus" ("hoc est corpus"). Nowadays, of course, new coinages at least are a no-no, but, given the existence of clearly understood cultural packages in Northern Ireland, for the incorrigible chauvinist language can be an attractive point-scoring proxy — like criticising someone's huge trousers because you're not allowed to call them fat. Mr. Gregory's culinary bent in that respect has form. For many years, sectarian wags have referred to Irish Gaelic as "garlic", which sums up many of the things they hate: middle-class Ulster-British pretension; cosmopolitanism; and Catholic southern Europe. It's unlikely that he could have got away with treating the language of an ethnic minority in the same fashion, although had he done so, a DUP petition of concern would no doubt have been mobilised to protect him.
Later, after suffering a day's speaking ban at a time when he was in any case away in London, Mr. Campbell appeared on UTV Live and, when Caitríona Ruane was interviewed in the main studio, feigned the involuntary whistle of a bad sleeper. Embarrassingly for Northern Ireland and the DUP in particular, such schoolboy behaviour will have done the 61-year-old no harm whatsoever with the voters. Indeed, like many an instance of forthright sectarian banter, it will merely have underlined how very different Northern Ireland is from Wales and, in particular, Scotland, with which many Protestants claim a special bond. Among the politicians of those countries, autochthonous Celtic languages enjoy overwhelming support or at least lip-service.
But why did Mr. Campbell wait until now before expressing such "long overdue" thoughts on Irish? It is true that it happened when discussing an Assembly Question on the language, and that is no doubt a factor. However, the Blether Region suspects that it is also because there is a Westminster election coming up and the DUP would like Protestants to forget that in 2007 it willingly entered a coalition with Sinn Féin.
They must think folk are stupid.
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November 18, 2014, 11:22 am
The BBC reports that owing to a technical glitch users of the Líofa website were able to access the names and addresses of people who had signed up to become fluent in Irish by 2015.
In any normal country, of course, that would have been relevant only to the fight against identity theft or credit-card fraud; the worst-case scenario, perhaps, would be a violent stalker. In Northern Ireland, on the other hand, there are a whole plethora of other fears relating to communal strife, and even politicians who regard themselves as moderate go around declaring that Sinn Féin is "using" the language to rile Protestants — without any regard to the fact that by making such claims they may be promoting sectarian stereotypes.
Given the deep-seated sectarianism of Protestant paramilitaries, however, the increased threat to those Catholics whose names were published must be fairly minimal.
Indeed, it occurs to the Blether Region that Protestant learners might have less luck.
Back in the early 1970s the IRA made a point of killing Catholic recruits to the RUC. Of course, during the course of the Troubles it killed far more Protestant members, but the killing of Catholic policemen was both easier, since they visited Catholic areas, and, very likely, seen as an effective tool in discouraging other Catholics from joining up. While in the 1970s the IRA sometimes also killed Protestant civilians in tit-for-tat operations (the most notorious being the Kingsmill massacre), and, where it killed members of the security forces in border areas, may have preferred to kill Protestant farmers' eldest sons, little acknowledgment has been made of its targeting of Catholic RUC men.
Nowadays, of course, a death related to political conflict is a relatively rare occurrence in Northern Ireland, but many people, particularly those in interface areas or ethnic minorities living in working-class Protestant redoubts, still find themselves intimidated or attacked. The Alliance Party office on the Upper Newtownards Road has been bombed or vandalised many times as a result of the flag protest whirlwind unleashed by its Westminster rivals the DUP — precisely because it reached out to the other side.
It remains to be seen if anything will come out of the incident with the Líofa website — probably not. But, as ever in Northern Ireland, the nagging fear of being targeted for being different remains.
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November 24, 2014, 10:21 am
The Irish Times reports on a court case involving the Irish Revenue Commissioners, who have been taken to task over sending out leaflets in English only, despite having a statutory duty to communicate with the public bilingually.
That of course comes as no surprise, since much of the Republic's support for Irish is little more than lip-service (perhaps small wonder given the fact that Bunreacht na hÉireann contains so many provisions not only unenforced but incapable of enforcement). What is perhaps more shocking is the brazen sophistry with which the Revenue Commissioners' barrister is defending the case."Ben Ó Floinn, for Revenue, said the parcels sent to 1.7 million households last year were not communications with the public in general because each information parcel was addressed to a specific citizen, whose name was written clearly on the envelope along with the words 'Private and Confidential'."
Ultimately some of that brazenness may owe something to the fact that Fine Gael are in power, the party that in the late 1970s removed the requirement for civil servants to have Irish (and therefore, among other things, to be able to communicate with the public bilingually), a setback from which the language has never recovered. More recently, it even attempted to make Irish an optional subject at secondary school (while English, presumably, would have remained compulsory).
In recent months senior Fine Gael politicians past and present have argued that the Easter Rising was unnecessary and counterproductive, its participants traitors to the Irish people. Like many aspects of Irish history, that is eminently debatable. What is not debatable, however, is that the vast majority of the generation that founded the State, including both sides in the Civil War and moderate Anglicans such as Douglas Hyde, considered the Irish language an awful lot more important than Fine Gael in 2014.
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November 24, 2014, 10:27 am
Wee Ginger Dug has a guest post from Clear Contrair Spirit over on his blog.
While Northern Ireland produces huge numbers of informed and motivated people when it comes to Irish, one is struck again and again that Scotland simply has a better class of activist when it comes to Scots, including those whose motivation is avowedly as much political as cultural. Issues of class, nation and both internal and external hybridity are clearly and concisely dealt with in the piece, as is the nexus between linguistic and political nationalism, which in Wales, Spirit rightly points out, has proven as limiting as it is inspirational.
Just one wee point, though. We are told that the Scots word for independence is "unthirldom". That's as may be, but is it actually a word?
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November 24, 2014, 10:33 am
The Guardian has an interesting article on the unfortunate Gregory Campbell, who has evidently received plausible death threats after compounding his "curry my yoghurt" comments at the St. Trinian's Annual Jamboree (sorry, DUP conference).
In both the strapline and the text, it states that an Irish Language Act would give "Gaelic" (by which the Blether Region assumes that the Grauniad means the Irish variety) equal status to English. There are in fact many ways in which Irish could be promoted short of equal status to English. The Irish-language community would favour a rights-based Act, while the probable compromise would be something more akin to the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005, which promotes Scottish Gaelic through a national plan.
The proposals from Pobal, probably much stronger than any final Act, mention "equal validity", "resolute action" to promote the language, and providing services "to the maximum extent practicable". That doesn't sound like equal status to the Blether Region — and it may scare off some more moderate Protestants to suggest otherwise.
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November 26, 2014, 10:00 am
Gerry Adams's recent comments about "bastards" and "Trojan horses" have attracted widespread comment. It is a fact of life in Northern Ireland, and of politics everywhere, that quite a lot of the people consider quite a lot of their elected representatives bastards quite a lot of the time. Indeed, that would apply as much to Gerry Adams himself as to anyone else. In this case, it seems clear enough that he was referring to Gregory Campbell and people like him rather than Unionists in general. Many Irish-speakers and Catholics, the overt and covert targets of Mr. Campbell's childishness, will share that view — even if they may well think it peculiarly impolitic to air it in public.
On the other hand, it is difficult to find any excuse for Mr. Adams's comments about the pursuit of equality being a "Trojan horse" intended to "break" his opponents. Surely equality should be sought by and for everyone whatever their background, even if they have trouble agreeing about what that might actually constitute. The phrase is also alarmingly reminiscent of Unionist criticism of the civil rights movement at the start of the Troubles. The only potential mitigating factor that the Blether Region can think of is that Mr. Adams may have been trying to assuage dissident Republican sentiment through martial hyperbole. Whatever the truth, it seems certain that the phrase, like "bullet in the freedom struggle" before it, will be used against Nationalist Irish-speakers for many years to come.
As an aside, the Blether Region recalls that 20 years or so ago the Conservative Prime Minister John Major made similar "bastard" comments about the Eurosceptics in his own party. At that time, the BBC was quite content to write out the offending word in full. Not so on this occasion, and one cannot but consider the resulting splay of asterisks a bizarre concession to prissy evangelicals and their topsy-turvy concerns.
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November 28, 2014, 11:13 am
John McCallister, writing in the Bel-Tel, makes the obvious and very reasonable point that Gregory Campbell's culinary satirisation of Irish might equally well have been applied to Scottish Gaelic (in Argyll, they do indeed say "Gun robh math agad", though the Blether Region is not aware of how they like their yoghurt).
Scottish Gaelic (in Northern Ireland known as "Scots Gaylick") is of course not particularly associated with Nationalism, and a substantial minority of its speakers stand out because of their adherence to the tenets of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, a staunchly Protestant sect whose name presumably inspired Rev. Ian Paisley when he founded his own Free Presbyterian Church. Indeed, anyone with an ounce of knowledge of Scottish history will recognise Campbell (Caimbeul, or "twisted mouth") as a surname that is as Protestant as it is Gaelic.
A pity that politics seem to have coloured Mr. Campbell's attitude to his own heritage.
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December 4, 2014, 11:30 am
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Ian Malcolm has an interesting piece over at the Belfast Telegraph on the troubled Protestant relationship with Irish, tracing his co-religionists' alienation to infiltration of the language movement by Republicans in the years leading up to the Easter Rising and pointing out that some iconic Nationalist figures such as Daniel O'Connell were in favour of a wholesale switch to English.
The word "piece", interestingly enough, is thought by some scholars to be of Gaulish, i.e. Celtic, origin, cognate with Irish cuid and thus neatly demonstrating the difference between P- and Q-Celtic.
That could hardly be said of another word chosen by Malcolm himself:"What really interests my students is what I call 'living Irish' - that's the language that's around us all in our everyday lives. My own favourite word is 'skitter', an epithet often applied to me when I was a wean.
It literally translates as 's****'. You'll also encounter it in the context 'I've a quare dose of the skitters', something one might endure after an ill-advised feed of curry and yoghurt."
The Concise Ulster Dictionary is very clear that skitter is of Scots and English dialectal origin. The Irish equivalent of the word, sciotar, makes no appearance in the magnum opus compiled by Father Dinneen during breaks from his detective work. There is the verb sciotaim, meaning clip or shorten, while a woman in a skimpy dress is termed a sciotóg. There is also the past participle sciotuighthe and sciotán, a word for a dart. But sciotar there is none. Irish influence seems to be limited to reinforcement. There is no need to invoke the substrate when the word is so well attested in more obvious places. Indeed, even if we had no other evidence to go on, the fact that, as Malcolm accepts, the word has something to do with excrement strongly suggests a Germanic origin. It is true that the word is included in Ó Dónaill's 1977 dictionary, but then so is that other Scots and English dialectal word craic.
That's not to say that there is no Irish influence on Ulster English. Indeed, there is rather a lot. Only yesterday evening the Blether Region watched a programme about the campaigning newspaper editor Jim McDowell in which the film's subject mentioned someone who, if its memory serves it correctly, "had a drop on him"— a clear lift from the Irish. Just as in France, however, few words of Celtic origin are heard in everyday speech — even if the French still count in twenties and talk about quatre-vingt-dix, while their Swiss and Belgian neighbours favour the dourly Latin nonante.
The skitter episode, on the other hand, makes the Blether Region want to say, "Would you ever use a dictionary, y'ould skitter, ye!"
Just to prove that it can annoy everyone equally, the Blether Region reports the following. Last week it attended a very informative lecture by Dr. Jacob King of Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba, who had an interesting tale to tell about the town of Kilwinning in Ayrshire. In the olden days it was common to use hypocoristic forms of saints' names incorporating a possessive pronoun, an Irish example being Mo-Báeth.
Although Gaelic has not been spoken in the area around Kilwinning for many hundreds of years, research revealed that the original version of the name had been preserved in the speech of some of the last Gaels on the Isle of Arran. Like Mo-Báeth, it involved a possessive pronoun, this time for the second person singular. Soon after bilingual signs were erected at the local train station welcoming people to "Cill D'Fhinnein", Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba was summarily called to account for the name that it had researched and asked to provide an explanation of the favoured etymology. Kilwinning is in a part of the west of Scotland where sectarianism lingers even if Gaelic doesn't, and more than one local had interpreted the Gaelic name as "Kill da Fenian"!
And with that the Blether Region is off to eat its piece, or as one might say in Irish, "Ith do chuid" ...
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December 17, 2014, 11:15 am
The High Court has dismissed an appeal against Belfast City Council's decision not to allow the erection of bilingual street signs despite an absolute majority of residents supporting the move.
This is disappointing for several reasons. First, it maintains a superfluous democratic test in something that is obviously a human-rights issue. Secondly, even when it does so, it is basically undemocratic. As the Belfast Telegraph put it:"It is understood that out of 92 eligible residents 52 [57% of residents, or 98% of respondents] confirmed they wanted Irish signs, with only one opposed.
However, the remaining 39 did not respond to the survey."
The requirement for a weighted majority or minimum turnout, while having some currency when applied to the internal (constitutional) workings of organisations, is a rare bird indeed when it comes to elections. The only other instance that the Blether Region can recall was the 1979 referendum on Scottish devolution, which is now widely regarded as having thereby been rigged. Odd that such rules seem to be applied only against Nationalists. If they were instituted in England, one wonders how many elections for mayors or crime commissioners would be regarded as valid — or, for that matter, local councils.
The bizarre gerrymandering of requiring a weighted majority sneaks through because of the wishy-washy wording of section 11 of the Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) (Northern Ireland) Order 1995, which requires that councils "have regard to any views on the matter expressed by the occupiers of premises in that street"— but without laying down how they should do it. As far as the Blether Region is aware, no Nationalist-majority council moves the goalposts by requiring a weighted majority or minimum turnout; by adopting a policy that two-thirds of respondents should be in favour, Belfast effectively does both. In any case, a weighted majority is clearly a measure not of demand but of antipathy. If demand were being measured, a much lower percentage would be regarded as admissible, perhaps 5% or 10%. Catering for minority languages, after all, is always about the minority.
The Blether Region hopes that Nationalist councils will now go ahead and reduce their own criteria below 50% in order to encourage the courts to make a binding determination on what is fair.
While the Unionist reaction to bilingual signage is of course predictable, the Blether Region has been taken aback by the sophistical contortions of the Alliance Party, which takes a confrontational and doctrinaire attitude to gay cakes (remember: the whole incident may have been staged) while failing the equality test abysmally with regard to Irish. On balance, the Blether Region is in favour of gay cakes too, but that support is tempered by the knowledge that an evangelical Christian baker asked to craft icing in support of gay marriage may feel that he is being asked not to tolerate something but to lend it his active support. It is clearly a borderline case. It seems that the Alliance Party is willing aggressively to promote equality issues shared with England while treating those of the Celtic fringe as a sectarian breach of the peace (and yes, believe it or not, they do actually call it "sectarian").
It is an odd sort of concern for shared space that predicates itself on the exclusion of someone's language from public life — and one obviously cooked up at some remove from the mainstream, multi-layered Britishness that its supporters apparently so admire.
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December 18, 2014, 11:58 am
The Ulster Herald reports on the language policy of the new Fermanagh and Omagh District Council, which "will see the new supercouncil embrace both Irish and English on letterheads, signage and on vehicles such as bin lorries".
The Blether Region thinks that the new council got it right. Unionists on the shadow body had backed a trilingual arrangement including Ulster Scots, but there have never been any Scots-speaking communities in Fermanagh — and few enough in Tyrone — and in any case some of the versions of the local dialect used in Omagh before have been ludicrously offensive to native speakers. Their intervention seems, as so often with the leid on this side of the Sheuch, to have been a calculated water-muddying exercise.
That wasn't the only daftness, however. One section of the article caught the Blether Region's eye and can't be left without comment."During the meeting, Sinn Féin stated that the party's preferred position was using the Irish language only on signage [...] agreeing to the inclusion of English as a compromise."
While that may have been said mid-flyte, arguing that signs should be Irish-only is every bit as bad as arguing that the language should be excluded. English-speakers have human rights too, after all. Not only that, but doing so confirms every cliché about Irish being symbolic and used mainly as a territorial marker (in this case, marking ownership of the council), as well as making it far less likely that progress will be made by language activists in areas farther east in which those with Irish-speaking relatives form a distinct minority. Indeed, since most Nationalists are monoglot English-speakers, one sure result of an Irish-only policy would be to make many of them line up behind its Unionist opposite.
People who use the language in such a way are addicted to conflict and need to have a long, hard think.
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January 9, 2015, 11:30 am
Among the traditional rites of every New Year is the annual release of Cabinet papers subject to the 30-year rule.
In Northern Ireland this has a particular importance, since the years in question cover the Troubles — and only about half of them have been released thus far.
This time around it was the turn of 1985-86, and it's astonishing both how much and how little has changed in the interim."In January 1986, the Irish government presented its views on 'The Irish Language in Northern Ireland'.
The four-page typescript argued that 'the Irish language is central to the identity and tradition of Irish nationalists'.
The paper called for 'speedy action' in four specific areas: place names; the use of Irish in official business; an Irish language question in the 1991 Northern Ireland census and support for Irish language publications and events."
According to the BBC interpretation, "The then Secretary of State Tom King had accepted the right of local residents to decide on bilingual street names." Yet the Irish Government had in fact been asking for street names to be decided by a majority of residents. As we have seen, the actual wording of the resulting change means that Unionist-controlled councils are free to require super-majorities— and to count those who fail to respond as having voted against, an interesting form of democracy of which Londonderry Corporation would no doubt have been proud.
Needless to say, there is no obligation on Government bodies to hire Irish-speakers to deal with the public, and before the courts the use of all languages other than English is explicitly banned.
A question on Irish is, however, now included in the Census, and there is support for publications and events, albeit in an unsatisfactorily arbitrary and impermanent manner.
Most tellingly, Irish officials pointed out a home truth to NIO staff:"As long as we refuse to move, Sinn Féin would have a valuable stick with which to beat us and, perhaps more importantly, the SDLP."
The definition of madness is sometimes said to be doing the same thing again and again despite knowing that it doesn't work. In Northern Ireland language politics, the particular form taken by that madness is to complain that Irish is being abused by Republicans and then summarily refuse reasonable demands on that basis, thus making it, and often its speakers and their relatives, all the more Republican.
Even in this New Year, there seems little sign of that vicious circle being broken.
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January 15, 2015, 12:55 pm
DCAL Minister Carál Ní Chuilín has confirmed that her Department will be publishing an Irish Language Bill at the beginning of February as part of a public consultation.
The German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt once wrily remarked that the people with the most dangerous view of the world were those who had never actually viewed it, and the legislative proposals have already attracted the ire of the usual suspects — far in advance of their actually having been made available to the public.
On last night's Newsline, the blinkers were very much in metaphorical evidence, with disgraced former Minister Nelson McCausland gaily denouncing the unread (and partly unwritten) legislation. In the view of Concubhar Mac Liatháin, McCausland's pronouncements on the subject have referenced the "ancient language of the 1980s".
Indeed, things have moved on quite considerably since then, and with a quarter of the population now voting Sinn Féin, one would have to have a very good reason not to grant them the inherently reasonable wish to have the same linguistic rights as Gaels in Scotland (indeed, SDLP voters are hardly likely to be against it either). In the genteelly perverse world of Ulster Unionism, however, the very fact that Shinners are so numerous is a sound reason not to play ball, since Nationalist voters embody the demographic and therefore political precariousness of Northern Ireland. Hardly the time for "Ulster" to go all Southern, they say.
Of course, Mr. McCausland's retro view of the world was not helped by Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, who referred to those who had struggled for the right to use the language in prison — omitting to mention that they were not in prison for speaking Irish and were partly using it as a device to prevent warders understanding them.
There is no doubt that McCausland, for all his claims to the contrary, understands perfectly well that calls to promote Irish are based on genuine sentiment, however. Why else would he suggest that Ms Ní Chuilín was endeavouring to please her party's "base"?
That said, the timing of bringing forward such a Bill, with a Westminster election on the cards, is interesting too. Could it be that Sinn Féin intends to follow the Blether Region's advice and let Westminster, perhaps in the form of a Labour/SNP coalition, fulfil the pledges of a previous Administration?
Or do they just want to make the Unionists look bad at election time and hoover up the votes of Gaeilgeoirí one last time?
We'll soon see.
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January 19, 2015, 10:11 am
Brian Walker has a post over at Slugger O'Toole on the proposed Irish language Bill that must count as one of the most distinctly ill-informed ever published there. Not only are the author's conclusions thoroughly skew-whiff, he appears not to have done some basic research.
Take, for example, this:"The political cases for the Celtic languages in all four jurisdictions of these islands reached a dead end long ago."
From that the Blether Region infers that Mr. Walker is contending that the promotion of the languages in question has been hobbled by an unnecessary and self-limiting association with political Nationalism. That is a valid view. Yet in the case of Scotland, any association with Nationalism is pretty much non-existent, and Gaelic enjoys cross-party support (as, to a large extent, does Welsh in Wales, which has trousered many victories over the years). Indeed, the Blether Region often wishes that Scottish Gaelic were more "Nationalist", since it would probably be doing rather better.
Even Mr. Walker's arithmetic is out. The Celtic languages in the various "jurisdictions of these islands" would have to include Irish in the Republic, Irish in the North, Scottish Gaelic in Scotland, Welsh in Wales, Cornish in "England", and Manx Gaelic on the Isle of Man. That's six jurisdictions.
And it goes on."Is it not obvious that furthering the use of Irish in the courts and official documents can conflict with the Charter’s 'overriding purpose' which is cultural?"
No, Mr. Walker, it ain't. The purpose is of course cultural, but the motto is "use it or lose it", and that means creating rights in various domains in order to encourage folk to speak their language. In that regard, yours are the views of a beginner. It is also not immediately apparent how someone who had actually read the Charter's provisions could postulate such a contradiction."I note that in the Republic, while Irish was dropped as a qualification for wider public service decades ago, it remains a university qualification for admission. Despite this according to the 2011 census 94,000 people reported using Irish as a daily language outside of the education system, and 1.3 million reported using it at least occasionally in or out of school – slightly up on the census of 2006."
That is a perversion of the truth, as the following, from the website of the University of Limerick, demonstrates."Irish is not part of the minimum requirements. The language requirement is 'Irish or another language and English'. Therefore Irish may be used to satisfy the second language requirement instead of French/German/Spanish etc."
It is clear from the above that there is no special requirement to have Irish; rather, a qualification in Irish is quite rightly recognised on the same terms as one in modern foreign languages of the Germanic and Romance families — which, for English-speakers, are actually a sight less difficult to learn."In Scotland where Gaelic has competition as an indigenous language, only 58,000 people identify themselves as Gaelic speakers. The Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act of 2005 established the Gaelic development body, Bòrd na Gàidhlig, (BnG), to secure 'the status of the Gaelic language as an official language of Scotland commanding equal respect to the English language and to promote the use and understanding of Gaelic.'.
Who really believes these pieties will produce the desired results?"
Well, those who actually pay attention to such things know that the last Census found that the ongoing decline in the numbers of Gaelic-speakers in Scotland had pretty much been stemmed. Barring an outbreak of Ebola on North Uist, we can also be absolutely sure that the next Census, if there is one, will show an increase in speaker numbers because of younger people passing through the rapidly expanding Gaelic-medium education sector. That's not to say that all is rosy and that Gaelic is not still declining as a community language in many areas, but as far as speaker numbers go, which is Mr. Walker's chosen statistic, he is simply wrong.
And what would happen if there were no state promotion of minoritised languages in case it offended Unionists (which in Scotland it doesn't)? Well, some commentators have argued that in Northern Ireland some of those Unionists might eventually re-discover an interest in Irish — at which point they would presumably call for state promotion."Just about the worst way to encourage the use of Irish is to try to make it a compulsory choice in official documents."
The Blether Region's mind was thoroughly boggled at the oxymoronic concept of a "compulsory choice", which may say more about Mr. Walker's attitudes than it does about promoting Irish. Depending on the state of play, there may of course be better ways towards the desired end, but it is a fact that translated documents do help minority languages. How could they possibly not?
From Mr. Walker's piece, the Blether Region concludes that a) the author thinks it's acceptable to mouth off about Celtic languages without researching the subject properly because, ah well, it's all political anyway and b) he has not bothered to ask, and may not actually have, a suitably qualified (Nationalist?) friend to read over his dippy pronouncements before publication.
Sigh.
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January 21, 2015, 9:39 am
The level of ignorance exhibited with regard to linguistics never ceases to amaze the Blether Region. Some people, for example, remark on the prevalence of "English" words in Scots poetry, not realising that a host of lexemes of impeccable Lowland Scots pedigree share an origin with, and are identical to, everyday Standard English words. Indeed, given the two varieties' common origins and the existence of a latter-day linguistic continuum between them, some have even called for English in Scotland to be renamed "Scots" on that basis — regardless of the actual "Scotsness" of the forms employed. Appealingly Scandinavian though that strategy is, given that so many other countries across the world use English but without resorting to such sleight of hand, it may be doomed to failure.
In the field of Celtic linguistics, there are those who refer to the native language of Wales as "Gaelic", not realising that there are actually two groups of modern Celtic languages, only one of which — that of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man — may actually be described that way.
The latest example comes in the form of identical Sinn Féin press releases published verbatim in the local press. So it is that both Cathal McLaughlin in the Ballymoney Times and Barra Ó Muirí in the Newry Times make the following involuntary blooper."Gaelic speakers in Scotland, Wales and in the rest of this island are already afforded the protection of language acts."
So much for their linguistic knowledge (or rather that of the Sinn Féin press office and local journalists). On a political level, of course, they are entirely right. Northern Ireland is clearly the odd one out with regard to promoting indigenous languages, and to argue that racism is too big to fight — as some people do who should know better — is hardly an argument in favour of lending it one's support.
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January 27, 2015, 11:55 am
The Blether Region was very taken with a version of "Green Grow the Rashes" by the late and sorely missed Michael Marra being linked to for Burns Night the other day. It's a well-known piece the world over, and Pater Blether once claimed that its popularity among Anglophone Americans was the origin of the word "Gringo".
Whether that's true or no, what we can be sure of is that the piece was translated into German by J.A. Barth in 1839 as "Die Mädchen". The Blether Region wasn't entirely happy with that version, which takes a rather rigid approach to rhyme at the expense of accuracy. Thereupon it decided to get together with Mrs. Blether, as sometimes happens, and tweak it. Evidently "Grün wachsen Binsen, O" sounds rather ridiculous to modern German ears — although still better than "Grün sind die Auen, O".
The final version, subject to much negotiation, was this.
Grün sind die Wiesen
Chor. - Grün sind die Wiesen, OGrün sind die Wiesen, ODie schönsten Stunden, die ich hab'Verbring' ich mit den Mädchen, O.
Ein Weilen kurz und voller Sorg'Und kaum ein zartes Stündchen, O:Was hätt' der Mann vom Leben selbstJa, gäb' es nicht die Mädchen, O?Grün sind, usw.
Wie mancher jagt sein Leben langNach Gold, das ist zum Scherzen, O!Und auch sein gelber SonnenscheinLässt kalt das Eis am Herzen, O.Grün sind, usw.
Schling' ich um Liebchens weiße BrustDen Arm in süßen Stunden, O:Sind alle Sorgen meilenweitVon meiner Stirn verschwunden, O.Grün sind, usw.
Dass kluge Köpfe Frauen schmäh'n,Das halt' ich für ein Märchen, O:Denn Salomon, der Weisheit Sohn,Der liebte auch die Mädchen, O!Grün sind, usw.
Die alte Weberin NaturWob sie aus feinstem Fädchen, O;Mit Lehrlingshand schuf sie den Mann,Und erst danach die Mädchen, O.Grün sind, usw.
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February 3, 2015, 10:15 am
DCAL has finally got around to publishing its strategies for Irish and Ulster Scots. The former's cover design is emerald green, while the latter's is royal blue — thus perpetuating unfortunate ethnic stereotypes that can only damage the speech varieties in question. In the case of Ulster Scots, the stereotyping is compounded by the fact that the document also covers "heritage" and "culture", matters likely to be of little interest to the quarter (or, more likely, third) of speakers that is CNR, and that may well alienate them.
It is also interesting, to say the least, that the strategies are being issued in bilingual format. When the drafts were issued for consultation, they were in English only. Many of the submissions made on Ulster Scots, as those familiar with the Northern Ireland situation would expect, lamented the obvious fact that so much of DCAL's translation output is literally incomprehensible to native users of the leid.
Indeed, it's also incomprehensible to the Blether Region, who has spent many years studying Scots, the reason being that the people who promote such parasitic cant — the leading clique of the Ulster-Scots Language Society — live in a world of their own, browbeating and overruling any fig-leaf native speakers whom they "consult" while simultaneously making vexatious complaints against people whose own translation skills are far superior.
It also cultivates political and bureaucratic support by claiming that it is the "representative" organisation for Ulster Scots. The USLS may in fact be representative of British-Israelites or unwitting former MI5 assets, but representative of ordinary speakers it clearly ain't.
Now that the strategy has been issued in its final form, it is bilingual — with the English alongside a totally inept USLS-style translation.
The Blether Region has a modest proposal to make on that front. Anyone rendering an official document in Ulster Scots and being paid for it out of public funds should be required to append their name and e-mail address to the published form of whatever they produce. The stipulation should be made a condition of their getting the work.
Auld Firm colours, ethnic packages, textual diarrhoea — so it goes. Although it is all redolent of some sort of strategy, one does wonder whose, and quite what it is intended to achieve.
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February 16, 2015, 12:14 pm
The Blether Region is tempted to compare certain recent pronouncements on how to promote Irish with a particularly pompous and ill-informed kind of gardening advice: "Of course I think it's important that you continue growing your geraniums, and I fully support your right to do so — just as long as you remember to do it without our light and water."
The latest is from Brian Walker, who writes thus on Slugger O'Toole:"Is the Irish Language Bill progressive? Although no doubt based on human rights arguments, in my book the institutional use of Irish in the public arena is profoundly reactionary, the politics of the 19th century. It runs directly counter to the creative adoption of the language for cultural enrichment and should be opposed regardless of the sectarian attitudes which coincide."
The Blether Region was pretty shocked to read that, and one might charitably suspect that Mr. Walker was reacting to some person-to-person abuse, which the Internet, wonderful in other ways, unfortunately facilitates. But is the dichotomy he posits a real one?
Not if one reads the academic literature, which is quite clear about the fact that no one ever saved a language — including for cultural use — by not using it, the state of affairs to which an enforced absence from public life would undoubtedly lead (in mitigation, and in the context somewhat bizarrely, Mr. Walker supports the use of Irish place-names on signage).
But what is the origin of his hypothesis, which seems also to be shared by other Unionist commentators? Well, partly it's because people don't talk to their neighbours, and since those who choose to live their lives, or part of them, through the medium of Irish are a minority even within the CNR community, it's hardly suprising that their views are misconstrued and their acumen ignored.
Partly, too, it is a product of the febrile nature of Northern Ireland, where cultural packages predominate and political commentators feel it is their duty to give their views on matters not considered particularly political in more normal societies.
Finally, it must also be due in some measure to the nature of Unionism, which historically subjugated culture to politics, ignoring a shared Gaelic inheritance and inventing in its stead a marching culture intended to keep what might otherwise have been momentary political affiliations frozen permanently.
Presumably the difference between supporting "institutional use" and "cultural enrichment" is thought somehow to mirror the political divide between Sinn Féin and the SDLP, and superficially there might be mileage in that argument. It is of course possible to use the cúpla focal in the Assembly without knowing Irish particularly well, or to Gaelicise one's name before becoming fluent in it. Indeed, it's even possible to make mercurial decisions about the promotion of the language on the sole basis of whether the structures are "all-Ireland". On the other hand, it's unlikely that there is any substantial group of self-denying "cultural" Irish enthusiasts who are fluent in the language and use it daily but feel that it should be excluded from the public arena.
And on that not only Sinn Féin and the SDLP but any Gaeilgeoir is likely to agree — including those of a Unionist background. And, of course, one doesn't need to be able to speak Irish to be in favour of it.
In that regard, it's worth looking at levels of public support for providing services through Irish: 70% in the South, and 54% in the North (with only 26% opposed).
If it's "profoundly reactionary", it's also a kind of Gaelic chauvinism that a substantial proportion of the PUL community doesn't seem particularly concerned about.
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A work colleague recently commented to the Blether Region on the strength of some people's rejection of Irish, having watched a particularly animated television discussion on the subject the previous evening. Overall the Blether Region got the impression that the colleague's antipathy to Unionists — or at least the shouty, grandstanding kind — was greater than his love of Gaeilge.
That view was confirmed when he added that he would rather learn French himself.
The obvious response to such comments is "Well, why don't you, then?"
After all, listing random speech varieties whose cultivation might profit the common weal more than Irish is a favourite pastime of politicians and journalists, often — as with Lindy McDowell's call for teenagers to learn Mandarin— with little appreciation of the hurdles that the more exotic tongues might present to learners.
But of course, if those same people were themselves linguists, they would have rather more of an idea about all that.
The disturbing corollary of this is that the Blether Region's love of minority languages may to some extent be down to its being a good practical linguist itself. Indeed, the more one thinks about it, the plainer it becomes. Perhaps it is merely boring the cloth-eared majority with its attempts to universalise a niche interest.
What we can be sure about, however, is that many of today's Irish-speakers are such because they attended Irish-medium education, regardless of any innate linguistic ability or otherwise.
At the moment there are 5,000 children attending such schools. And yes, some of them might even be learning French.
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