E 2.6: The Irish of Tourmakeady, Co. Mayo: a phonemic study

by Seán de Búrca

1958 (repr. 1970, 2007). x + 171 pp.

€20

ISBN 0 901282 49 9

Preface

The present work deals with the spoken Irish of a narrow tract extending along the west side of Lough Mask, between it and the mountains, from its northern tip to the border of Co. Galway. Part of the area was included in Co. Galway until the boundary was adjusted in 1898.

In a somewhat wider sense, this dialect belongs to what may be termed the Irish of Middle Connacht.[1] It may be added that Middle Connacht is the only major region relatively unaffected by one or other of those two great linguistic movements - spreading respectively from the North-East and from the South - that have largely moulded the history of spoken Irish since the i3th century.[2] Indeed, observers have been struck by the apparent closeness of the dialect to the classical form of Modern Irish; a fidelity that is all the more remarkable because unlike Northern or Southern Irish, that of Middle Connacht has depended almost solely on oral tradition ever since the fall of the classical order, over three centuries ago. Evidently the old tradition was transmitted orally with considerable success. [3]

Among previous investigators of Middle Connacht Irish mention must be made of John Molloy, a native of the Tuam area, who 'is worthy of special mention as being the author of the first Grammar of Irish based for the most part on the language of the people'. [4] His grammar, based on his own dialect and containing variations recorded from fellow-students in the Irish College in Paris, appeared in 1867. At length, towards the close of the century Ireland began to come within the scope of European dialectology, and two distinguished continental scholars, F. N. Finck and l'Abbé Rousselot, made investigations of Western Irish. [5] The latter made a palatogram study of the Irish of South Mayo in 1895; his informant being Rev. Stephen Walsh, a native of the Neale, who was then a student at the Irish College in Paris. The results of the inquiry were published four years later, in a lengthy article including upwards of eighty palatograms. Subsequent students of our dialect included Prof. Tomás Ó Máille, whose Urlabhraidheacht, published in 1927, contains the name of Pádraig Ó Meadhraigh - a native of Glensaul - among the list of informants.

The present century has seen the diffusion of the phoneme theory, together with its further development by linguists such as Trubetzkoy in Europe and Bloomfield in America. In this, as in the wider fields of language and communication, progress continues on both sides of the Atlantic: a voluminous literature exists. As compared with phonetics, phonemics involves the further step of sorting the sounds, of identifying the relevant units into which phonetic material is organized in a particular dialect or language. In this study an attempt is made to provide a phonemic inventory of the dialect of Tourmakeady; to examine its structure in the light of modern phonemics on the one hand, and by comparison with early modern Irish on the other. The method of treatment is based, to a large extent, on the one already successfully used in the monographs on Irish dialects published by the School of Celtic Studies in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; in the present work, however, attention is devoted to such matters as phoneme distribution and syllabic structure, while extensive use is made of the commutation test in proving the status of phonemes.

It need hardly be said that no investigator of a living dialect can expect to exhaust his subject: dialectologists are familiar with such variables as the rate of speech, the style of speech, the speech of different age-groups, the realization of phonemes in relation to strong or weak stress, in relation to word or utterance, etc. Problems such as those await further study.

Tourmakeady itself, although the scene of strong anglicizing efforts by landlords and others in the 19th century, was entirely Irish-speaking at the beginning of this century, when an Irish college was established there. Irish is still a living language there, though the circumstances accompanying its use are changing at an ominous rate: many customs, pastimes, and beliefs, that were once part and parcel of the Irish speaker's world, are now moribund; and the innovations that replace them frequently involve foreign phrases and an alien vocabulary. The fact that it remains an economically under-developed area, with a high rate of emigration, has the twofold effect of reducing the number of speakers and increasing the import of English.

I should like to thank Prof. M. A. O'Brien, Director of the School of Celtic Studies, Prof. Heinrich Wagner, of the University of Basle and Dr. Brian Ó Cuív, of University College, Dublin for their helpful comments and advice. Prof. Myles Dillon kindly read the proofs, and made several useful suggestions. I am grateful also to the speakers, to whom much is due for their attachment to a time-honoured heritage in the domain of Partraighe an tSléibhe.

S. de B.

Footnotes to the Preface

1. Cf. Urlabhraidheacht, § 472.
2. See Irish Dialects, pp. 189, 246, 263 ; Clare Island Survey, III p. 7 ; Urlabhraidheacht, p. 135.
3. In his well-known anthology of Irish poetry, published in 1831, Hardiman gives portion of a Fenian poem, the Lay of Ben Bulben taken with several others, from the recital of a native of Partry. He writes: 'These metrical fragments, to the number of several thousand verses, had been committed to memory by the reciter in his early youth, amidst his native hills, where they have been transmitted from sire to son through countless generations'. See Irish Minstrelsy, II, p. 385.
4. Irish Dialects, p. 13.
5. Noteworthy also in this connection is the name of G. Dottin, who was, moreover, a pioneer in the comparative study of Irish dialects. See Revue Celtique, xiv, xvi, xx, xxi.