30 IRISH SPELLING 



Cuileannain, I shall be glad to help any of you who wish 

 to read his glossary, and the poems attributed to him. 

 But you will find that he does not spell like the Gaelic 

 League, the only editions are printed in the ordinary 

 roman type, and to appreciate his style you will first have 

 to study a form of Irish about as different from that of 

 the twentieth century as Latin is from French. In fact 

 this talk about the ancient literature has nothing to do 

 with present-day problems. 



Objection 5. " You will destroy the history of the 

 language, and the etymology of its words." 



We might as well say, " Do not put a bridge over the 

 Liffey, or you will destroy its geography/' So far as the 

 objection has any meaning at all, it introduces a subject 

 which ought to be kept distinct from the practical question 

 of spelling. We don't speak in order to show the etymology 

 of the words we are using. Why should we write in order 

 to do so ? I have already shown what a burden this craze 

 for scholarship may become. Even if it could by any 

 possibility attain its purpose, is there not something absurd 

 in this learned affectation which would make every line 

 in our prose and poetry, in our books and papers, and in 

 our private and commercial correspondence a gratuitous 

 lesson in the history of the language ? Of course the 

 attempt fails. No one who takes etymology seriously 

 will stop at Modern Irish. The first question will be, 

 " Does the word occur in Old or Middle Irish ? " It is 

 idle to discuss the origin of At\if till you get back to 

 afrithissi. No reader could guess from the spelling -o^A-ntm 

 that the word is a compound of 5111 orh. For etymology we 

 need all the help that can be got from the earlier forms 

 of the language, and from cognate languages. Etymology 

 is an interesting subject, but its interest is academic, not 

 popular, and I cannot deal with it now. Otherwise I 

 might attempt to show that in tracing the history of the 

 language, particularly for the last five hundred years, we 

 have to rely largely upon the blunders of ignorant scribes 

 or on deliberate simplifications like those of the early 



