840 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION n. 



and writing have been commonly practised ; yet Gaelic still survives, wliilst Welsh 

 not only survives but flourishes. It is therefore simply incredible that such a 

 complete transformation as that postulated could have taken place in three or four 

 centuries in an age when writing and literature can be hardly said to have existed 

 in these islands. 



Let us now see under what conditions does one race or people borrow the 

 language of another. Slaves of course take over the language of their masters, but 

 we have to consider (1) the adoption by a conquering people of the language of the 

 conquered, (2) the adoption by a conquered people of that of their conquerors, and 

 (3) the adoption by a people themselves uuconquered of the language of their neigh- 

 bours. Under what conditions do the conquerors adopt the language of the con- 

 quered .'' Ireland affords us at least two certain e.xamples. Cromwell planted large 

 bodies of his English soldiers in Tipperary,butthey hadno English women, and there- 

 fore took as wives the daughters of the land, who spoke the Irish language. From 

 this union resulted a splendid offspring, who spoke chiefly the language of their 

 Irish mothers, and not their fathers' English. So it came to pass that in a single 

 generation the progeny of Cromwell's Puritans were in language as Irish as the 

 purest blooded aboriginal of Munster. Yet this adoption of the Irish language by 

 the great majority of the children of these settlers took place in spite of the effect 

 ■which the reading of books in English must have exerted to counteract the 

 tendency to adopt the Irish language. Let us go back five hundred years in Irish 

 history and we find exactly the same process going on. The Normans who 

 followed Strongbow into Ireland, like their captain, frequently married native 

 women. It is a matter of common knowledge that the Anglo-Norman settlers 

 in a short time became Hihendores ij^sis Hibernts. 



These and other examples too numerous to cite here prove that the children of 

 bodies of conquerors who marry the women of the land will have an inevitable 

 tendency to follow their mothers' speech. We may also lay down as a solid factor 

 in the tendency of the conqueror to merge into the conquered the isolation of the 

 conquerors from their original homes and from the great mass of those who speak 

 the same language. 



Next we come to the case where the conquerors bring with them some women 

 of their own race. This of course helps to keep their own language alive, as a 

 certain number of the children speak it as their mothers' tongue. But even 

 in these circumstances the invaders are liable to drop their own language and 

 practically adopt that of the natives. Thus the Northmen who settled on 

 the coast of France gradually abandoned their national tongue for French, though 

 modifying dialectically their adopted language. When under the name of 

 Normans they conquered and settled in England, they again adopted the language 

 of the conquered, though modifying the English tongue by many words and 

 phrases brought with them from Normandy, and we have just seen how some of 

 their descendants who settled in Ireland for the third time changed their speech 

 for that of the conquered. 



Hitherto all our examples show the adoption by the conquerors of the language 

 of the conquered, even when they bring a certain number of their women with 

 them. 



We now come to undoubted cases where the language of the conqueror has 

 been able to get a firm foothold. From the time of the plantation of Ulster, 

 the advance of the English tongue, and consequent decadence of the Irish, has 

 steadily proceeded, for the settlers, unlike Cromwell's Ironsides, brought with 

 them women of their own race and speech. Consequently their children grew up 

 speaking English as their mothers' tongue. Yet even with such a basis the 

 advance of English amongst the Irish has been exceedingly slow. In the glens 

 of Antrim the Irish language still lingers on, whilst in Donegal, Connaught, 

 Kerry, Cork, and Waterford, English has not succeeded in ousting completely the 

 native language, though the former is the language of the national schools, of the 

 newspapers, and of trade. 



The story of the establishment of English itself in Britain is just the same 

 as in Ulster, We know from Bede that the Angles who settled in Bi'itain left 



