﻿664.
AN GAOḊAL.
Mr O'DONNELL'S SECOND LETTER.
Editor Gael,
Dear Sir — Just a few lines in reply to your
iomments on my letter on Irish conjugations, pub¬
cshed in the October Gael.
1. You ask, “who is the authority on whom to
rely.” I have, in the very first column of my let¬
ter given the names of three standard authors, of
whom Dr. O’Donovan is considered the best for a
full and perfect knowledge of the rules of Irish
grammar.
2. You say "Dr. Joyce asserts that all the in¬
flections of the conditional mood should begin
with f.” In page 53 of his grammar,
Dr. Joyce restricts the letter f to the
future and conditional of buail, and all
other verbs of its kind, that is, verbs with monosy¬
llabic roots, adding in the next paragraph, page 54,
that another class of verbs, namely, those whose
roots consist of two or more syllables
ending in uiġ or iġ, take eo instead of
f, and change ġ into ċ to form the
future and conditional. Now this precisely am¬
ounts to the termination oċaḋ, of which
I have fully treated in the October Gael.
3. You say "Dr. Joyce declares that not with-
out reason a second conjugation is adopted."
Therefore there are two classes of verbs ; and they
are distinguished according to O'Donovan, Bourke,
Joyce &c., by the formation of the future and
conditional.
4. You say "Dr. Joyce admits that part of his
inflections are not in conformity with the spoken
language.” Why should they? The synthetic
form of conjugation has fallen entirely into disuse
among Irish speakers, but it occurs in all our
manuscripts, songs, lays and legends ; and conse¬
quently a grammar without the synthetic conjuga¬
tion and its inflections would be of little or no
use to the student of classic Irish.
5. You say “it is the spoken language we want,
and who should be its criterions but its speakers."
Of course you mean its educated speakers, for what
can an uneducated man know about the
grammatical construction of a language, even
though he speaks it fluently? O'Donovan, O'¬
Curry, Taig Gaodaloc O’Sullivan. MacNamara and
a host of others, too numerous to mention, were
highly educated Irish speakers-grammarians, his¬
torians, bards, &c. : all these distinguished two
classes of verbs, one forming its con¬
ditional in ḟaḋ, and the other in oċaḋ.
Dr. Joyce is a highly educated Irish speaker, who
makes the same distinction, Canon Bourke also
makes the same distinction, and so does my
esteemed and learned friend, Mr. John Fleming,
the talented editor of the Dublin Gaelic Journal,
as anyone who reads that excellent periodical can
see — yet in the face of all these authorities you
suggest that the termination oċaḋ
should be used in the 3rd sing, con-
of all verbs and the termination faḋ
discontinued.
6. Criticising Dr. Joyce's grammar in the Au¬
gust number of the Gael, you say "let the gram¬
mar be made from the language, and not the lan¬
guage from a so called grammar.” The Irish
language as at present spoken among the peasant¬
ry of Ireland is corrupt and ungrammatical; and
therefore a grammar made from such a language
could not be otherwise than corrupt and ungram¬
matical. You are not the first to suggest the use
of the spoken language in writing a grammar, for
Dr. O'Donovan, when compiling his admirable
Irish grammar about 50 years ago, travelled all
the counties in Ireland in order to become acquain¬
ted with the provincial dialects then spoken ; yet
he takes his inflections &c., principally from the
written language "using,” he says in his preface,
“the provincial dialects as far as they throw light
upon the rules of Irish grammar" — in other words,
as far as he found them grammatical. Further he
could not be expected to go; for the idea of writ¬
ing a correct Irish grammar from the corrupt and
unpolished Irish language at present spoken, to
the exclusion of the written and correct language
would be as absurd as would be the proposal to
write a correct English grammar from the vulgar
jargon of a Midlothian plough-boy.
7. You say you dont confine yourself
to ól and dean &c. Neither do I. Ól
and dean were the examples discussed
by you and your correspondents before I wrote,
and in laying down the rules, I have merely treat¬
ed these words as individual verbs belonging to a
certain class.
8. You say you are supported in your position
by Irish speakers from Louth, Cavan &c. During
the last eight years that I spent in Ireland, I took
occasional holiday trips through all the provinces,
making it my business, whenever I came to an Irish
speaking district to take a note of the peculiarities
of the language, and collect idioms and proverbs
which I did not meet in print, and which are not
given in any Irish dictionary; and it was only in
Munster that I noticed the conditional of all verbs
pronounced as if terminating in ċ, or
oċ. In Galway and Mayo, I heard the
conditional of verbs with monosyllabic
roots pronounced as if ending in ṫo or
ṫú, for instance some would say d'ólṫo
sé, while others would say d'olṫú sé.
Along the coast of Donegal, the conditional of
of such verbs are pronounced exactly as they are
in Galway, Mayo and Sligo — entirely free from
that gutteral sound produced by the
final ċ which marks the southern Irish
speaker. In other parts of Donegal, however, and
in the Irish speaking districts of the county Ty¬
rone, the f in this mood is distinctly
and forcibly sounded, such words as
ḃuailfeaḋ, ḋeunfaḋ, being pronounced
ḃuailfa, ḋeunfa. In Louth I found the
Irish speakers allowed the f in the
conditional to suffer a gentle aspiration
but the sound of the f a little softened,
is perceptible. In many other dis-
