AN GAODHAL.
401
PROF. ROEHRIG ON THE IRISH LANG¬
UAGE.
Continued from page 391.
[So the German wallfahrt, meaning pilgrimage,
expresses fundamentally the same; as vi grim is
the Latin peregrinus, a stranger.) The word Gael¬
ic itself is of the same root and origin. So is Cal¬
edonia = Gaele doane, foreign men, — land of for¬
eign men or strangers. Indeed, gal points us
likewise to our word alien (a stranger), connecting
with the Latin al-ius and the Greek all-os. We
have it in Fingal (Fin gal, Finn the stranger), in
Donegal, Galoway, Galatia, the suburb of Galata,
on the Bosphorus; Galliopolis, at the Dardanelles;
Gallipoli in Southern Italy; we have it in Galaez,
on the Danube ; in Galicia, in the Scotch towns
Galston, Galashiels, the Irish galoon, Galway, etc;
the name of the French town Bordeaux, which was
Burdigala; in Portugal, which bore the name of
Lusitania in the time of the Romans, but received
its new name from the city, Oporto, (literally the
sea-port = le Havre) or, without the article o, sim¬
ply Porto, when, in the first half of the Twelfth
century, it became an independent Christian king¬
dom, after Ferdinand I., of Castile, Henry of Bur¬
gundy and his son, Alfonso I., had there gradually
destroyed the power of the Moors Then, that city
was called Portus Gallorum, or Portu Cale. — which
was made into Portugal to designate the whole
land. Also in the Saint's name, St. Gall, the same
root may have been originally implied: and even
common nouns, such as walnut (German walinusz)
meaning Welsh nut, come under this head, per¬
haps also the German gallapfel (oak apples, galls
gallic acid, etc. The t in kel-t, gal-at (which has
in gall become assimilated to the l) seems to be an
old sign of the plural, corresponding with the
Welsh plural in ed, od (et, ot), and also with the
Irish plural of the fourth declension, with t (db)
w. Gael and Gadhel seem to be mere derivations
from gall or gal, the dh (in Gadhel) being simply
a phonetic strengthening of the root, so common in
Celtic; — just as we have double forms in Irish, one
with dh, another without. Such as bi dh]im and
bim; bu dh ir and bir: bi[dh]id and bid Consue¬
tudinal Present]: and in the Preterit or Past,
i[dh]eamer and bhiomar: or in the plural of nouns
such as anro dh]a and anroa (misfortunes); iarg
no(dh)a and iargnoa [plural of iargno, [anguish],
where we know that dh is insertea to avoid the hi¬
atus.]
The Gaelic has a just claim to a greater antiqui¬
ty, — and to far more original and unmixed state
— than the Kymric: and, among the Gaelic tongues
the Irish is, undoubtedly, the most primitive
and the oldest member of that group. Its genu¬
ineness and purity appear to be owing especially
to the circumstance of the peculiar insular condi¬
tion of Ireland, whereby the Irish language has
remained isolated, and, as it were, cut off from the
other cognate dialects. It is also owing to its not
having passed through so many various transform¬
ations and violent changes, — caused by foreign el¬
ements, — as English has: and finally, to its liter¬
ary cultivation at a very early period. And thus,
we see the Irish language generally considered as
that portion of the Gaelic group which, — more
than any other, — has preserved most of its primi¬
tive, genuine, original and antique forms. More
than any other, it has transmitted to us the most
original, grammatical and lexical condition of the
Celtic languages. From its comprehensive exten¬
sion, its literary treasures, and the antiquity of the
written monuments in Irish, it is, certainly, by far
the most important and interesting, not only of the
Gaelic, but of all the Celtic languages.
The antiquity of the whole Celtic group is shown
among many other things, especially, by such ex¬
traordinary phenomena as the transformation of
the initial consonants, which directs us back, in¬
deed, to a very distant past, — of which we shall
have to say something more, as opportunity pre¬
sents, in these lines.
The Irish language is, moreover, decidedly su¬
perior to the other Gaelic dialects, in extent, cul¬
ture, and the antiquity of its literature. As we
have said, Irish and the whole Gaelic group, actual¬
ly, belong to the same great parent-stock of Indo-
European languages, and the affinity of Celtic with
Sanskrit and the entire Aryan family has been, in
our time, established beyond any reasonable doubt,
— so much so, that the Irish language cannot, pos¬
sibly, be any longer discarded from linguistic
studies and researches in this extensive domain of
Indo-Europan philology. The Celtic tongues
sustain, in fact, to Sanskrit quite as close and con¬
sistent a relation as any other of the Indo-European
languages: and, — even where the Celtic seems
most widely to diverge from Sanskrit and the Ar¬
yan languages, — the philologist will discover that
the most genuine and remarkable Indo-European
family-features still — and that, too, in a pre-em¬
inent degree, — exist under the surface : as is, for
instance, the case in the aspirated and unaspirated
forms of nouns, etc.
It may, however, be said that in the Celtic lan¬
guages, the original and characteristic features of
Aryan speech, often, lie deeper than elsewhere,
and altogether concealed from the uninitiated eye,
under the multitudinous aspects of phonetic de¬
cay, new growth, and other frequent, but accident¬
al alterations. The Celts appear to have been the
first of the Aryans to arrive in Europe ; and the
Celtic tongues form the most western stem of the
Indo-European languages.
To be continued
The Holy Father has raised Mr. P; V. Hickey,
Editor of the Catholic Review, — already a Cheva¬
lier — to the rank of Commander of the Order of
Saint Silvester. It is an honor weil deserved.
Ave Maria;
