AN GAODHAL.
739
Oil City, Pa. July 24th, 1887.
Editor of the GAEL,
DEAR SIR :—
Through diffidence of my own slender
abilities, I have hitherto withheld myself from en¬
tering into the learned controversy which has, for
some time past, been going on in the columns of
your journal; but having recently discovered
that a learned Celtic philologist has de¬
livered his opinions, the fears which I had of
stultifying myself have greatly vanished; for my
convictions tell me that, as well as others, I may
be able to offer some useful hints in reference to
the matters in dispute. With regard to the verbs
ól and dean I am persuaded that the
latter has a false orthography; and I am led to
this conclusion by the fact that, in the West of Ire¬
land, the diphthong ea has always, a
short sound as in the words lean, fol¬
low, sean old, and cead leave; but
when these sounds require to be lengthened the
said diphthong is changed into eu as
leun, seun, and ceud: But on the con¬
traary in Leinster and Munster the said verb is al¬
ways written dein, and is followed in
the spoken Irish by the demonstrative pronoun
sin, which, in the South, follows words
with attenuated vowel terminations. Now, as Fath¬
er Bourke has, very properly, pronoun¬
ced the 'fiat” of his disapproval a¬
gainst making monosyllabic Gaelic verbs have their
future tense endings in chadh, it is not
necessary for me to offer a single word in support
of so manifestly correct a decision ; but when he a¬
vers that it is proper to give derivative verbs the
condemned termination I altogether disagree with
him; because the paramount law of the Irish lan¬
guage which is that of euphony would be greatly
violated by such a course; for then we would have
permanently established in our tongue those un¬
sounding, barbarous crudities known as double gut¬
turals, than which there is nothing in a language
more inelegant ; and I may mention some of these
as, beachteochadh, bochtanochadh, críochnoch¬
adh, dochtochadh, dorchochadh, machlochadh,
smachtochadh and sneachtochadh. With
such uncouth and almost unutterable sounds remain¬
ing in our dialect it would be inconsistent to ever
boast of the Gaelic language as an idiom of melliflu¬
ous sweetness and rare euphonic perfection. The
custom in the South of Ireland is to change
the ch guttural of the last syllables of
such words as these into an aspirating g
which is a letter of the same vocal
organ, in order that the sound of the
preceding broad vowel o should be
forceably heard in the penult. And if this be al¬
lowed without any objection in the past and pres¬
ent participles, it is perfectly logical to make a
similar change in the verb itself, and consequently
I am thoroughly convinced that the
said adventitious ch should be al¬
together eliminated from verbs in the connection
mentioned; as also from the passive voice: and
I need scarcely add, that a legion of authorities
can be quoted in support of this reasonable view.
The error which I have decried must have origin¬
ally found its way into the Connaught dialect from
Ulster, which must have borrowed it from Scotland.
In the Scotch Gaelic it has, however, some
"raison d'etre," but none whatever in
Irish; because many dissyllabic verbs in the
Scottish Erse have guttural terminations which
sound exactly like the German personal pronoun
Ich. It is therefore natural that such verbs in the
future tense should receive a guttural increment ;
but to give such increase to non-guttural Irish dis¬
sllabic verbs would be contrary to analogy — would
be detrimental to Gaelic euphonism and opposed
to the best interests of Celtic elocution and vocal
music, by greatly depressing the tone of enuncia¬
tion ; and hence I do not hesitate to affirm that the
recommendation to do so deserves a most emphatic
condemnation. I had a mind to express my sent¬
iments in regard to the Irish conditional mood but
the space which I wish to occupy in the GAEL will
not permit my doing so at present: yet I will
declare my decided conviction that no grammatical
AUTHOR
has arisen in Ireland for a considerable time who
has understood the Irish conditional mood or who
has been able to give Gaelic verbs in all cases a
proper conjugation. And it is pitiable to see
would-be grammarians mistaking the potential for
the subjunctive mood, and styling the consuetudi¬
nal tense, the habitual mood of our language.
Though great be my respect for some of the scholars
who are prominent in the Celtic movement I will
not agree to receive error at their hands without
inquiry, or tacitly consent to give my sanction to
wild and fanciful etymological surmises, by which
derivatives are formed from incongruous and irrel¬
evant etymons. Nor can I accept the dictum that
the term agam is a compound preposit¬
ion, for if it were it should sometimes have govern,
ment in Irish, whereas it has none. In philology
it is properly a prepositional pronoun ; but in
Irish syntactical parsing it must receive another
designation. I am greatly surprised to find that
a Celtic savant in his recent letter to the GAEL has
thought fit to condemn the orthography of the
conjunction ach, which he says should
be properly spelt acht, as having the
sanction of antiquity in its favor. Now, I think
that antiquity is rather against him than for him
in this respect, because the same argument could
be advanced against the use of agus
which was anciently written ochus ;
and against the modern preposition
faoi, which was formerly written fá
and originally fo. In the South of
Ireland, since the days of Heber, the
disjunctive ach, has been in constant
use, as I infer from some old historic tracts in my
possession. It is sanctioned by Mac Curtin, Peter
O'Connell and O’Rielly in their dictionaries and is
the form preferred in the Scotch Gael¬
ic; but as to acht it is ambiguous be¬
cause it signifies a law, as well as a conjunction
and has been considered by the bards of the South
