I'm working on an MA thesis about the Irish language and found this in one of my books...it looked cute:

Prepositions:

Ar and air, with de and do
Aspirate; as you must know
Fa, fo, and also faoi
Do the same, as all agree.
O, from, and im, about,
Are of same rule, without a doubt.
Mar, tar, and likewise tre
Follow here in like array...

Revd John Nolan, 1877

About = um or uim (in Corca Dhuibhne) (im as a prefix... but it's not a preposition)

Will you write your thesis in Irish? Were the examples in the old script? Have you left out the aspiration on "tar" -- I think it should be "thar" and you have left out the sineadh fada. While we lament the attitude of some of the clergy to the spoken language many of them did their bit to rescue the written language: Ó Gramhnaigh, Ó Duinnín, Ó Neill Lane, Mac Cionnaith, Ó Laoghaire, Ó Fiannachta, and your man, Ó Nualláin.

In school long ago we just learnt:

ar do de faoi
gan ó thar trí

+ séimhiú

Then years later when we thought we knew it all we discovered nuances of meaning and caolchúis and realised "ar bord" and "ar bhord", "faoi deara" and "faoi ndear" meant different things. Now I wonder how many howlers do I make in my enthusiasm teanga ár sinsear a scríobh. Nothing is as simple as it might appear.

@ Lughaidh, it is now, but I wonder if im wasn't an acceptable variant spelling in 1877.

@ Taidhgín, no, it is for an English MA, I'm looking at the positive shift in attitude toward characters that speak an English heavily influenced by Irish (either by using Irish words/phrases directly, or speaking a Hiberno-English making extensive use of Irish syntax etc). From the time of Shakespeare through the 1880s the "Stage Irishman" became a staple character that used Irish elements in speech to indicate lack of intelligence and a host of other negative stereotypes. Consequently, the Stage Irishman was nothing more than a buffoon inserted for comic relief.

In the 20th Century that began to improve, with the "Irish" characters being shown in increasingly better and better lights.

For purposes of the paper, I consider Brian Friel's Translations to be the complete reversal of the Stage Irishman, for even though the entire play is in English, all the Irish characters (but one) are supposed to be monoglot Irish speakers and are portrayed as highly intelligent and classically educated compared with the unfavorable light the Englishmen in the Ordinance Survey are cast.

In an MA thesis I naturally can't cover all that time period, so my paper will only deal with Juno and the Paycock as a rough midpoint in the shift from 1880-1990.

I'll be presenting a draft of the paper at a conference in September.


(Message edited by antaine on July 23, 2009)

Antaine,I'm not sure how this fits into your scheme of things but I recently stumbled on a piece of Irish used by Wm.Shakespeare himself in Henry V act 4 :

Callen o Custure me.This is a refrain from a popular song of the time and has been unravelled as 'Cailín ó Cois tSúir mé' ie I am a girl from the banks of the Suir.
The swan of Avon mugged me on another thread as Aonghus and Pádraig will attest.Mo leithscéal if you already have this!

That is certainly a worthwhile thesis and I wish you every success. Those of us reared in Ireland and not being WASPs had to fight very hard to aquire an education and prove ourselves. Those of us who spoke the intermediate language between Irish and English -- the so-called Hiberno-English knew only too well from Primary school onwards that we were not of the ascendancy class "lucht an chinsil" and had to prove ourselves through education.

I can tell you an amusing little yarn that relates to this: On the BBC one morning the presenter of the morning talk programme introduced a famous folk singer -- I think his name was Patrick Tunney ???? -- and he was presented as a noted lilter. "Lilting was an art of the Irish peasantry, was it not, since they didn't have instruments to make music. Can you give us an example, Paddy?"

I prepared myself for embarrassment and ridicule and then cheered when Patrick replied: "Peasants is not an acceptable word in Ireland. There are no peasants in Ireland. Only dispossessed aristocrats."

Good for you, Paddy. He then went on to speak of the art of lilting and lilted a pleasant tune having established his own status in relation to his interviewer and his audience.