The Celtic
Irish, or are we?
By: Willie White
PERHAPS the fact that Carlow has been declared
the Celtic Capital of Ireland has sent my mind going
back in time to find out how it all came about. One
of the things that had made me think about it was
the language.
If the Celts brought the language we now speak
when we converse in what we call Irish, what was the
language we spoke before they came to the Irish
shore? We may have been a mongrel race with a lot of
different dialects but surely we spoke some general
form that enabled the people of Leinster understand
the people of Munster and so on. While we are proud
that Carlow is deemed the Celtic Capital of Ireland
we wonder what the language they spoke before the
arrival of the Celts.
In saying this we must go back to long before the
Book of Kells was written. The only writing known
before that was Ogam or Ogham, which was an early
Irish system of writing preserved on stone, or to
state it more correctly, the edges of stone. It
consisted of an alphabet consisting of roughly 25
letters. These letters were generally incised along
the edges of a stone pillar. As we turn the pages of
a book, so the inscribers put their marks of varying
length on the corners of the usually square stone
pillars on which they worked. Several instances of
these stones are to be found in different parts of
the country. These columns are also to be found in
Wales, and what was often called the ‘hurling
stones’ were also located in Cornwall.
The information on the stones generally referred
to the ancestors or some noted person from the area.
It looks as if these stones dated from the 4th
century to the 7th which would roughly correspond
with the period of time from paganism to
Christianity in Ireland. It is true that the
language employed on some of the stones could be
Primitive Irish, a language which was retained
through the old pagan priestly class or some
dignified characters of an earlier time.
Now to get back to the amount of influence the
coming of the Celts had on what we now call the
Irish language. Another point to be remembered is
that the Celts did not come in hordes as some people
think, they came in small groups, and some of those
groups settled where they landed while other bands
took to their boats and put to sea again. Some of
those who settled and made their homes probably
leanred some of the words now used in the Irish
language from the natives of the area where they had
made their home while the native Irish in turn began
to use some of the words of the stranger. We should
also remember that there were two distinct dialects
of the Celtic language, the ‘P’ Celts and the ‘Q’
Celts as they were termed used different names for
the same place or thing, and this adds to the
mystery of the language question.
Of one thing we are quite sure, that no matter
what we think or say there won’t be any changes in
what we call our native language now. To go back to
the time the Celts first arrived in Ireland there
can be no doubt that the Celts had reached Ireland
in the end of the Bronze Age or the beginning of the
Iron Age, and that they were responsible for what
became the dominant language of the country
eventually. (This was before the arrival of the
Normans).
A number of stories are told of happenings that
occurred at the time and place of their landing, and
how the majority of the stories old came from old
Irish roots just as the stories of happenings at the
time of the Vikings and the Norman landings. The big
difference between the landings of the exploring
Celts and the plundering Vikings and the land hungry
Normans were the reasons for their arrival. Another
question we must ask ourselves is if Ogam was a
written language was it ever a spoken one, and what
is there to prove one way or the other.
Nothing is known of the pre-Celtic language of
Ireland. By the first centuries of the Christian Era
the inhabitants of Ireland were speaking an early
form of Irish. The number of Irish chieftains
raiding the western part of Britain and extending
northwards into Scotland ensured that Irish and
Scottish remained the chief language (whatever that
was) until the 13th century. Prior to that period,
Latin was the best known language ‘among the
children of the school’s’, if there were any, of
their time.
There may have been a form of Gaelic in the
country when the Viking settlers of the 9th and 10th
centuries reached our shores. A form of what we will
call Nordic Gaelic survived for some time in Ireland
and Scotland but later was lost to another form of
language which was called Gaelic. This was probably
the spoken language during Ireland’s golden period
until the Norman invasion which had a profound
effect on Irish native learning which was no longer
carried on with the same intensity in the monastic
centres. In spite of this Irish remained the
language of the majority of the people of the
country up to the early 1700’s following which it
began to decline.
Actually it was from the ‘Hedge Schools’ that
thousands of Irish people learned English which had
been introduced and forced upon the people following
the Tudor conquest. It has often been said that the
shift from the native language (Irish) to the
language of the conquerors (English) was a big
source in weakening the attachment of a lot of the
native Irish to their own country. Let this be true
or not it still does not tell us why or how our
country became known as Celtic Ireland.
Thoughts of our
ancestors and their clans
