Dead Language

I looked back at some old posts, and realized that I seem to write a lot about handbags. I don't know what that's about. I mean, what is there to say, really?

So let's talk about books instead, because you don't get enough of that around here. I just finished Motherfocloir: Dispatches from a Not So Dead Language, by Darach O'Seaghdha. I got this a long time ago, and forgot about it, but after my trip to Ireland, I was curious about the Irish language movement and remembered that I had this.

Apparently, there are fewer than 100,000 fluent, everyday Irish speakers in the whole of Ireland, north or south, with maybe a few hundred thousand more people around the world who speak or understand the language to varying degrees. It's a compulsory subject for most Irish schoolchildren and has been for some years, so maybe those numbers will grow. Even for the majority who don't speak Irish at all, it's still a fact of daily life in Ireland. Signs in most Irish towns are printed in two languages--Irish and English; and lots of official announcements--on trains, for example--are spoken in both languages, too. So if Irish ends up dying out, it won't be because Ireland didn't try to save it.

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Motherfocloir is hard to describe. The word focloir, by the way, means "dictionary" in Irish; and the title is meant to be a clever, attention-grabbing play on another long word beginning with "mother."  Anyway, it's kind of a book about the language, with lots of vocabulary lists and definitions, broken up with commentary and observations about how the language has evolved and how language influences thought and culture. So I suppose it's something of a dictionary, but it's much more of an extended commentary about what language represents to a culture and how it influences the thoughts and ideas of each individual who speaks or writes in that language.

The Irish language is a political issue in Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland, taxpayers question the wisdom of spending so much money and effort (signage, compulsory education) on a language that only a handful of people speak. In Northern Ireland, Irish is one of many bones of contention between Unionists (those who want Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom) and Nationalists (those who favor reunification with the southern counties and independence from the U.K., which makes the word "unionist" a little confusing). The 1998 Good Friday Agreement provides for some official support for the Irish language, but the Nationalists want to see more mandated official use of the language, rather than just the "if enough people want to speak and read and write in Irish then I guess we won't try to stop them" approach outlined in the Good Friday Agreement. Of course, this isn't the biggest problem that Northern Ireland has right now, with a messy Brexit becoming more and more likely.

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A few weeks after my trip, this article showed up in my newsfeed, and so I read it. The writer explains that the name gaeltacht--the Irish word for the Irish-speaking places in western Ireland--translates roughly as "the Irishness." And that's really how I would describe Motherfocloir, too. It's about the Irish language, but it's more about how the Irish language shapes the Irishness, and about whether or not a distinctive Irish identity would even exist without the language.

Maybe a person who speaks Irish is more Irish than a person who speaks only English. But that's a troublesome idea, especially for an American. My mother-in-law is a U.S. citizen, but after 46 years in the United States, she still hasn't really mastered English. She gets by, and she tries--she has taken classes on and off for years, and she does crossword and word search puzzles to help her to recognize more English words. But even though she can carry on a conversation, she'll never be really fluent in English. I think she feels less American because of that. There's an American frame of reference shaped by idiom and wordplay and jokes that she doesn't get. And I'm sure that she thinks in Korean. But she's American. It says so, right on her passport.

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Toward the end of Motherfocloir, O'Seaghdha cites C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters as a book that he enjoyed but disagreed with. I suppose lots of people, especially non-Christians, would disagree with The Screwtape Letters, but O'Seaghdha specifically complains about Lewis's "zero-sum take on Christianity and his bitter dismissal of romantic love," a criticism that made absolutely no sense to me. So now I'm re-reading Screwtape, and finding that although O'Seaghdha is dead wrong about Lewis's views on Christianity and romantic love, he's dead right when he writes that "Great writing is never just about one thing..." Motherfocloir, though not great (especially when you're comparing it with Screwtape or anything else that C.S. Lewis wrote) is very good. Mostly because it's not just about one thing.