Waterbury evening Democrat., 1904-01-05
THE GAELIC LANGUAGE.
Tongue Which k Known to n Million
 Persons and Spoken by Many #E Thousands.

Gaelic is a living language to about 100000 persons out of the 100000 in Ireland Of this 1000, 900 more than nine-tenths know English also: about S5,00O living in the more remote and in- accessible villages of the western coast, know no other language than Gaelic, This small remnant, states the Boston Transcript, possesses the language by continuity of inheritance running back to the very roots of time
 Gaelic is not and never has been dead language The approaching death which was threatened by the rapid de- crease of the numbers who speak 1t will be long deferred, or entirely prevented, 1t is hoped py the efforts of the Gaelic. league.
 Further indications of the so-called Celtic Renaissance" force themselves on the attention of contemporary trav-, elers in Ireland, where shopkeepers, in deference, more perhaps to popular sentiment than to actual necessity, have a newly painted Gaelic sign below the English one that has long done duty; where the newspapers print a column or page of their contents in the native tongue. and where every vilH lage has it's branch of the Gaelic league which meets once a fortnight and has instruction, lectures and recitations in the language. The Irish educational authorities, at the insistent demand of the renaissance organization, has in- troduced Gaelic into the public school curriculum. There are Gaelic chairs at Harvard, at the Catholic university at Washington, at Notre Dame, at Trini- ty college. Dublin; at Oxford, and in some of the German universities
 All this is a reaction against the leg tslauon, with the social tendencies that accompany hostile legislation, of quite 300 years. The statute of Kilkenny in 1867 placed a death or confiscation penalty on the use of the Gaelic Ian guage within the pale" and by the middle of the eighteenth century 1t be- gan to be accurate to say that Eng1ishy rather than Gaelic, was the prevailing language of Ireland. A still more ruin ous blow was dealt in 1883, when the national schools were organized with provision for instruction in English only.
 A language is the index of the emo tonal and intellectual life of the peo- pie among whom it has grown, hence the universal testimony of philologists that Gaelic is the best language in the world in which to write poetry ."TisL a great tongue to court with said one of Ian Maclaren's characters, tft has 93 ways of saying dear !"
 I~lc IA. great adaptability to the discussion of spiritual themes; and one of the dukes of Argyle is quoted as saying that he should use English to address his queen, French to persuade his lady of his love, and Gaelic to speak of his God. For lyric poetry, for the descrip- ton of nature, for deep and intense expression of love and hate, for the communication of truth with power, for wealth of metaphor, for expressing shades of emotion incomprehensible in less adaptable tongue, Gaelic is the language par excellence. Similarly, no treatise on philosophy or science could be written in Gaelic without the whole sale importation of foreign terms.
 Gaelic is closely related to the native tongue of the Scotch Highlanders: more accurately Scotch and Irish as well as the dying Manx are branches of the Gaelic tongue. A Boston gentle man was lately interested to find that his Irish maid and his Scotch gardener, neither of whom knew English, could converse without great difficulty in their common tongue, Still more loose- ly, Gaelic is used as the equivalent of Celtic" In this sense it is in addi- ton the language of Wales and of Brit tany, and was, up to the middle of the last century, the lingua rustica of the Cornish coast of England just across the channel from Brittany