Willmar tribune. [volume] (Willmar, Minn.) 1895-1931, 1904-01-13
THE GAELIC LANGUAGE.
Which Is known to n Million
Persons and Spoken by Many
Thousands.

Tongue Which Is known to n Million
Persons and Spoken by Many
Thousands.
Gaelic is a living language to about
100000 persons out of the 100000
in Ireland. Of this 100000 more than
nine-tenths know English also; about
$4,000 living in the more remote and in
accessible villages of the western coast,
know no other language than Gaelic.
This small r. -nnant, states the Boston
Transcript, possesses the language by
a continuity of inheritance running
back to the very roots of time.
Gaelic is not and never has been a
dead language. The approaching death
which was threatened by the rapid de-
crease of the numbers who speak it will
be long deferred, or entirely prevented,
it is hoped by 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
Difference, more perhaps to popular
sentiment than to actual necessity,
have 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 vii
lage has it's branch of the Gaelic league
which meets once a fortnight and has
instruction, lectures and Rotations 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
islation, with the social tendencies that
accompany hostile legislation, of quite
500 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 it be-
gan to be accurate to say that English,
rather than Gaelic, was the prevailing
language of Ireland. A still more ruin
GUS blow was dealt in 1888, when the
national schools were organized with
provision for instruction in English
only.
A language is the index of the emo
tiOnal 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 '"Tis
a great tongue to court WITH" said one
of Ian Maclaren's characters, lit has
SO ways of saying DEAR"
The philologists testify equally to it's
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 nngua rustica of the
Cornish coast of England, just across
the channel from Brittany.