The current situation of the Irish language revealed: Why the Irish don’t speak Irish

With the recent visit to China by Irish President Michael Higgins, many Chinese people have been deeply impressed by the rich and colorful resume of the president: he is not only a politician and scholar, but also a famous poet. In Ireland, a magical country that has produced four Nobel Prize winners in literature and great literary giants such as Joyce and Wilde, it is not surprising to choose a poet as the head of state; he can also speak fluent Irish and is enthusiastic about promoting Ireland. The use of slang – wait a minute, isn’t English spoken in Ireland? What is the relationship between Irish and English? Yeats and Bernard Shaw, have you never heard of them writing in Irish?

Well-informed readers will say, of course, the Irish are a Celtic nation, their mother tongue is Irish, which is a Celtic language, and English is just the result of the colonists' imposition! Is this really the case?

That’s right and wrong. We are accustomed to equating ethnicity with race, and race is equated with language. Not to mention it goes as far back as the "Five Nationalities Harmony" in the Republic of China, to the hundreds of "ethnicities" declared by various places at the beginning of the founding of New China, to today. The official definition of "fifty-six ethnic groups and fifty-six flowers" shows how fluid and even illusory the definition of ethnic groups is.

In fact, it is true to say that Irish is a Celtic language, but to say that the Irish are Celts is to share the same Celtic language with other people who speak Celtic languages. Special culture, that would be outrageous. The reason is very simple. Language is relatively fixed and changes slowly. Like species, a unique genealogical tree can be drawn through diversity and difference. People are fluid and changeable, and they will migrate, intermarry, assimilate, and change languages. . The ambiguity of the word "Celtic" is that it is both a linguistic concept and a general name for an ancient group of people, and it is also used to summarize some modern popular culture.

The Celts in History

In several centuries BC, there was indeed a group of people called the Keltoi by the Greeks and the Keltoi by the Romans. The tribal alliance of Celtae (pronounced "Celtic" instead of "Celtic") dominated Europe for a while, sacking the city of Rome, advancing on Delphi, and once occupying a vast area from Gaul to Asia Minor. These tribes have different origins, but their names, place names, and a few inscriptions show that they seem to speak the same (slightly modified) language. They like to use the word Gal- to refer to themselves, such as the clan names Galli and Galatai (now Turkey). This word may mean "powerful".

By the time of Julius Caesar, Celtae mainly referred to the unconquered Gauls in what is now France and Belgium. The Gauls, who had mastered the art of writing, left behind some written materials. Their language persisted for hundreds of years after being conquered by Rome. However, under the dual pressure of Romanization and the invasion of Germanic tribes, the Celtae as an independent group eventually died out in In the long history.

Discovery of "Celtic Languages"

It was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that scholars began to notice some living languages, including Irish, Welsh and Breton. It is related to the language of the Celtae people represented by Gaulish. This relationship is based on historical comparative linguistics. In short, if two languages ??are far apart in time and space, and the similarities between them are systematic and basic, and cannot be caused by coincidence or borrowing, then logically they must come from a common ancestor. . What historical comparative linguistics does is to use a logical method of deduction and induction similar to that of natural science. On the one hand, it reconstructs the language of the same ancestor, and on the other hand, it explains clearly how it changed from the language of the same ancestor to the language of the descendants. .

European scholars in the 18th century discovered that Sanskrit, Latin, ancient Greek, ancient Germanic and ancient Slavic languages ??were far apart in time and geography, but they were surprisingly similar in phonetics, vocabulary and morphology. are very similar, and most of their differences can be systematically reduced to a small number of laws. The only explanation is that all these languages ??are derived from a mother tongue, which linguists hypothetically call "Indo-European", and all real languages ??derived from this hypothetical language are collectively called "Indo-European" Indo-European languages. Using the same method, most of the world's languages ??have been classified into various language families of varying sizes, and the language families are divided into language families and language branches, like a tree extending its branches.

According to this method, the languages ??most closely related to Irish, excluding Scottish Gaelic and Manx, which were separated only around the 12th century AD, are Welsh and Gaulish. They are even more closely related to each other than Irish is to its neighbor English. Therefore, linguists followed the customary practice of that era and settled on a term using the name of the Roman era, classifying this group of languages ??as "Celtic languages."

The existing Celtic languages ??are only active on some islands and coastal areas along the Atlantic Ocean, including Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh and Breton.

Among these languages, only Welsh is not listed as endangered. There are only a few hundred thousand fluent speakers of Welsh, and basically the speakers of each language mainly use English, the dominant language of their country, in their daily lives. and French – communication. From all aspects, the influence of Celtic languages ??in modern society is very small. It is no wonder that few people know them!

Are the Irish Celts?

If we believe that the kinship of languages ??reflects the ancestry of the users, can we think that the ancestors of the Irish are the Celts who dominated the European continent in the past?

Ireland developed a developed agricultural civilization as early as 3000 BC, producing exquisite gold vessels and large stone buildings. At that time, people who spoke Celtic languages ??had not yet reached Western Europe. Archaeological evidence shows that it was not until around 500 BC that a group of immigrants bearing the imprint of Gallic material culture entered Ireland and quickly spread the technologies they brought with them such as iron smelting, horse training, and pottery making. It is conceivable that they also brought with them the precursors of Irish, which is related to Gaulish.

By the first century B.C., these descendants of the Celts, who were good at riding horses and fighting with iron swords, had assimilated Ireland so completely that we can find no trace of any remnant of the ancestors' language. It is very difficult to imagine that the Celts expelled all the ancestors. It is more likely that during the process of intermarriage and integration, the ancestors completely accepted the Celtic culture and language.

By around 800 AD, the Vikings from Northern Europe began to plunder the coasts of Europe in their fearsome longships, and Ireland, an island surrounded by seas, was not spared. At first, like the Japanese pirates who harmed the coast of China in the Ming Dynasty, the Vikings suddenly attacked, robbed cattle, sheep, gold and silver, and then quickly retreated back to their hometown in Northern Europe; as the raids became more frequent and in-depth, some bold Vikings raided Ireland. A winter fortress was set up at the mouth of the river and they settled down for a long time. The war with the Irish gradually turned into peaceful trade.

Ireland has always been a closed agricultural society and has never developed these estuary areas for convenient navigation; while the Vikings harassed the whole of Europe, they also objectively promoted the development of cross-border trade. The fortress bases they established It soon prospered because of commerce, including Dublin, Cork and Waterford, some of Ireland's largest cities today.

Slowly, the Irish people got used to the existence of the Vikings. The Viking Kingdom in Dublin became an important political force that the kings of Ireland wanted to win over. Many Irish people added Nordic culture to their blood. element. Today, the proportion of Irish people with red hair is higher than that of other countries outside Northern Europe, which is one of the contributions of the Vikings.

In the mid-12th century, the Norman French army, which had just conquered England, set foot on Irish soil. On the pretext of mediating the disputes between the kings of Ireland, King Henry II of England (who was also the Marquis of Anjou and the Duke of Normandy in France) took advantage of the overwhelming advantage of the Norman army and the chaos of Irish politics to gain recognition from the kings as the supreme lord of Ireland.

Henry entrusted a large amount of land in Ireland to his Norman nobles. Since then, these Normans with mixed French, Nordic and English ancestry have joined the Irish population. Many of these so-called "Old English lords", while using continental European technology to transform local agriculture, military and political landscape, voluntarily accepted the Irish language and culture, lived like Irish nobles, and even became Irish speakers. A poet who writes in Chinese.

The Irish, Catholic lords of ancient England sided with the natives in the 16th century and resisted Henry VIII, who carried out the Reformation. The war lasted for many years and ended with the defeat and flight of the northern Irish lords in 1607. In order to consolidate its decision-making power in Ireland, the British King mobilized a large number of English and Scottish immigrants who believed in Protestantism to enrich the six northern counties that were abandoned after the war, laying the foundation for the future Northern Ireland problem. These immigrants were no longer assimilated into the declining native culture. The Irish language lost the support of the nobility and intellectual class, and gradually retreated to the west, far away from British influence.

The last wave of population reshuffle occurred at the end of the 19th century. The British government's discriminatory policies against the Catholic native population gradually plunged them into extreme poverty, especially in the barren west. The potato blight that occurred in the 1840s deprived these poor people of their only food rations. Nearly one million people died of starvation and disease. More people immigrated to the United States and Australia. A quarter of the entire population of Ireland disappeared within ten years.

Even if we do not count the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe after the integration of the European Union, the blood of the Irish is extremely mixed. To say that the Irish are Celts is just a mythical imagination.

The current situation of the Irish language

The millions of people who disappeared in the 19th century were the main speakers of Irish. After that, the Irish language could only survive in a few small places. No wonder Yeats and Beckett wrote their masterpieces in English and French.

Although Ireland has made every effort to promote Irish education after independence, there are still not many people who can use it fluently, and even fewer people use it for daily communication.

No wonder, under the world hegemony of English, even past international languages ??like French have to resist tenaciously. How much power does the weak Irish language have?

If you have an Irish friend, you might as well test them on how to say something in Irish. Most of the time, they will make a fool of themselves! Being able to speak fluent Irish is something to be proud of in Ireland. Because Irish is designated as the national language, it is theoretically the first language for *** work. To take the civil service examination in Ireland, you must master Irish. If you want to be a politician, you have to work hard to speak Irish well, otherwise you will be defeated when your opponent suddenly starts speaking Irish in the TV debate before the election. Speaking of which, President Higgins’ Irish language and literary skills gave him a lot of points in the election! However, for most people, the Irish language and the twists and turns of history it represents are distant and unfamiliar memories of the past.