Cúpla focal

The Last Straw: I was chatting with a senior foreign diplomat on his lawn the other night, the way you do. As usual, discretion prevents me saying who it was. Oh all right, you dragged it out of me: it was the British Ambassador. And, inter alia, he told me he'd been taking Irish classes recently, in Donegal.

I was pleased to hear it, as any Irish person would be. We've suffered long enough with the language, I thought; it's time the English shared the pain. But as he described just how challenging Irish was for a beginner, my feeling deepened into pride.

The ambassador is something of a linguist, in fact. So, anxious for comparisons on the language-difficulty scale, I mentioned German, with its notorious mutations and, as Mark Twain complained, "more exceptions to the rule than instances of it".

The ambassador shook his head. Irish was much more difficult than German, he said. "In German, the end of the word changes. In Irish, the start of the word may change as well. And the middle." Delighted, I prompted him on the issue of Irish letters exercising their constitutional right to remain silent while clearly up to no good. He nodded sadly: "Who'd have thought 'mh' could be 'w'?" Still, he had now mastered a vocabulary of "about 70 words". He was hoping to push on from there.

I didn't want to discourage him altogether, but you wouldn't know how secure that beach-head is, either. As an occasional correspondent of this column, Bill Casey, is wont to point out, the same Irish word can have a multiplicity of meanings, including fiercely opposed meanings, incapable of reconciliation even by a diplomat.

You'll recall that Bill is Professor of Aqueous Geochemistry at the University of California and, so far as I know, has never even been to Ireland. He just studies Irish as a hobby - it gets his mind off water, I imagine - and the properties of words, when held under a microscope, fascinate him. A while ago, he was marvelling at how the same Irish expression means "French person" and "rat" (a coincidence that may have influenced US foreign policy). The latest object of his inquiries is "leannán", a noun meaning either "lover" or "chronic affliction", depending on context.

That's only the tip of the iceberg. Writing in this paper half a century ago, Myles na Gopaleen discussed an academic's claim that while the average English speaker got by with a 400-word vocabulary, "the Irish-speaking peasant uses 4,000". Myles thought the 4,000 estimate was on the low side, when you allowed for nuance, irony, evasion, poetic licence, and whatever you were having yourself.

"There is scarcely a single word in the Irish (barring, possibly, Sasanach) that is simple and explicit," he wrote. "Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are many with so complete a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of them can be made to express two directly contrary meanings, as well as a plethora of intermediate concepts that have no bearing on either."

Slipping on his etymologist's hat, he gave an example: "Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m - act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the crown of cast-iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff faces, the stench of congealing badger's suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorised person, a heron's boil, a leprechaun's denture, a sheep-biscuit, the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake's clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman's dumpling, a beetle's faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a fiddler's occupational disease, a fairy godmother's father, a hawk's vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottle's 'farm', a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge-mill, a fair-day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat's stomach-pump, [ and so on]."

It's possible Myles was embroidering a little here. I'd be almost certain that, even 50 years ago, there was no word in Irish for "the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump". He may also have been exaggerating when he added that, "in Donegal", there were native speakers with such vast vocabularies, it was a matter of pride to them "never to use the same word twice." But you couldn't be sure with Donegal, then or now. I wished the ambassador well with his studies.