An Irishman's Diary

FURTHER TO the McClean/McClane pronunciation controversy (“An Irishman’s Diary”, May 10th), Pat Kennedy writes with an interesting tale about how he learned to say the name correctly.

To wit, he was catering at a “very posh” wedding in the Scottish highlands some years ago. So posh, in fact, that he had to announce the guests. These included a lord and lady “MacLean”. And assuming that the surname rhymed with “McQueen”, he pronounced it accordingly. Whereupon Lady MacLean objected: “My God, you make us sound like a bloody toothpaste.” Here, indeed, may be the real explanation for how the Anglo-Saxon pronunciation became the norm. Whether there was an actual Maclean family behind the eponymous dental hygiene product, and if so, how they pronounced their name, I don’t know. But for obvious reasons, the marketeers were bound to favour the pronunciation that allowed such advertising slogans as: “Did you Maclean your teeth today?” That wasn’t the only linguistic lesson at the highland wedding, by the way. Other guests, Pat adds, included a nobleman known as “Moncreiffe of that Ilk”. “Ilk” is now generally used in English to mean “type” (as in “people of that ilk“). In which sense, for some odd reason, it tends to imply the speaker’s disapproval.

But in the original Scots, the word meant only “place”, thereby solving a problem that affects certain members of the landed gentry. If, like the said Moncrieffe, you came from an area named after your family, then instead of being titled “Moncreiffe of Moncreiffe”, you became “Moncreiffe of the Ilk”.

Anyway, getting back to corporate imperialism as an influence on the pronunciation of names, here’s another example. From the same corner of Ireland as James McClean, Iris O’Sullivan writes to say that her home village, Malin, used to be pronounced by all who lived in it as “Mawlin”. Which was entirely consistent with the Irish original, Málainn.

Then along came the BBC shipping forecast, wherein “Malin” features prominently, but always without its fada. Intoned several times daily, the British met office’s pronunciation was the linguistic equivalent of the grey squirrel, thriving on the vast amounts of weather available off Malin Head, and gradually squeezing out the native version of the name.

Says Iris: “I can recall the amusement of fellow students at boarding school who mocked my ‘grand’ accent when I said ‘mawlin’, so I gave that up and joined the hoi polloi!”

From one landmark head, meanwhile, to another. Or as Joyce put it, “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” On which subject, Donal Kennedy, who grew up in that ilk (Howth, I mean), tells me that the local fishermen and the longer-established hill residents used to pronounce the village’s name with two syllables. There may even be a few still holding out against the modern orthodoxy. And if there are, they have history on their side.

“Howth” comes from the Viking-Danish “Hoved” – pronounced “ho-eth” – meaning “head”. Which in turn means that, although the now-standard pronunciation is a syllable short, the related term “Howth Head” makes up for it, having a verbal redundancy level of precisely 50 per cent.

While he’s at it, Donal recalls that his mother grew up in Phibsboro, but that she had relations “out in the country”, in a place called “Rahaney”. That pronunciation too was in keeping with the original Irish. But the McClane/McClean phenomenon may been at work here too. Rahaney moved into the big city at some stage and has been Raheny ever since.

THERE'S NOlogic to the translation of place-names. Just look at France, where any English-speaking person with a modicum of education knows that you don't pronounce the "x" in Bordeaux or the "t" in Peugeot.

And yet everybody refuses the right of the final consonant in Paris to remain silent, once it leaves French soil.

I would have cited “Marseilles” as another example of the French pronunciation being honoured universally in English. But I was reading through some Edward Lear limericks just now and, among the many that mention foreign place-names, I saw one with these opening lines: “There was an Old Man of Marseilles/Whose daughters wore bottle-green veils.” Clearly, that example of Lear’s famous nonsense poetry hasn’t aged well. And in general, his limericks look a bit lame now, partly because it was not yet the convention at that time for the verse to have a surprise fifth line. In fact, many of his have only four lines, and even then, the last tends merely to repeat the first. It’s like looking at the early steam-powered motor cars. The general idea is there, but the technical advances that would make it popular hadn’t happened yet.

By contrast, The Owl and the Pussycat is a classic undimmed by time. Not only did it introduce the word “runcible” to English, it elevated nonsense verse into the general neighbourhood of poetry, where it remains. Moreover, despite concerning a love affair between supposedly incompatible species, it reads more plausibly now that a lot of romantic-era verse that wasn’t meant to be absurd when it was written but has become so.

It’s largely forgotten these days that Lear was also an artist. He was a professional illustrator and painted landscapes too, some of them during visits to Ireland.

But it’s the nonsense for which he’s remembered and loved, a fact that may or may not be a lesson for all of us, as we note in passing his birthday, 200 years ago today.