An Irishman's Diary

THE Malin pronunciation controversy rumbles on in my mail-box, although a contribution from Aengus Finnegan ought to be the last word on the subject. Or the last two words, maybe.

Anyway, Aengus refers me to logainm.ie, the place-names website of the Department of Arts, Culture, and the Gaeltacht. Which, among many other things, contains a sound file wherein a native of Inishowen says the name in both Irish and English.

In English, the speaker pronounces it “Malin” with a flat A, just as it would be said in Dublin or on the BBC. But in Irish, his pronunciation is very definitely “Mawlin”, with a long A reflecting the fada. This appears to contradict a key argument of the anti-Mawlin camp: that the fada’s writ does not run in Donegal, or at least that it runs differently there than in other Gaeltacht areas.

Whereas there now seem to be grounds for concluding that some Malin-ites might have used the long A, even in English, before the shipping forecast made the short A general (all over Ireland). And this, of course, was where the debate started, via Iris O’Sullivan’s original e-mail.

In any case, just to be on the safe side, I think that in all future mentions, I will adopt the classic compromise deployed by a certain city just east of Donegal, and refer to the place as “Malin/Mawlin”, so as not to risk offending either side of the community.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, I notice that even the radio ads from Northern Ireland Tourism have now taken to calling the aforementioned city “Derry/Londonderry”, as if that’s its official name.

Which indeed I foresee it becoming, sooner or later. Derry/Londonderry already has a ring to it, partly because of the pleasant trochaic rhythm and partly because it echoes the title of the U2 song, Sunday Bloody Sunday (itself of course not unrelated to the same place).

In fact, on this last point, if the city fathers/mothers were minded to make the name change official, I imagine Bono could easily be persuaded to re-write the song accordingly, with a happy ending, as a contribution to the peace process.

With or without a song, the formal adoption of the Derry/Londonderry compromise would finally remove the need for the many avoidance strategies that businesses and other organisations in the city have to use in their own names, rather than alienate a section of customers.

This usually involves ignoring the city altogether and referring instead to a geographic feature, like the river Foyle, or to the general location: the north-west.

But there are potential pitfalls everywhere. Consider, for example, the neutral-sounding name of the Belfast-Derry bus service “Maiden City Flyer”. It even has a poetic quality: until you remember that the “Maiden City” nickname is a politico-sexual reference to the siege of 1689, when Protestant Derry successfully defended her virtue against the amorous advances of the Papists.

True, the name doesn’t seem to have affected the bus service’s popularity in the now mainly-Catholic city. Unlike the Jacobites, the vehicles get in and out regularly, with no incident. But it’s a lot of baggage for any transport service to have to carry. Whereas a “Derry/Londonderry Flyer” would be impeccably neutral, albeit at the risk of sounding like a bus that went nowhere.

I ALSO NOTICE, mind you, that on the City of Culture 2013 website, which also uses the compromise format, the alternatives are divided by a hyphen rather than a forward slash. Thus it reads “Derry-Londonderry”, which to my eyes suggests a union of twin cities (like Minneapolis-St Paul) rather than of mere names. But then maybe, Northern Ireland being what it is, the forward slash was considered controversial.

This is entirely possible. Anything that leans one way or another in the North is open to suspicion: including, as I mentioned here before, a notorious punctuation mark in the title of the language agency, the Boord O Ulstèr Scotch.

At a press event promoting the Boord some years ago, I asked – out of genuine curiosity – what the effect of the accent on the E in Ulster was. Whereupon a spokeswoman admitted it had none: “we just thought it looked good”. And so it does. But I couldn’t help noticing that the accent pointed in the opposite direction from the Irish fada, which was hardly accidental.

Maybe Ulster Scots enthusiasts could argue that they were unconsciously imitating Scots Gaelic, in which all the fadas are left leaning. This last bit, by the way, is true. Thus, while a welcome in Connemara is “fáilte”, in Scotland it’s “fàilte” (although the accents probably meet half-way in Donegal).

But the Ulstèr-Scotch accent looked like stroke politics, Northern-style. The Boord was established around the time of the Palestinian intifada, if I remember correctly. And it seemed to me that the Ulster-Scots had launched an anti-fada, effectively, as part of their struggle.

Maybe this is why the city of culture people have opted for the hyphen, which being horizontal, has no leanings one way or another. After all, if the nationalist-dominated city council officially renamed the place “Derry/Londonderry”, the forward slash might be assumed to have Catholic overtones. And then, before you knew it, there would be the inevitable Protestant backslash.