Inside Feature: HE Dictionary: Stones to the Carn
Last Spring we mooted the idea of compiling a large-scale dictionary of Hiberno-English with the Royal Irish Academy by enlisting the membership of IASIL to trawl the literature for usages. Nothing has been heard since and in the interim Terence Patrick Dolan (UCD) has brought out A Dictionary of Hiberno-English (Gill & Macmillan 1998) containing approximately 3,500 lexical entries a high proportion of which - perhaps the majority - are simpy Irish loan-words embedded in English sentences (e.g., 'She has had nothing but mí-rath since she moved back in with the family after the husband died'). Thus for epithets such as 'omadhawn' the reader is referred back to the Irish ('amadán'), though others such as 'hooley' are justly explicated in place with reference to their Hindu origins. (Do-lally, heard on Cork lips - but not listed her-derives from a mental asylum known to servicemen in Calcutta.) Others like 'renegue' that might be classed as Anglo-Irish are referred to Old French and Latin (renegare) origins - oddly overlooking a broadly identical citation in the Oxford English Dictionary and the resemblance to the common English verb 'renege'.
Arbitrariness is inevitable in any compilation yet I wonder if the inclusion of the RDS and RIA - here styled 'the leading learned society in Ireland' - is not unduly parti-pris when TCD, UCG, RTE, and EU, &c., are all omitted from the headword list? A different kind of partisanship is glimpsed in the definition of the term 'unionist' as signifying an 'opponent of Irish independence' while 'nationalist' goes unlisted. More cheekily yet, 'big house' is seen as 'symbolising the arrogance of the Ascendancy', while the 'Ascendancy' can be recognised by 'their accents, and their faces, and the company they keep' - according to an unnamed interlocutor whose obiter dicta serves as the sole example. At this point the concept of vernacular usage shades into common prejudice. By marked contrast to these uncongenial signifiers, items such as 'national school' and are treated at astounding length though representing no problem whatsoever to the common understanding. Here the Dictionary trespasses on the function of a very different kind of compilation - as more than occasional onward references to the Oxford Companion to Irish History reveal.
The element of spurious encyclopaedism is perhaps most apparent in a 35-line entry that proffers a biographical sketch of Frank Duff while the international phonetic alphabet is summoned to assist those who have trouble pronouncing the obscure Gaelic phrase 'Legion of Mary', along with an etymological reference from Hiberno-English 'Mary' to the Aramaic name Maryam. In his amiable desire to catalogue the contents of the Irish mind, the compiler inadvertantly arrives at an amalgam of pedantry and credulity that almost suggests the intellectual angle of approach epitomised by Flann O'Brien's philosopher de Selby. A column-length account of the (presumably) Catholic eucharist, for example, bears witness to the recognition that 'holy communion' is at the centre of experience for most Irish children and their parents at some moment. Yet the account of it given here reads like the handiwork of a Swiftian projector describing the eating habits of an antipodean tribe:
Holy Communion: the name and reception and consumption of the Blessed Sacrament [q.v.] in the form of altar-bread directly into the mouth from the hand of the priest or into the left hand of the communicant and then transferred into the mouth with the right hand.
'Holy days of obligation' are documented with the same misplaced exactitude. After this kind of thing, it is a relief to come upon the alcoholic import of the 'holy hour' and the common-sense significance of 'holy show'; yet 'holy water' proves irresistible, and we are soon immersed in the 'stoup' so commonly affixed to the wall 'beside the front-door of private houses' in Co. Kerry (to judge by the sole example) - though less commonly now than in the past, as the entry also notices.
Deference to political shibboleths is equally apparent in the brief historical introduction where we are told that the Irish
had first become exposed to English as a result of the invasion conducted by King Henry II, who had been authorised by the only English Pope, Nicholas Breakspear (who had taken the name of Hadrian IV), reigning form 1154 to 1159, to unite Ireland with England, on supposedly spiritual grounds. (pp.xxvi-vii.)
Contrary to such hints, it is generally held that the pope in question (whom most authorities are content to call 'Adrian') wrote no such bull as Laudabiliter - which was in all probability a propagandist fabrication of Giraldus Cambrensis. If this is so then any further allusion to Adrian's national provenance or his dates of office are of value merely in bolstering anti-English feeling. In mitigation, Dolan does remind us parenthetically that the Statues of Kilkenny forbidding any 'Englishman to use the Irish language' were actually written in Norman-French - a fact less susceptible of political simplification than his notion of a Saxon prelate and a Plantaget Angevin king conspiring to 'unite' England and Ireland.
The usages employed as illustrations (generally one or two per entry) have been gathered or - more frequently, I suspect, excogitated - by a panel of some 120 correspondents in Dublin, Cavan, Mayo, and Cork, with a lesser number in Limerick, Galway, Tipperary, and Antrim. Literary sources are restricted to some 60 titles including five by Seamus Heaney, five by James Joyce, two by Neil Jordan, one by Jennifer Johnston, and one by Marie Heaney. As for earlier texts, the Irish Hudibras and Sir Richard Head's Hic et Ubique are included in the survey along with everything else edited by Alan Bliss. Excepting the Field Day production, drawn on for citations from Lady Gregory, Shaw, and Synge, anthologies have been spurned, while Carleton is represented solely by Six Irish Tales in Anthony Cronin's popular edition. Durcan, Kavanagh, Kennelly, McGuckian, Montague, Yeats, and Tom Paulin - who contributes a Foreword - are the only poets called in evidence.
Far from being a systematic survey of the literature, this compilation gives an impression of eccentricity hardly less marked than that which characterised P. W. Joyce's English as We Speak It in Ireland (1910). The pleasures of the book are identical with its chief failing: it remains arbitrary and anecdotal in its selection of examples. We will have to wait for a dictionary that provides an authoritative rather survey of the linguistic culture of anglophone Ireland - a point that Tom Paulin perhaps acknowledges when he calls Dolan's dictionary both 'a quarry and a cairn'. The book may well deserve those strenuous similitudes, and may be nothing less than 'magnificent' in a sense apposite to Paulin's own purposes, but there are other quarries to be worked in Irish lexicography. It is regrettable, therefore, that we are not told if the Folklore Commission at UCD has anything to offer future researchers or how the long-planned HE dictionary at the RIA is coming on. A courteous bow in the direction of other Irish published glossarians such as Richard Wall might have been made also - beyond citing him as a point of reference in isolated entries. Nor is there any introductory acknowledgement of the extent of the challenge facing us and the potential role for Irish literary scholars of an Association like our own in contributing to a dictionary project that might result in an authoritative census of lexical forms and semantic variants, together with their chronological incidence, in the fashion of a full-scale national lexicography.
There is nothing ultimately depressing about this compilation so long as we regard it as the threshold rather than the whole edifice. Perhaps an RIA-IASIL co-venture is still before us and perhaps Terry Dolan has a key role to play in it as the leading lexicographical professional in Ireland. In the meantime, his scrupulous compilation will remain on my desk within easy reach for reference and 'divarsion', and ought to grace the bookshelves of everyone concerned with making sense of Irish writing as it springs up like saxifrage between the tectonic plates of Irish and English literature. BS