For the love of language

Reflections on a long apprenticeship to Gaelic

Can you tell me where the boundary lies? The line between the centuries-old ivy on the side of our house and the weathered stones to which it clings with such a patient love. I cannot find it. The world’s slow adaptation to itself has been so painstaking. Thousands upon thousands of tentative overtures and hesitant advances, rebuffed or accepted, each on its merits. The accumulation of a gradual understanding. The accommodation of plant and stone. 

 

Can you tell me where the boundary lies? The border between the millennia-old language of the Gaels and the rocky western holdfasts to which it now clings with such a fierce love.¹ I cannot find it. The synergy between the language’s syntax and the rugged sway of the land is so deep. The synchronisation of verbal forms with the slow accretion of hours into days and days into seasons is too intricate. After so many centuries of rubbing along together, language and land have settled their differences.

For more than a decade I lived in the places where Gaelic is still the everyday language of the community. It all started after I heard a stranger recite a poem on the shore of a Highland sea-loch. The tide was low but on the turn. The poem was spoken out over the calm water in Scottish Gaelic, of which, back then, I understood not a word. But down amongst the yellow wrack on the side of Loch Broom, amongst the carcasses of crabs and the society of limpets, I fell under the language’s spell. I wanted that taste in my mouth, those images in my throat, the feel of that animal’s fur on my lips. I gave up my job. I gave up everything I had previously been and went to live where the language lived.

For four years the salt-slap gales on the western coast of the Western Isles of Scotland taught me the intricate ways in which Gaelic expresses a passive verb. They call the passive voice an guth fulangach – the voice of enduring, of bearing.

While I worked to reopen ditches and renew the rotten fences on our Atlantic-facing croft, St Kilda would come briefly into sight on a clear day, only to fade away for weeks at a time in the mist and rain. The fruits of all my efforts to wrap myself in the language were no less fleeting. One day my tongue seemed to know the circuitous shapes and serpentine strokes which turned sound into words and bent words into idiom. The next day it lay comatose in my mouth and would not dance.

A language is a cautious animal. Scottish Gaelic more than most, perhaps. Like the otters on the headland it knew all the tunnels and sinks in the deep peat. It could watch you approach until the last minute - then away unseen in the black underground streams, to emerge with a magician’s flourish, out of reach on a rock guarded by the rising tide.

Undaunted, I crossed Sruth na Maoile, the narrow North Channel that barely separates Scottish Gaelic from Ulster Irish.² For the next four years we lived in Donegal, in the palm of the cupped hands of the Derryveagh mountains. In a one-bedroom cottage with black mould climbing the walls as fast as the peat fire could dry them out. Myth jostled for space in the everyday and got its way. Mount Errigal, the throne of Lugh, was at our back and the lobster-claws of Balor’s Tory Island were snapping at the horizon as we left the house each morning. For three summers the trout of Loch na mBreac Beadaí, the Loch of the Fussy Trout, schooled me in the evasiveness of Gaelic’s subjunctive mood. I never caught one. But once, when the sun shone into the peaty water, I think I saw the flash of a fish’s flank expressing the delicate distinction which Gaelic draws between a simple counterfactual and the near impossible.

A language, like any other animal, can be brought into captivity. Then it can be harnessed to a cart and blinkered, forced to transport our goods to market. It can be taught to drive a tank, fell a forest. It can be brutalised to the point where it knows only fear and distrust, snarling at any hand that reaches out to it. Despite centuries of brutal oppression, it seemed to me that Gaelic had, thus far, evaded capture.

There are ancient manuscripts that contain poems and other texts in Gaelic which were written from the seventh to the ninth century. Aside from Latin and Greek, these are some of the oldest written witnesses of any living European language. The poetry is startlingly fresh. In one of the poems the writer embodies the coming of winter in the bellow of a stag. In another the scribe expresses his comradeship with a white cat. The language of this period is Old Irish: the source code, the mother stones. We left Donegal and moved to Connemara so that I could study in the famous Old Irish department of the University of Galway. I saw the Gaelic language, which so completely filled the landscapes I inhabited in the present, stretching back to the horizon of historical time. In the tiny village where we lived I began to hear snatches and echoes of these oldest forms of speech. We had neighbours in those hills way out west with whom I never spoke English. There were cows, lochans, foxes and dragonflies with whom I never spoke English. I continued to climb the slippery cliffs of a beautiful language, grateful for every ledge and handhold. I will always be climbing, without any illusion that I will ever even glimpse the summit.

A few months ago I finally made my way home, a prodigal, to the language of my birth. I started writing again after many years of silence, here in this tolerant community of people doing their generous best. If I have learnt anything in those years on the road, it might be this. Every language, like all living things, can thrive or wither. If we repeatedly soak a language in poison and ugliness it will grow to answer us back with toxins and malice. When we hand our language over to those who use it only to buy and sell we are left with dust in our mouths. Language blossoms in the shelter of the land and the warmth of the attention we pay to it. We pull its roots out of the soil at our peril.

1. The ancient Celtic language of Gaelic, which was once spoken throughout Ireland and most of Scotland, is now the everyday language only of small, precious enclaves, mostly on the Atlantic seaboards of those two countries.

2. Up until as late as the end of the nineteenth century, Gaelic was spoken in a continuous territory stretching from the southwest tip of Ireland up to the western isles and northernmost mainland of Scotland. When speaking in English it is customary to refer to the specific forms of Gaelic spoken in Ireland as ‘Irish’.

---