Sir, - I refer to the article by Malachy O'Rourke, "Writing the Wrongs" (Weekend, September 15th). Mr O'Rourke attempts to share his opinions with the readers about An Caighdean Oifigiuil, the official standard grammar and spelling for the Irish language. In short, he recommends a radical overhaul. Unfortunately, his article is so full of fluff that it is not easy to understand what type of overhaul he is getting at.
He left his listeners in no doubt in a lecture he gave in the offices of Bord na Gaeilge some time ago. Basically what Mr O'Rourke wants is a written language that is user-friendly to people whose first language is English, and for whom Irish is at best an eccentric past-time. He would like to do away with initial mutations, for example. If I understand him rightly, he would like to do for Irish what the Zionist linguistic zealots did for Hebrew. My linguist friends tell me that the Zionists didn't so much revive a language as create a new language based loosely on the vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew. Any points at all that would cause difficulty for non-Sephardic Jews were just dispensed with, including many of the traits that make Biblical Hebrew a Semitic language.
One has to ask: why should we attempt that in the case of Irish? What do we need such a mishmash of a language for? At least in the case of the Zionists there is a certain plausibility in the argument that they needed a lingua franca that Jews from all over the world could accept. We Irish don't need to invent a lingua franca. We have one: English. For the past quarter of a millennium, allowing for jumps and starts, we have become an English-speaking people, and have developed an identiably Irish voice in the Anglo-American world which is the reality we inhabit and are likely to inhabit for the foreseeable future. If Irish, the ancestral language of the majority, is to die, well then let it die in peace.
The problem with Irish for several hundred years is literacy, not lack of standardisation. Until the advent of the revival movement, Irish as a language of prose was confined to a small number of registers, mainly seanchas, traditional prose-tales, works of devotion, spirituality, and catechisms. The private letter was almost non-existent in Irish until the advent of the revival. When educated Irish-speakers needed to write to each other, they invariably did so in Latin, English, or even in Spanish. There is not one Irish-language letter in the Salamanca College collection published some years ago by Maynooth. There was no drama in Irish in the period in question. The political pamphlet or speech was all but non-existent. The main force for standardisation and mutual intelligibility in this century has undoubtedly been the radio. I applaud Teilifis na Gaeilge's current policy of employing Gaeltacht people rather than Galltacht learners. I hope they apply it all round.
Despite being a near-dead language, more Irish prose has been produced this century than in many of the previous centuries combined. If the traditional language, the real language of our heritage, is to survive at all, it needs careful husbanding, not major surgery. - Yours, etc., Seamas de Barra,
Beaufort Downs,
Dublin 14.