English As We Speak It in Ireland

by P. W. Joyce

'You had better rinsh that glass' is heard everywhere in Ireland: an old English survival; for Shakespeare and Lovelace have renched for rinced (Lowell): which with the Irish sound of short e before n gives us our word rinshed.

Such words as old, cold, hold are pronounced by the Irish people ould, cowld, hould (or howlt); gold is sounded goold and ford foord. I once heard an old Wicklow woman say of some very rich people 'why these people could ait goold.' These are all survivals of the old English way of pronouncing such words. In the State Papers of Elizabeth's time you will constantly meet with such words as hoult and stronghowlt (hold and stronghold.) In my boyhood days I knew a great large sinewy active woman who lived up in the mountain gap, and who was universally known as 'Thunder the cowlt from Poulaflaikeen' (cowlt for colt); Poulaflaikeen, the high pass between Glenosheen and Glenanaar, Co. Limerick, for which see Dr. R. D. Joyce's 'Ballads of Irish Chivalry,' pp. 102, 103, 120.

Old Tom Howlett, a Dublin job gardener, speaking to me of the management of fruit trees, recommended the use of butchers' waste. 'Ah sir'—said he, with a luscious roll in his voice as if he had been licking his lips—'Ah sir, there's nothing for the roots of an apple tree like a big tub of fine rotten ould guts,'

Final d is often omitted after l and n: you will see this everywhere in Seumas MacManus's books for Donegal. Recently we were told by the attendant boy at one of the Dublin seaside baths that the prices were—'a shilling for the hot and sixpence for the cowl.' So we constantly use an' for and: in a Waterford folk song we have 'Here's to the swan that sails on the pon' (the 'swan' being the poet's sweetheart): and I once heard a man say to another in a fair:—'That horse is sound in win' and limb.'

Short e is always sounded before n and m, and sometimes in other positions, like short i: 'How many arrived?' 'Tin min and five women': 'He always smoked a pipe with a long stim.' If you ask a person for a pin, he will inquire 'Is it a brass pin or a writing pin you want?'

Again is sounded by the Irish people agin, which is an old English survival. 'Donne rhymes again with sin, and Quarles repeatedly with in.' (Lowell.) An Irishman was once landed on the coast of some unknown country where they spoke English. Some violent political dispute happened to be going on there at the time, and the people eagerly asked the stranger about his political views; on which—instinctively giving expression to the feelings he brought with him from the 'ould sod'—he promptly replied before making any inquiry—'I'm agin the Government.' This story, which is pretty well known, is a faked one; but it affords us a good illustration.

Onion is among our people always pronounced ingion: constantly heard in Dublin. 'Go out Mike

for the ingions,' as I once heard a woman say in Limerick.

'Men are of different opinions,