The National Board and Foreign Opinion on it

From the "Daily Express"

In addition to Dr. Bonn's interesting articles, which you have been reviewing for the last couple of weeks two other books of great importance to Irishmen have; within the last fortnight, been issued from the German press, and certainly their appearance is, for the people of this country, full of significance.

One is grammar, the other is a dictionary in German and Irish, of the Irish language exactly as it is spoken at this moment in the West of Ireland, more especially in the Arran Isles. Their author is Dr. Franx Nikolaus Finck, and he has, in elucidating some of the more knotty points, called in the assistance of his friend, Dr. Holger Pedersen, a Danish Professor, of Copenhagen.

Both of these savants resided for months, together in the West of Ireland and in the Arran Isles, to thoroughly master the spoken speech of the people, and to record with the utmost minuteness every turn and twist of the current language. These two great works of Dr. Finck's are founded not upon the old books, not upon the MSS., not even on the written language, but simply and solely upon the speech of the people as he took it down by ear, and recorded it by a scientific and accurate system of phonetics.

And the results are marvellous.

After listening for a few months to the conversation of the Arran peasantry amongst themselves, Dr. Finck was able to write down a vocabulary of close upon 4,000 words which he had heard them use in their everyday life as they went out and in, and he constructed independently of former grammars a marvellous and beautiful one of the spoken speech of the peasantry.

Had Dr. Finck lived longer amongst the Westerns he would have been easily able to increase the bulk of his excellent dictionary of living terms, for I miss from it at the first glance scores and scores of words quite familiar to me, but which happened, apparently, not to have fallen in his way.   

If the Board of National Education in Ireland is capable of any reflection at all, it must be a bitter annoyance to them to find Germans and Danes, and Frenchmen like M. Dottin, earnestly engaged in studying the beauties of the spoken Irish language which they have treated with an ignorant contemptuousness, and a remorseless persecution.

It must make them feel exceedingly foolish to have Dr. Finck exposing to the world of science the fact that the people who speak the Irish language employ a current vocabulary of some 4,000 words in which they are denied education by the political "educationalists" who are appointed to educate them.

It must make them feel like culprits at the bar of public opinion to be told, as Dr. Kuno Meyer tells them, that they are engaged in a "grotesque educational blunder" in refusing to teach the people the language that they speak. It should give even the most case hardened ignoramus pause to be addressed by a Danish Professor from Copenhagen in these burning words of honest indignation at what he had seen with his own eyes—"If you blot the Irish language out of the educational programme you are committing not only an injustice but an act of barbarity, of cruelty, of murder.

You are murdering a nation. I know what I am talking about, for I have sojourned half a year in Ireland, and I have taken down phonetically 400 pages of Irish folk-lore, and I have been conversing the whole day with Irish-speaking peasants, and in my printed works I have given large evidence that I know the Irish language. But I know that the Irish-speaking population can derive no good from the English language. I found some individuals. who boasted of their knowledge of English, but they were the most stupid people I ever met with."

Exactly so? We are tired telling this to the Commissioners, but they will not believe the Gaelic League. Will they pay attention now to the perfectly unbiased opinion of these great foreign scholars?

I put it to the Board, I put it to the readers of the "Daily Express," is not the Irish-speaking peasant with a native vocabulary of 4,000 words in possession of a superior endowment to that of the English peasant (as has been pointed out over and over again by English scholars) who has often only a vocabulary of from 400 to 700 words?

Is the Board so ignorant of its own business that it does not know that thought is conditioned by language, and that they act and re-act upon one another so intimately that a boy with a vocabulary of 4,000 words will have many times more subtle ideas at his command than a boy with only 500. What does the Board mean? What excuse can it give for itself for refusing to teach the people the language they speak?

It is the firm belief of hundreds of thousands of Irishmen, at home and abroad, that the National Board of Education is simply wiping intelligence, intellect, and, to a larger extent than people are aware of, the religion out of the West of Ireland.

I know of no parish now in the West of Ireland in which the National Board has succeeded in extirpating the Irish language, where each house still continues to say family prayer at night.

I know no Irish-speaking parish where they do not almost universally do so. It is my firm conviction—and I have some knowledge of the people—that the present generation of Western boys turned out by the National Schools are no more to he compared for intellect, wit, shrewdness, and general ability with their fathers, who were educated in the hedge schools, than the Australian blacks are today with the white men.

The Western bi-linguists, so far as they have succeeded in expressing themselves at all, are solid in demanding bi-lingual education. But what is the use of their demanding anything when the Board to which they appeal is not responsible to anyone except itself?

As at present constituted the Board is an anomaly which must be soon altered. In the letter addressed by Mr. Martyn, of Tillyra Castle, familiar to the Dublin public as the author of the "Heather Field," to the recent great Feis in Galway, in which he advised the people not to attend schools in which they were refused a National bi-lingual education, and in the openly-expressed sympathy of the Bishop Of Galway with that letter I think I see the arising of a cloud which I sincerely hope may develop into a storm throughout the West and North of Ireland which will sweep from its place a Board which in the consciousness of its complete irresponsibility has done such fearful damage to Irish intellect.

DOUGLAS HYDE