Personalizing Language – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week, adding onto last week’s release about my work as a translator, I’m discussing my view on how language ought to be personalized.
About this time every year I’ve been releasing a blog post about my interest in and continued study of the Irish language. In past years I’ve talked about how I came into this period of studying Irish knowing bits and pieces of it, but without the comfort of speaking or reading it regularly, and later how I appreciate the meaning of how the structure of Irish gets its ideas across. This year, I want to talk about how I feel my own personal use of the Irish language has taken on its own form, or idiolect, and why that’s the case.
A few weeks ago, I found several books on the regional variations in Irish through my university’s e-book catalog. It struck me that these linguists had found such common generalizations of Irish sounds when spoken, or rather attempted, by native English speakers who don’t have much experience with Irish itself. The frequent “ch” sound as in leathanach, or page, gets hardened from a ch to a k, while the slightly less frequent “dh” in dha, or two things, gets turned from a dh into a g. The best way I can describe this dh sound is it sounds to me like a French r that’s rolled further back in the throat.
I read these examples of Anglicizations of Irish phonetics and could see, or rather hear, where they were coming from. Yet in my own case I’ve always tended to either make these sounds as we’re taught in class, or to soften them, with the ch becoming a h and the dh joining the other sound spelled “dh” as something along the lines of a ya. I suppose the authors of that book were using native speakers of Hiberno-English as their test subjects, something that I am not. I speak American English, more specifically a blending of the western end of Inland Northern American English (aka Great Lakes English) and Midland American English. Plus, when it comes to other languages I’m most often exposed to, French and Spanish, I’ve found a good deal of the phonetics of those languages to be rather easy to adopt. So, my own idiolect, my own way of speaking Irish would be a tad different from the norm because I don’t speak the expected standard of English.
Going forward, I wonder if it would be more helpful, should I ever get the opportunity to teach Irish here in the United States, if I adopted some of these slightly easier to pronounce sounds and taught those, alongside the traditional Irish ones, would that change the ways my students spoke the language? It’s certainly possible, yet on the other hand like how I adapted Irish to fit the comforts of my own speech perhaps they would find ways to make the language their own as well.
At the end of the day, these ch and dh sounds are two of many that make Irish its own, that give it the spirit and the character that keeps it true to its origins and history. I for one love that I’ve figured out how to make these sounds, and how to speak this language to an intermediate level now as an adult. It means a lot to me to speak the language of so many of my ancestors, to keep that vehicle for thoughts, ideas, and stories alive.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 