Blood of the travellers

slowburner

paky wrote: »

one traveller family called the o'donnells said that according to their family history they began travelling after the ulster plantations.

Was this said in the programme ? I don't recall any mention of the Ulster plantation. Or did you hear it yourself from the O'Donnells - that would be fascinating.

dubhthach

slowburner wrote: »

Was this said in the programme ? I don't recall any mention of the Ulster plantation. Or did you hear it yourself from the O'Donnells - that would be fascinating.

One of the travellers met by Francie was an O'Donnell. I believe (bit hazy) he mentioned that his grandfather had been from Elphin and had married a travller and started travelling (after been ostracised by his family)

with regards to "Ulster Plantation" it is well know that there was a fairly major migration of Donegal people into North Mayo after the plantations. For example the Irish of North Mayo is often said to be intermediate between that of Conamara and Donegal as it's been heavily influenced by said migration.

CDfm

i saw somewhere about references to irish travellers in the USA around 1760 - i must have a look.

even if it is lore there must be some history

unclejunior

dubhthach wrote: »

One of the travellers met by Francie was an O'Donnell. I believe (bit hazy) he mentioned that his grandfather had been from Elphin and had married a travller and started travelling (after been ostracised by his family)

with regards to "Ulster Plantation" it is well know that there was a fairly major migration of Donegal people into North Mayo after the plantations. For example the Irish of North Mayo is often said to be intermediate between that of Conamara and Donegal as it's been heavily influenced by said migration.

my dad comes from north mayo. we can trace our family back to 16th century donegal. the village he comes from was founded by dispossessed irish from donegal and tyrone who fled during the plantations. the people in the village spoke an ulster dialect of irish up to the end of the 19th century and rarely intermarried with people outside the area. the people there look like travellers funny enough. some families in the area are direct descendants of red hugh o donnel and descendants of the clearys, who compiled the annals of the four masters

teekayd25

slowburner wrote: »

Agreed. The programme raised many more questions than it answered.

I think this is actually a good thing, and of course it's understandable too when you consider how little information there is in relation to the travelling community's history. At one stage the point was made that Irish academics / writers etc. have simply never really had much interest in it - hopefully this programme can help change that a bit.

The Mere Mortals - "Travelling On". Can anyone remember this band . . . were any of them actually members of the travelling community?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUtheN-infU

At least one thing the programme did shed light on was how the travelling community can take "credit" for introducing the words "beore" and "feen" into Irish everyday language! :pac:

CDfm

UL have a course on it starting at 1850

http://www2.ul.ie/web/WWW/Faculties/Arts,_Humanities_%26_Social_Sciences/History/Centres_%26_Research_Activities/HEA_Traveller_Initiative

CDfm

And here is a link to a pdf from Queens University Belfast done for the Irish Antropological Association of Ireland.

http://eprints.nuim.ie/1087/1/IrishTravellersSOS.pdf

And this link is an article from History Ireland

http://www.historyireland.com/volumes/volume12/issue4/features/?id=114362

Here is snippet showing travellers predate the famine and the article reviews the literature

Apocrypha to canon: inventing Irish Traveller history*

Detail of A Gypsy [sic] Encampment (1810) by William Mulready—evidence that the tent was not introduced into Ireland in the 1870s, as claimed by the Gmelches. (National Gallery of Ireland)

The Scientician

Having a look at it now on the RTE Player.

slowburner

teekayd25 wrote: »

community can take "credit" for introducing the words "beore" and "feen" into Irish everyday language! :pac:

I haven't heard these words, what do they mean?

dubhthach

slowburner wrote: »

I haven't heard these words, what do they mean?

Regular parts of Galway slang. We used to use them as kids in Galway city for example:
beore = woman (good looking)
feen = a man

Ye see it in Limerick as well or so it seems listening to the "Rubber bandits"

They are loanwords from Traveller cant.

slowburner

dubhthach wrote: »

Regular parts of Galway slang. We used to use them as kids in Galway city for example:
beore = woman (good looking)
feen = a man

In the Claddagh, by any chance?

CDfm

Irish(Gaelige) has dialects too, not that you would know from how it is thought in schools.

Wexford around the Bannow area had a language called Yola and a cousin has told me that they still have hymns in the dialect at Mass.

mikemac

Near the start of the first episode a bottle in the laboratory was labelled buffer

Is that some laboratory term?
Or is that supposed to be some joke??

dubhthach

slowburner wrote: »

In the Claddagh, by any chance?

No I would say among teenagers in general in Galway City. The Claddagh was Irish speaking up until it was demolished rebuilt in the 1920's.

Ye hear them alot in places like Tuam as well.

slowburner

mikemac wrote: »

Near the start of the first episode a bottle in the laboratory was labelled buffer

Is that some laboratory term?
Or is that supposed to be some joke??

Googled 'buffer' and could only find technical definitions relating to chemistry, water tanks etc.. Does it have another meaning

mikemac

Ah I'm flying off the handle
Buffer must be some technical term

In Galway anyway, the travellers say "buffer" for settled people and not always in a nice way.

Buffer is a label same as any label thrown at them

dubhthach

mikemac wrote: »

Ah I'm flying off the handle
Buffer must be some technical term

In Galway anyway, the travellers say "buffer" for settled people and not always in a nice way.

Buffer is a label same as any label thrown at them

Not just travellers, plenty of people in Galway (city) use "buffer" to refer to country people. "You're some buffer" etc.

teekayd25

slowburner wrote: »

I haven't heard these words, what do they mean?

dubhthach wrote: »

Regular parts of Galway slang. We used to use them as kids in Galway city for example:
beore = woman (good looking)
feen = a man

Ye see it in Limerick as well or so it seems listening to the "Rubber bandits"

They are loanwords from Traveller cant.

It's actually interesting because in some areas of the country they are very common, but might not be recognised throughout an entire region, maybe just pockets of it. For instance, the terms are common in the town I grew up in (which happens to have a festival that attracts the travelling community for a few days each year), but I never got the sense that the words were widely used in any of the neighbouring towns.

Found a couple of surprisingly useful definitions on urbandictionary.com

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=feen&defid=2983701

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=beor

You'll see them pop up on After Hours every now and again as well

old hippy

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

As Brendan Beehan said about the Free State super heros like Jerry McCabe - they coax them down from the Kerry mountains with raw meet.

The way they treated the travelling people a decade or two ago, they would have given the red neck cops in Alabama in the 60's a good run for their money.

I do wish you people would stop using the Free State/Free Staters epithet. It smacks of prejudice to me.

Otherwise, I agree. Travellers have always been faced with out and out hostility.

sensibleken

teekayd25 wrote: »

I think this is actually a good thing, and of course it's understandable too when you consider how little information there is in relation to the travelling community's history. At one stage the point was made that Irish academics / writers etc. have simply never really had much interest in it - hopefully this programme can help change that a bit.

There's bits and bobs, mostly seems to be life writting. The UCD library has a large section of wax cylinders from the turn of the last century interviewing travellers. My other half is doing her phd in traveller music so we've a few shelves of stuff at this stage

CDfm

I knew I had seen 1760 mentioned somewhere

I have been researching the history of the Irish language, as well as Shelta/Gammon/Cant in the US. I am looking to correspond with others who have interest in the Travellers and their language and history. The project focuses on dialectical survivals of Irish Gaeilge in regions of North America, and of course Shelta is an important part of the tale. I have uncovered evidence of Irish Travellers in the US as early as the 1760s. I have also located a few familles in the census, and on the Famine ships, which has been a little like catching moonbeams in a jar.

Daniel Cassidy

The Irish Studies Program

New College of California

http://sciway3.net/clark/freemoors/travellers.html

slowburner

dubhthach wrote: »

Regular parts of Galway slang. We used to use them as kids in Galway city for example:
beore = woman (good looking)
feen = a man

Ye see it in Limerick as well or so it seems listening to the "Rubber bandits"

They are loanwords from Traveller cant.

Sorry to be going backwards a bit here.
I spoke to a man who was born in Galway city and lived there from the 1930s to 1950s. The terms were new to him.

dubhthach

slowburner wrote: »

Sorry to be going backwards a bit here.
I spoke to a man who was born in Galway city and lived there from the 1930s to 1950s. The terms were new to him.

Well make sense words such as those would only have come into lexicon after it became policy to settle travellers. I was using these words in school in the mid-90's. So obviously there's a 40-60 year gap from his experience. In general though the old "Galway town" accent no longer exists (was similiar to Tuam accent). As mention though these are generally words ye only hear teenagers using.

man1

Pity its not available on Rte player, they must be bringing out a dvd of it or selling the rights to other stations???
would love to see it, it sounds interesting!

malarkus

mikemac wrote: »

Near the start of the first episode a bottle in the laboratory was labelled buffer

Is that some laboratory term?
Or is that supposed to be some joke??

I can categorically state thats theres no in-joke, its a standard reagent used in biochiemistry for DNA extraction and hundreds of other lab techniques. In fact, that particualr bottle was probably from my kit

slowburner

man1 wrote: »

Pity its not available on Rte player, they must be bringing out a dvd of it or selling the rights to other stations???
would love to see it, it sounds interesting!

Pretty sure it still is.

malarkus

man1 wrote: »

Pity its not available on Rte player, they must be bringing out a dvd of it or selling the rights to other stations???
would love to see it, it sounds interesting!

http://www.rte.ie/player/#v=1098961
Both parts are there, it stays up until 12th June

CDfm

slowburner wrote: »

Sorry to be going backwards a bit here.
I spoke to a man who was born in Galway city and lived there from the 1930s to 1950s. The terms were new to him.

Probably because if it is a dialect you did not have cars back then -horses and carts. So in a way travellers went from being local to national.

This explains the thinking on the history of the language -inverted words and loan words

Shelta's vocabulary is based largely on Irish, with many words inverted in a style not unlike French verlan slang; for example, the word for 'girl' is lakeen, from the Irish cailín, and the word rodas, meaning door, has its roots in the Irish doras. The language's structure also contains many grammatical similarities with English. It also contains elements of Romany languages, though the Travellers are not actual Roma. Although heavily influenced by non-Celtic languages, Shelta is sometimes mistakenly classified as part of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic language family; it is, in fact, a cant based on Irish and English, with a primarily English-based syntax.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
There are approximately 86,000 worldwide speakers of Shelta, with anywhere from 6,000-25,000 in Ireland itself according to various sources. The language is spoken almost exclusively by Travellers, though linguists have documented Shelta since at least the 1870s. Both Celtic expert Kuno Meyer and Romany expert John Sampson assert that Shelta existed as far back as the 13th century.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It has been suggested that the word "Shelta" itself derives from the Irish word "siúlta", meaning "of walking". This refers to the people/">nomadic lifestyle of the Travellers, as well as the fact that they were commonly referred to for a time as "the Walking People" by English speakers in Ireland. In Irish, Travellers are called an Lucht siúil "the walking people" (literally "the people of walking"). The form an Lucht siúlta (with the same meaning), although not usual, is not beyond the bounds of possibility.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/shelta-language/

What Dr Alice Binchy and her detractors think

Research by an Irish socio-linguist, Dr Alice Binchy, suggests that more than half the surviving Cant/Gammon lexicon may be derived from a long-lost language spoken in Ireland before the Celts arrived. "A partially pre-Celtic origin would have substantial implications for the way we look not only at traveller history, but at early Irish history as a whole," said Dr Binchy, a delegate at a conference of linguists, historians and anthropologists to be held at the University of Limerick.
Pre-Celtic Ireland started to disappear 3,000 years ago. Irish travellers may first have been recorded in the 13th and 14th centuries. Surnames suggest that many are descended from medieval poets - the Irish bards. Others were metal workers. Significantly, both were separate "castes".
It is probable that numbers greatly increased in the late 16th and early to mid-17th centuries, when English occupation forces dispossessed the Irish aristocracy. At some stage, the newly enlarged community appears to have begun to develop a secret form of verbal communication. Many academics - though not all - believe that words were altered, with syllables inverted and letters transposed, to make it impossible for enemies to understand.
The language remains a source of dispute, with some scholars arguing that any link with the pre-Celtic era is unlikely. But most accept that travellers date back at least to medieval or Tudor times.


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/academics-suggest-irish-travellers-are-remnant-of-preceltic-culture-530081.html

dubhthach

malarkus wrote: »

http://www.rte.ie/player/#v=1098961
Both parts are there, it stays up until 12th June

man1 is posting from Sydney. RTÉ have region locked the show to be only viewable to IP's originating within Ireland. On DNA-Forums people couldn't access it from UK etc.

Corsendonk

mikemac wrote: »

Near the start of the first episode a bottle in the laboratory was labelled buffer

Is that some laboratory term?
Or is that supposed to be some joke??

Years since I did genetics but if I remember correctly buffer is the liquid used to prep the DNA sample for DNA finger printing.