Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie

The availability of Irish language texts before indepedence

  • 08-07-2023 11:58AM
    #1
    the O Reilly connection
    Registered Users Posts: 231 ✭✭


    Hello

    Does anyone know how available Irish language texts were before independence? When I say texts I mean newspapers and books.

    Thanks



Comments

  • #2
    iniscealtra
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 385 ✭✭iniscealtra


    https://cnag.ie/en/info/history/an-claidheamh-soluis-online.html

    I have no idea of circulation numbers.



  • #3
    Manach
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 9,804 Mod ✭✭✭✭Manach


    A good text on this is Doyle's "History of the Irish Language". English language always dominated the urban centres and hence the printing industry (compared to the decentralised manuscript writing which survived until the 19th Century). Post famine there were numerous societies that were formed to encourage Irish language authorship with local clerics such as Father Peader O'Laoghaire writing local history and novels in regional Irish dialects. Thus while much less prevalent than English language books, I'd reckon there would have been a higher percentage available than in modern times.



  • #4
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 27,430 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    What <anach said. The bible and other religious works aside, virtually nothing was printed in Irish before the mid-nineteenth century, but from then on there's a growing interest among scholars and antiguarians which leads to more publishing about, and in, the Irish language. Much of this is academic - e.g. the printing of old Irish texts, often with parallel translation, but as time goes on the focus widens, and new texts, written for publication, are issued covering history, folklore, language, new fiction and poetry, etc.

    I suspect the big gap would have been access to the wider European literary heritage in Irish. Very little literature written other languages was translated and published in Irlsh until the Free State began to subsidise this work. There still isn't a great deal of this, since almost everybody who can read Irish can also read English, and there is a vast corpus of literature translated into English.



  • #5
    gaiscioch
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,534 ✭✭✭gaiscioch


    Niall Ó Ciosáin has published a considerable amount on printed works in Irish in the 18th and 19th centuries, and made some comparisons with the better fortunes of Welsh at the same time. Breandán Ó Buachalla's Aisling Ghéar is perhaps the most famous study of the intellectual world as seen through Irish language manuscripts. Some recent studies, such Lesa Ní Mhunghaile study of the Irish language in 19th-century Meath explore links between Meath poet-scholars like Peadar Ó Gealacáin and Robert Shipboy MacAdam, the Belfast industrial and patron and many of those texts still survive.


    Philip O'Leary in Boston College's The Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881-1921 is a very engaging book, full of humour about various 'An Claidheamh Soluis' contributors and insight, with great credit given to Liam Ó Rinn and other little-known scholars in their struggles to write in Irish in an industrial world where a different lexicon, etc was required. There's actually quite a lot on Irish language texts before independence, and Pádraic Ó Conaire's Deoraíocht (1910) is considered to be the first modernist novel in Irish . Nicholas M. Wolf's An Irish Speaking Island (2015) is a great overall text for the Irish language in the 19th century.




  • #6
    the O Reilly connection
    Registered Users Posts: 231 ✭✭the O Reilly connection


    I noticed in that in the Irish census of 1901 + 1911 not a lot of the surnames are in Irish. Statistics suggest that there were at least half a million people speaking Irish at this time. Was it a case that they new how to speak Irish and not read Irish?



  • Advertisement
  • #7
    rock22
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,789 ✭✭✭rock22


    Not sure about the census. But I have copies of family birth certificates from late 19th and early 20th centuries and there is considerable differences in spelling of the surname. As far as I can tell, the entry was made by an official not by a family member and the spelling reflected 'official' spelling. For instance some entries had an 'O' in the surname while others omitted it , but there were other differences too.

    I now live in an area with many fluent native speakers who share my surname( i am not fluent in Irish). They all, without exception, use the 'English' spelling of the surname rather than the 'Irish' spelling I was taught in school.



Advertisement