All languages are the same age…

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh just a couple of days ahead of time in one of those rarities – a leap year with St Patrick’s Day on a Sunday.

Of course, St Patrick himself would not have been a native Gaeilgeoir, although he would of course have come to speak the language (most likely with an hint of an East Ulster accent). In fact, he would have arrived in Ireland where the Irish language was long established, having come perhaps from England where the English language was at the time completely unknown.

Names

In fact, language names are a funny thing because the above sentence would not really work in Irish itself; what in the English language is referred to as “Irish” is referred to in Irish as Gaeilge (literally ‘Gaelic’), whereas the adjective for ‘of Ireland’ is Éireann. Similarly, ‘England’ in Irish is Sasana but ‘English’ (as in the language) is Béarla.

Languages travel

This is in fact more accurate than in English; the island of Ireland has taken roughly its current form for as long as human habitation has existed on it (almost 10,000 years); yet Gaeilge has existed on the island for “only” a little over a quarter of that period. During the preceding millennia it had made its way across Europe, likely dipping south and one stage (which still likely part of a single Proto-Celtic language and perhaps even as a single Proto-Italo-Celtic language) before heading northwest, ultimately from what is now Eastern Ukraine. It arrived in Ireland about half its lifetime ago (if we define that as its existence as a separate language from the original Proto-Indo-European) and of course it kept going, to Scotland and the Isle of Man.

A little over a millennium after “Irish” arrived in “Ireland”, “English” arrived in “England”; it is worth emphasising that the language was named first. Various Germanic tribes headed across the North Sea from what is now northern Germany and southern Denmark, the most prominent among them being the Angles and the Saxons. Interestingly, the Saxons may have been more numerous in total, but the number travelling constituted a lower share of all Saxons than the number of Angles travelling (it is thought almost all Angles travelled). For whatever reason, the pure numbers determined that “Saxons” would give their name to Sasana directly (i.e. the land was named for the tribe). In their own language, however, the fact that almost all “Angles” travelled meant that the language spoken in the new location of eastern Britain came to be known as “Angle-ish” or “English”; ultimately, in English itself, the name of the kingdom followed the name of the language (i.e. there was an “English” language before there was an “England”). Curiously, Béarla derives from an older term simply meaning ‘speech’ (but, at least implicitly, ‘foreign speech’).

Ireland

This all means, of course, that “Irish” has spent about half its lifetime in “Ireland”, but people in Ireland spoke different languages for almost three quarters of humanity’s existence on the island.

Interestingly, if you define “lifetime” a little differently, it could be argued that “English” has spent roughly half its lifetime in Ireland too (having arrived in the 12th century, albeit as a minor sideshow given that government in England at the time took place in Norman French), taking as the starting date its departure from Continental Europe. Given that length of time in each case, it is small wonder that so many regret the decline of “Irish”, but also that so many of the most prominent exponents of literary “English” have in fact been “Irish” (although it is subjective, this must surely be a number disproportionate to population, particularly if we include contributions not just to writing but also to cinema and popular music).

Of course, there are other linguistic curiosities in Ireland. It is probably that some unexplained aspects of place names date from before even Irish (Gaelic); there has also been influence from other languages, most obviously Scots in the north but many others. It is not infrequent across the island now for more than 20 languages to be spoken in a single school. (However, it does need to be emphasised that this should not discount from the particular requirement to maintain Irish; Polish, Tagalog or Portuguese will manage just fine regardless of how they develop in Ireland, whereas Irish needs promotion in Ireland itself or its very survival is at risk.)

“Old” languages

We do need to take particular care of Irish, for reasons noted above, but we also need to be clear about one thing: all languages are actually the same age!

Irish does hold a notable distinction of having extant writing existing before any Germanic language (including English); this does not make it “older”, just “attested earlier” – even though it may be noted that this is of significant value to historical linguists, particularly in their reconstruction of the very Proto-Indo-European language from which Irish, English and indeed languages spoken natively by almost half the world’s population (from Spanish to Hindi) all derive.

English is in fact the “earliest attested” extant Germanic language (though we do have quite a number of texts in Gothic, a now extinct Germanic language, from centuries before this), but again this does not make it the “oldest”. It is perhaps apt that one of the best known translations of the Old English epic poem Beowulf was by the late Seamus Heaney, an Irishman also well acquainted with the Irish language!

Ultimately, however, all languages are the same age. They pre-date even Proto-Indo-European (spoken roughly between 6500 and 4500 years ago), of course – that too must have derived from a different language perhaps influenced by other different languages (though it is extremely unlikely that they bore any relation to the one spoken in Ireland at the time).

Ultimately every sentence we utter is an echo of the distant past. If we speak and Indo-European language like Irish or English, it is in fact an echo of a common distant past. Maybe that is a thought for St Patrick’s Day?!