I’ve been to Irish weddings before in Dublin, Borris and Athlone. Back then I had no Irish to speak of, let alone to speak with.
Here’s a fun fact. In Irish the word ‘Fear’ means ‘Men’. ‘Bean’ means ‘Woman’. Now there’s a valuable lesson in not falling for false cognates. These are words in different languages that mean different things despite being spelled the same.
Why do I point this out? Quite simply because the proximity between England and Ireland became conflated in my mind with a proximity in language structures and grammar. This, in hindsight, was a heavily retarding thought process akin to thinking Spanish and Portuguese share language structures. They don’t. Much.
That proximity combined with the nearly 1,000 years of British colonisation means that there are loan words between the two languages. There’s no need to go into those because, well, they’re shared so you’ll recognise them.
This Anglophile thinking extended and extends further than nouns though. Sentence structures are also wildly different between the two languages. You need to be prepared for this. I wasn’t. This is important because I will need to piece a few sentences together for The Wedding later this year in Dublin. More of that later.
History theatre 2025
What I won’t do here is a history of the Irish language. Many, many people have done and are continuing to do better work on this than I’m capable of. I’d suggest having a look at books including the priced A History of the Irish Language From the Norman Invasion to Independence by Aidan Doyle.
Also worth a read for grounding yourself in how Gaeilge has become what it’s become. The Údarás na Gaeltachta site also has a decent backgrounder.
As for video, there’s loads of resources out there including this fascinating talk:
The wedding fear
I’ve been to Irish weddings before in Dublin, Borris and Athlone. Back then I had no Irish to speak of, let alone to speak with. I sang along with Behan’s The Auld Triangle and Come Out Ye Black and Tans in the same way as I sang along with hymns and the English national anthem’s second verse; brokenly and half a second after the others sang them out.
This next wedding will be different. I know at least two people who regularly converse in Gaeilge are going to be there. I know they’ll mock my ‘citizenship’ and passport. I guess they’ll do so in Irish.
I want to be able to say more than “Dia duit, conas atá tú?” (“Hello, how are you?”) before looking more ignorant than a Reform Party member. I want to show willing in the same way as I do on buses in Paris or in German bars. I know they speak English, but I’m in their country. In Ireland, I’ll be in my country, sort of.
What I don’t want to do is keep a note of useful phrases (the Duolingo theory) that I’ll learn by rote. This is because I’ll have no map for them to actually take up residence in the correct bits of my brain; to the inspired parts of my imagination, to be weaved in among my vocal chords.
Object of desire
I want to be able to construct sentences on the fly. This means understanding that English uses Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). Whereas Irish uses Verb-Subject-Object (VSO). To this extent Gaeilge (Irish) has more in common with Breton, Welsh, Biblical Hebrew and Tagalog.
Think of this as follows, in English, “The women drank beer”. In Irish the structure would be, “Drank the women beer”.
That’s just grammatical word order. That’s before I look at genders, possessive’s, and even word choices. For example, imagine how the sentence, “I’ve had an ok year, Brendan. I may be unemployed and old but I’ve still got my dignity and this beer. How’s yourself and Grace?” might be rendered in one of the three Irish dialects.
The challenge is immense and that’s what’s so beautiful about encountering other languages.
