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430 The twentieth century: 1900–45<br />

Seamus Heaney has described well the sense of dislocation induced<br />

in the Irish by the English language:<br />

History, which has woven the fabric of English life and landscape and<br />

language into a seamless garment, has rent the fabric of Irish life, has<br />

effected a breach between its past and present, and an alienation between<br />

the speaker and his speech.<br />

Irish (or Hiberno-English) has distinctive varietal features of<br />

pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, although patterns vary<br />

considerably between North and South and East and West. In grammar,<br />

for example, tense and aspect are structured differently from standard<br />

southern English. I do be is a habitual present tense and the form ‘after’<br />

is used in Irish English to record a completed act or to express recency:<br />

thus, they’re after leaving has the meaning of ‘they have just left’, and<br />

he was after saying means he had just said. The variety also has distinctive<br />

discourse and conversational patterns: for example, it is common for a<br />

question to answered with a question: A: Can you tell me where the post<br />

office is? B: Would it be stamps you’re looking for?; Gaelic-influenced<br />

word order in questions is also common: Is it ready you are?; and<br />

standard English ‘but’ is used with the meaning of ‘though’: He still<br />

went there but. (See also the quotation from J.M. Synge, page 385.)<br />

Writers regularly attempted to exploit the distinctive patterns of Irish<br />

English but, as is the case with writers such as Hugh MacDiarmid and<br />

Scots, invented or ‘forged’ artificial versions, which retain as much<br />

intelligibility as the writer judges proper for a wide English-speaking reading<br />

public, are actually used. In the many sections of Joyce’s fiction which<br />

involve narrative recounts, Irish colloquial speech patterns are prevalent:<br />

What was he after doing it only into the bucket of porter.<br />

(Ulysses)<br />

I know you are a friend of his and not like some of those others he does<br />

be with.<br />

(Grace)<br />

But still and all he kept on saying that before the summer was over he’d go<br />

out for a drive one fine day just to see the old house again where we were<br />

all born down in Irishtown, and take me and Nannie with him. If we could<br />

only get one of them new-fangled carriages that makes no noise that Father

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