A History of English Language

A history of the english language 300
diminutive ending -een, from the Irish diminutive ending -in, which may be added to any
English word: maneen, boyeen, girleen). Although different varieties of Hiberno-English
are distinguished, especially in the north and the south, certain peculiarities of
pronunciation are fairly general. Dialect stories make use of spellings such as tay (tea),
desaive (deceive), foine (fine), projuce (produce), fisht (fist), butther (butter), thrue
(true), and the like. As an instance of sh for s before a long u, P.W.Joyce quotes the
remark of one Dan Kiely “That he was now looking out for a wife that would shoot
him.” 14
Syntactic structures in Hiberno-English often reflect the patterns of the Irish
language. 15 The present perfect and past perfect tenses of English (have got, had got),
which have no equivalents in Irish, can be expressed using after, the verb to be, and the
present participle: He said that he knew that I was after getting lost (“…that I had got
lost”). Irish also does not have the equivalent of indirect questions introduced by if and
whether; instead of the declarative word order of Standard English, these sentences have
the interrogative word order that is found in other varieties of English, including African
American Vernacular English (see § 250): He wanted to see would he get something to
eat. The influence of the Irish prepositional system upon Hiberno-English is evident in
the use of with instead of for meaning “for the duration of”: He’s dead now with many a
year; He didn’t come back with twenty-eight years. The lack of an expression for no one
in Irish, explains why anyone is used where no one is expected in Standard English:
Anyone doesn’t go to mass there.
229. English World-Wide.
In the various parts of the former British Empire, as in the United States, the English
language has developed differences that distinguish it from the language of England. In
Australasia, Africa, South Asia, and Canada, peculiarities of pronunciation and
vocabulary have grown up that mark off national and areal varieties from the dialect of
the mother country and from one another. These peculiarities are partly such as arise in
communities separated by time and space, and are partly due to the influence of a new
environment. In some countries the most striking changes are the result of imperfect
learning and systematic adaptations by speakers of other languages. Differences of nature
and material civilization, and generally contact with some foreign tongue, are clearly
reflected in the vocabulary.
1. Australia and New Zealand.
In Australia it has been well said, “It is probably not too much to say that there never was
an instance in history when
14
English as We Speak It in Ireland (Dublin, 1910), p. 96.
15
An illuminating treatment of Hiberno-English syntax, from which the following examples are
taken, is A. Lunny, “Linguistic Interaction: English and Irish in Ballyvourney, West Cork,” in