Cultural Nationalism

• "Our Natioanl Language," Thomas Davis (1814-1845)
• A people without a language of its own is only half a nation. A nation should guard its language more than its territories--'tis a surer barrier, and more important frontier, than fortress or river.
• To lose your native tongue, and learn that of an alien, is the worst badge of conquest--it isa chain on the soul.
• Davis is optimistic that the efforts to revive the Irish language can succeed, but even if they don't, those efforts will save Irish literature:
• we will rescue its old literature, and hand down to our descendants proofs that we had a language as fit for love, and war, and business, and pleasure, as the world ever knew
• "The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland," Douglas Hyde (1860-1949)
• The Irish try to copy England, but despise England, and this causes a significant problem:
• How can it produce anything good in literature, art, or institutions as long as it is actuated by motives so contradictory.
• 9 out of 10 Englishmen would accept a trade of wealth for culture. 9 out of 10 Irish would accept the trade in the other direction.
• Restoration of culture requires restoration of language. Hyde provides a ridiculous example of trying to reclaim culture without reclaiming the language:
• Imagine for a moment the restoration of a German-speaking Greece.
• Hyde responds to Davis' optimism, delivering a verdict that his efforts failed:
• Yet in the long run it failed to properly leaven our peasantry who might, perhaps, have been reach upon other lines.
• The Irish peasantry used to recite Irish poetry, but now they don't even read it.
• Hyde is seeming to take pride that the peasantry of Ireland speaks Irish, while academics like Davis are trying to re-discover the language.
• It is only recently that no one knows Irish -- well after the time of Davis.
• Hyde's call to action:
• I have no hesitation in saying that every Irish-feeling Irishman, who hates the reproach of West-Britonism, should set himself to encourage the effots which are being made to keep alive our once great national tongue.
• If they can keep the Irish language alive with the peasantry, it will shame the educated, elite Irish into learning the language:
• woiuld make it at least as disgraceful as for an educated Jew to be quite ignorant of Hebrew.