Language
Some officers of the Irish Brigade are believed to have cried out Cuimhnígí ar Luimneach agus ar fheall na Sasanach! ("Remember Limerick and Saxon Faith" or "Remember Limerick and Saxon perfidy") at the battle of Fontenoy in 1745. Modern research by Eoghan Ó hAnnracháin claims that it is very doubtful if the regiments would also have been chanting in Irish, a language unknown to probably a majority of the brigade at the time. Others strongly dispute this point, as over the course of 100 years new recruits were brought into the brigade mostly from the Irish speaking regions of West Munster, the homeland of, among other the O'Connell family. Daniel O'Connell's uncle was the last Colonel of the French Irish Brigade and both he and Daniel O'Connell were native Irish speakers. According to official French Army regulations, officers of the Irish Brigade regiments had to be Irish, half of which had to be born in Ireland and the other half born of Irish parents in France.
Seamus MacManus shows in his book The Story of The Irish Race (1921):
"In truth it was not the "Wild Geese" who forgot the tongue of the Gael or let it perish. We are told that the watchwords and the words of command in the "Brigade" were always in Irish, and that officers who did not know the language before they entered the service found themselves of necessity compelled to learn it."
Read more about this topic: Irish Brigade (France)
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Though language forms the preacher,
‘Tis “good works” make the man.”
—Eliza Cook (1818–1889)