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Irish Words

in Newfoundland English,

derived from

the extinct dialect

of Newfoundland Irish

 

Gaeilge Thalamh an Éisc was a dialect of the Irish language spoken in the Canadian island province of Newfoundland (later named Newfoundland and Labrador). It was used among a limited number of immigrants and their children until the middle of the twentieth century.

The Irish name for Newfoundland, Talamh an Éisc, means literally ‘Land of the Fish.’ But its semantic suggestion is ‘fishing ground.’ The name of the dialect, Gaeilge Thalamh an Éisc, means ‘Gaelic of the land of the fish.’

In Newfoundland English there are many local words introduced by early Irish immigrants to the island who arrived chiefly from Ireland’s southeastern counties: Cork, Kilkenny, Tipperary, Waterford and Wexford.

 

Some Irish Words in Newfoundland English

Hangashore

Exemplary sentence: That bhoyo’s nuthin’ but a poor hang-a-shore.

That boy may indeed be nothing but a poor, lazy lout. An angishore, angashore or hang-a-shore is a direct loan from Irish aindeiseoir ‘sickly person, wretch.’ Some of the additional meanings developed in Newfoundland arose from mistaken folk etymology. For example, on The Rock a hang-a-shore came to mean in its last semantic shift an idle layabout too lazy to fish and so he ‘hung about on shore, instead of bravely setting forth to sea.’ The semantic freight of the original Irish word contains no such gist.

A citation perfectly reflecting this Newfoundland use comes from Baffles of Wind and Tide, a 1973 collection of stories edited by Clyde Rose published by Breakwater Books. In a story entitled “The Hangashore” we read: “Uncle Solomon Noddy was a hangashore if ever there was one. By that I mean he was too bad to be called a good-for-nothin' and not bad enough to be called a sleeveen. He was just ... a hangashore.”

 

Sleeveen

And there’s another word brought to Newfoundland from Ireland: sleeveen ‘rascal, schemer’ from Irish slighbinn pronounced <sleiveen> and meaning ‘rogue, deceitful miscreant.’

“A sleeveen, dat one, he’d steal yer balls and sell ‘em back to yers as kidneys for fryin’.”

 

Here’s a quotation from a Wikipedia article.

“There is evidence to suggest that as many as 90% of the Irish immigrants to Newfoundland in the 17th and 18th centuries only spoke Irish.

Court records show that defendants often required Irish-speaking interpreters, which indicates that the dominant language in many areas of the Avalon Peninsula was Irish rather than English. Ecclesiastical documents bolster this case; for example, in the mid-1760's a Methodist missionary named Reverend Laurence Coughlan converted virtually the whole North Shore to Methodism. Observers credited the success of his evangelical revival at Carbonear and Harbour Grace to the fact that he was fluently bilingual in English and Irish. Meanwhile the Roman Catholic bishops also realized the importance of Irish-speaking priests. In letters to Dublin Bishop James Louis O'Donel requested a Franciscan missionary for the parishes of St. Mary's and Trepassey, indicating that it was absolutely necessary that he should speak Irish.”

 

Mythic Arrivals of The Irish in Terra Nova:

The Voyage of Saint Brendan

An early story claims that Saint Brendan brought the first Irishmen to Newfoundland. One of the amazing episodes in The Voyage of Saint Brendan concerns an incident that occurred on the way to Newfoundland. On Good Friday, the saint and his sailor monks put ashore on a strange island that turned out to be a giant sea monster, possibly a whale. A pious man, Brendan could not put off Easter mass and so, lying off the Canary Islands, Easter mass was said on the broad back of the whale, as depicted in the engraving!

 

There exist several versions of an account of a fantastical voyage from The Irish Sea to Newfoundland via Iceland and the Faroe Islads by a group of Irish monks led by Saint Brendan. The story is extant in several manuscripts and printings. One of the oldest, possibly written down in the 8th century in Latin, is entitled Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis ‘The Voyage of Saint Brendan, the Abbot.’ There are also unreliable, hagiographic biographies in Irish and Latin: Betha Brenainn and Vita Brendani abbatis. The story belongs to a form of popular ancient Irish storytelling called immrama, modern Irish iomramha ‘voyages.’ The hero sailor sets sail with the purpose of disembarking only when he has found “Otherworld.” For a sixth-century Irish monk, the puffin–clustered cliffs of Newfoundland, on first siting, might indeed have been an other world, not as fondly sought as paradise, but ‘some close.’

The legend says that, in the sixth century of this era, these Irish monks discovered the new world by landing on the rocky coasts of what became Terra Nova or Newfoundland. Would this not make an excellent Canadian theatre piece or dramatic film? Canuck scenarists, seize thy quills!

The monks sailed in a leather currach (Irish ‘boat, little ship’). The English version of the word is coracle, both words and the Welsh corwg stem from Old Celtic *kurokos ‘boat.’ What a prodigious ocean crossing that would have been! A currach is a hardly yare little vessel made of wickerwork thwarts and split-cedar ribs covered with water-proof leather cowhide.

This is a wonderful illustration from a German codex of approx. 1460 CE depicting Saint Brendan of Clonfert and his sailing monks voyaging to Newfoundland. The story goes that when Brendan began to celebrate mass in the boat, the fish of the ocean gathered to listen with astounding reverence around the gunnels of the little boat. In the sketch a devout pen has drawn one scaly denizen of the deep snuggled round the currach and beaming a fishy smile.

 

Colcannon & Colcannon Night in Newfoundland

Colcannon is another Irish word borrowed and still used in Newfoundland.

The famines of the 1730s and 1740s in Ireland brought waves of Irish immigrants to Newfoundland, and with them, dishes like colcannon, crubeen, and pratie oatens. Colcannon was first boiled cabbage and mashed potatoes topped with butter. This is clear from the original term in Irish Gaelic cál ceannfionn, literally ‘cabbage fair-headed.’ But it’s a lively little Irish joking reference and was really like calling the dish in English “blonde cabbage,” blonde because of the potatoes.

As different cooks personalized the ancient recipe, colcannon came to be a boiled hash of as many as seven or eight vegetables, sometimes with bits of meat tossed in. Chopped chives, parsley, and a piquant hail of fresh-ground pepper can spice up the basic blandness of the recipe. Like its British sister dish, bubble and squeak, colcannon can also be fried into a kind of cake. In Ireland and parts of England it was traditional to serve colcannon on All Hallows’ Eve.

Colcannon Night: A Broomy Spoor Across Night’s Sky

Colcannon Night or Snap-Apple Night are still frequent synonyms for Halloween in many Newfoundland communities. To snap at apples is similar to bobbing for apples. Very ancient custom held this late October evening to be ghost-clammy, ghoul-swarmed, ripe for magic and fit for prophesy. For a millennium or two, All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween has been an evening when properly performed rites might help one discover a lover or find out what marital fate awaited the young. Thus four objects were traditionally hidden in the large dish of colcannon served on Halloween: a ring, a coin, an old maid’s thimble, and a bachelor’s button. So, when spooks leave a broomy spoor across the night sky, one eats this cabbage-and-potato hash with care. Whoever finds the ring will marry soon. To the coin-holder, riches will accrue, while celibacy awaits both the thimble-getter and button-discoverer. Happily for eaters, one Newfoundland variation reduces the surprises in colcannon to several large buttons. If a girl finds a button, she will marry. If a young man finds a button, he will remain forever a bachelor.

The Folk Etymology

The spurious origin of colcannon says the word consists of cole, an old name of cabbage still seen in coleslaw, plus the military weapon, cannon. This compound “arose when Irish peasants turned cannon balls into kitchen implements by using them to pound vegetables into a paste.” So runs a quotation from Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities by Winnipegger Mark Morton. He does not bother to label this supposititious flapdoodle as just that: a wild guess by folk unacquainted with Irish Gaelic and even perhaps, most modern dictionaries. I have shared a flagon of the nut-brown ale with Mark Morton in the eatery attached to Winnipeg’s best bookstore, McNally Robinson, and I can report that he proclaims himself no etymologist. Like all protestations of modesty by academics however, this claim must be taken with a dose of salt.

The True Etymology

Irish Gaelic cál reflects an ancient Indo-European word for cabbage, literally vegetable on a stalk (IE * kaul ‘stalk’). Related forms are: Old English cal (giving colewort ‘cabbage plant,’ an older name for one loose-leaved variety), Old Scandinavian kal (giving English kale and modern Norwegian kaal), German Kohl (giving Kohlrabi), Latin caulis (think of cauliflower, a plant in the same botanical family as cabbage; think too of various words for cabbage, derivatives of caulis in the Romance languages, for example Spanish col and French chou), Greek kaulos, Medieval Dutch kool (in MD cabbage salad was kool sla, giving modern English coleslaw). Finally, showing the true spread of this cabbage word, a cognate appears in ancient Persian as kelum.

Perhaps the most appealing derivative is a French term of tender affection used by lovers and maybe by mothers speaking to small children, mon petit chouchou, a sweet intimacy one might translate as “my little cabbage-wabbage.”

Irish Gaelic

Colcannon is an Anglo-Irish compression or slurring, a frequent habit in daily speech, of the Irish Gaelic name for this dish cál ceannfionn, literally ‘cabbage fair-headed.’ The adjective comes after the noun in Gaelic. Ceann means head; fionn means white or fair, when describing people it usually refers to a light complexion or to blonde hair. You will recognize the Gaelic word for white or fair in common Gaelic female names like Fiona, and in less common but no less beautiful girl’s names like Finola, Fionnula, or Fenella, all from the Gaelic Fionghuala “with white shoulders.”

The initial part of the compound adjective ceannfionn is the Gaelic word for head, ceann, which appears in Gaelic surnames like the Irish O Cannan ‘son of white head,’ that is, son of a founding ancestor who was of fair complexion or blonde hair, and also in its Scottish cousin McCannan, with the same meaning.

To investigate more Irish words in Newfoundland, consult the excellent Dictionary of Newfoundland English, 2nd edition with supplement, eds. G.M. Story, W.J. Kirwin, J.D.A. Widdowson, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1990

So, I raise a pint, a wee sip o’ the green, to all Irish Newfoundlanders today and always.

May your glass be ever full.
May the roof over your head be always strong.
And may you be in heaven
half an hour before the devil knows you're dead.

 

© 2009 William Gordon Casselman

 

 

 

Any comments, emendations, additional word lore?

Please email it to me at

canadiansayings@mountaincable.net