|
|
 |
You are > Home > International Radio Programme
|
Thursday, June 24, 2010
International Radio Programme
SHANE DUNPHY, up to recently famed on South East Radio’s morning chat programme of current affairs, is leading a team on exciting business.
He will be presenting in due course a one-hour programme on the culture of the curious County Wexford area of the dialect called Yola.
The areas are, as we know, the baronies of Forth and Bargy. It will hopefully be heard when completed and edited on Radio Éireann One.
The project is exciting because they are chasing and recording the surviving elements of that old mysterious Yola dialect and culture as well as the cultural and linguistic connections with Celtic Cornwall.
This is fascinating because while we at present may not have Cornwall as a priority, the connections were just as deeply mysterious in earlier times.
I would certainly think it was so in smuggling enterprises under sail.
So here, for example, is a strange story. Many people know of the oratory and rath of Saint Vauk of Carnsore Point near the ESB wind farm.
He was an early Christian missionary whose aim was to bring the pre-Christian ceremonies, the already famed fire-burning rath and, presumably, attending druids into the strange and agreeable new religion.
The reason for the religious rath and the great fires was in the first place because Carnsore Point, Tuskar Rock and the vicinity, where the Irish Sea slapped into the Atlantic, was a death trap and peril to mariners for thousands of years, clearly mapped by Ptolemy of Egypt as far back as A.D.180.
So the fire acted as a lighthouse or as a place of fire-burning sacrifice to the Demon believed to be in residence.
The same demon was remembered by old residents at the time of the Aer Lingus tragedy thirty years ago.
The tradition in Carne and Lady’s Island holds that St. Vauk arrived on that perilous coast by floating across from Cornwall on a slab of rock.
{Editor: We don’t do miracles. Get on with it.} Sir, To continue, I happened to be in Cornwall myself about able to recall words common in Forth and Bargy ten years ago and wandered off on my own, accidentally, to a small harbour village about the same size as Cahore or Cullenstown.
Unfortunately I’ve forgotten the name.
There to my blinding astonishment was a stone plaque to St. Vauk (or Vogue or Fauk it’s spelt differently), another oratory remains and clearly embossed was the same legend.
Cornwall’s St. Vauk had sailed to and from Ireland on a slab of rock!
Back to the one-hour radio documentary and work in progress. Shane with his team are doing interviews with a wide selection of people on the Yola culture, carols, mumming, songs of those baronies isolated until the railways opened them to Ireland and the world.
Naturally they are working with the surviving dialect words. The dialect along with the Irish language suffered irreparable damage during what scholars call ‘the linguistic avalanche’ of the 1800s.
However, in conversation with Shane, I was easily able to recall words common in Forth and Bargy up to the 60s and many still current and understood today.
I remember one hardy gent going into a pub and being told by Irene Scallan, ‘Jack, the half one is gone up two and six’. He wheeled around in shock.
‘A tchy (to rhyme with shy) of whiskey two and six and you wouldn’t war it in your mouth!’
A tchy or chy, if you like, is a small measure or portion of anything. The word ‘war’ means to feel. ‘The wind would cut the berr off you!’ Berr is the side face or cheek.
‘I showed him the ball to grig him’. To grig is to deliberately torment as in a football game with an opponent. ‘Give me a geiss of the paper. A geiss, to rhyme with lice, means a look at.
‘Curky down and he won’t see you’. To curky is to stoop.
The well-known place the Forloan point at Kilmore Quay means the Farland. A garn is an old horse past its best.
A verb form most frequently used goes like this: ‘The Rowes are ta cutten. That mean the Rowes are cutting corn or hay this very day.
The prefix Ta goes with any verb to indicate the immediate present. ‘Look ar yer man scudden’Scudden means scratching one-self, most indicating idling.
A shrump is a low-lying portion of a field. The word enteeth means the after lunch siesta. A vang is a sudden muscle pain, usually at physical work.
Another word in use on sloblands or mudflats by fishermen, hunters or bait seekers is scootch.
A scootch is the long type of ski worn on the feet in order to walk across mudlands.
The exact same word for the exact same footwear obtains in The Netherlands.
Incidentally, Paddy Berry and Company Ltd., of Bawn Developments have a local Yola word as their head quarters title, ‘Knockenhoy House’, in Sinnottstown Boulevard Hoy or hye is Yola dialect for an enclosed piece of ground. The ‘Knockenhoy’ is the name for the now disused Mass path from Sinnottstown Lane across Devereux land to Drinagh Churchyard.
Among several current and classical Yola expressions still in use must be the several variations of this: ‘I must take my stevven and I will sawk it out for the rest of the day’.
I will go easy (or at my own pace) and I will do nothing, or idle, for the rest of the day.
Jacob Poole was the first to collect the Yola words and pronounctions along with Yola ballads including one about a hurling game plus the last speech of welcome to Yola made to the then Lord Lieutenant when he visited and opened the newly-landscaped garden in the massive double-ringed Rath at Ballytrent House.
Since then the glossary has been greatly improved upon with additions by Terry Dolan and Diarmaid O Muirithe of New Ross, both working in the Irish and English department U.C.D. interviewing several in the dialect area.
If you have any strange words yourself peculiar to this area, or anywhere, in the south east give us a written word and explanation. They may not have long to live.
Main News Page
Previous Page
|
|
|
|
