When the tower of Babel fell, the Scythian king Fénius Farsaid had a plan. He would find out what happened when one language became many. In the medieval Irish work Auraicept na n-Éces, Fénius is described as journeying to Babel together with his companions Goídel mac Ethéoir, Íar mac Nema and a retinue of 72 scholars. Finding on arrival that the languages had already been dispersed, Fénius sent his scholars off to study them, staying at the tower, and co-ordinating their efforts. After 10 years, the investigations were complete, and Fénius created in Bérla tóbaide “the selected language”, made up of the best part of each of the tongues born of Babel’s confusion. This language he called Goidelic, after his close friend Goídel mac Ethéoir. In the mythical accounts, Fénius Farsaid’s descendants, the Milesians, will eventually make their way to the island of Ireland and bring the selected language now known as Gaeilge in their wake.
Gary Bannister’s Teasáras Gaeilge-Béarla is a monumental celebration of this landfall. In a volume covering nearly 700,000 words, running to over 1,000 pages, the Irish-English Thesaurus is a remarkable testimony to one man’s lifetime devotion to mapping out the sheer scale and range of the Irish language. Bannister, a graduate in Russian and Irish from Trinity College Dublin, was notable for setting up the first department of modern Irish at Moscow State University in the early 1980s before returning to Ireland to teach in St Columba’s College in Dublin where he was head of the Irish department for nearly 30 years. Schoolboy discoveries of Peter Mark Roget’s Thesaurus and Tomás de Bhaldraithe’s English-Irish Dictionary fired a passion for words and the encyclopaedic ambitions of this thesaurus. If a thesaurus is typically a book or electronic resource that lists words in groups of synonyms and related concepts, the Teasáras does this and more. In fact, if anything, it is more like a one-stop-shop for the Irish language or Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Irish But Were Afraid to Ask. In addition to the expected synonyms, the volume contains countless proverbs, useful phrases, explanations of historical and cultural references, a concise and easy-to-use grammar guide, and English translations of words for language learners. The range of reference materials drawn from is vast and includes, in the modern period, every significant figure who has worked in or continues to work in the Irish language.
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Part of the pleasure of the Teasáras is losing oneself in the endless possibilities of the language, as the headword kickstarts a stream of associations. The word amaidí, translated as folly or foolishness, eventually brings us to “(foolish talk) foolishness, folly”, as illustrated by “buinneachántacht chainte verbal diarrhoea, talking daft, bundún arse (cf Tá bundún ort. You’re talking arse.), caint san aer idle talk, hot air, shooting the breeze, clabaireacht empty chatter, waffling, clismirt confused talk, dramhaíl chainte rubbish talk, faoiste fáiste nonsense, nonsense talk, frois frais cainte nonsensical talk, gaotaireacht shooting the breeze, waffling, glagaireacht flannel, guff, málóideacht silliness, nonsense (cf málóideacht chainte nonsense talk), mugadh magadh humbug, farce, raiméis baloney, bilge, treillis breillis nonsensical talk, truflais chainte rubbish talk”. In these cascading variations on a related concept, you can sense not only the zealous inventiveness of speakers of the language over the centuries, but the sheer impish exuberance of the wordplay and sound effects. When, under “Hurlamaboc” (hullabaloo, uproar), you find furtla fartla (fuss, confusion), holam halam (commotion), húirte háirte (hubbub), hulach halach (commotion, uproar), and liútar éatar (pandemonium), you know that the Irish language has always been the business of impurists.
Languages are always creatures of context, and Bannister’s word hoard continuously points beyond the words to wider histories and belief systems. Under “Anachain” (calamity) we find the moniker “Murchadh na ndóiteán” (Murrough of the burnings), a reference to the role of Baron Inchiquin, Murrough O’Brien, in the sack of Cashel in 1647. The Teasáras lists stock phrases that echo that distant slaughter: “(cf fear a chonaic Murchadh a man who has been to hell and back, Chonaic mé Murchadh I got the fright of my life).” Under “Urchar” (shot, casting), a note points the reader to indigenous beliefs in parallel worlds: “Urchar cnoic fairy dart – it was believed that ailt ata swollen joints were caused by one of the slua sí fairy folk firing invisible darts at people.” Browsing through the dictionary is a journey through the fractal landscape of language, each headword opening out into ever-expanding webs of complex nuance. There are also the repeated reminders of how the language is anchored in the physical and animal realities of its island home. The Irish equivalent of not throwing in the towel is “Ná caith le haill é” (Don’t throw it over the cliff) and staying up late is expressed as “airneán an bhroic a dhéanamh” (to go night visiting like a badger).
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As words to describe specific aspects of landscape – land, sea, weather, atmosphere – or dimensions of behaviour (love, grief, anger, pity) begin to ebb from a language, the ability of speakers to be able to see the world around them becomes radically impoverished. A crucial contribution of the Teasáras is showing how a fuller knowledge of Irish offers opportunities for seeing in a deeper, more context-sensitive way. The English nature writer Robert Macfarlane, describing his reactions to Barry Lopez’s classic travel book, Arctic Dreams, claimed that one of the lessons the book taught him was that “while writing about landscape often begins in the aesthetic it ends in the ethical”. Lopez’s intense attentiveness was “a form of moral gaze born of his belief that if we attend more closely to something then we are less likely to act more selfishly towards it” (Macfarlane 2015: 211). In other words, attending to language is not a luxury but a necessity. The American poet and farmer Wendell Berry has argued, “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.”
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As Ireland faces into the calamitous challenge of the climate crisis, defending “what we love” would seem to require more than ever the “particularising language” spelled out on page after page of the Teasáras. Yet the language that has described every field, mountain, and stream on the island for over 2,000 years is almost wholly absent from public debates on our environmental future. In the most recent Climate Action Plan from 2021, readers had to wait until page 89 in a 208-page report for the one-line sentence, “Support environmentally friendly initiatives through the Action Plan for the Irish Language” to appear. This peerless piece of policy prose was squeezed in between “Support the modification of sports facilities in order to reduce energy consumption” and “Enhance the sustainability of Screen Ireland”. Garry Bannister’s Irish-English Thesaurus is what Macfarlane might term, “a counter-desecration handbook”, a heroic act of restorative ecology, inviting readers to reconnect with the words, phrases and concept worlds that have been fundamental to the shaping of a sense of place on the island of Ireland.
Humans feature as much, of course, as the more-than-human, in the Teasáras. There is, for example, a fascinating and longstanding Irish fascination with appetite. Under the headword “Amplóir” (greedy person; glutton) we find a mutinous company of gobblers: “airceachán voracious eater, alpaire voracious eater,guzzler, amplachán gluttonous person, béiceadán glutton; person who yells, screecher, bleadrachán paunchy person, glutton, calcaire glutton, cíocrachán greedy, avaricious person, cráin chraosach gluttonous pig, craosaire glutton, gaileadán greedy eater, gorb glutton, graoisín glutton, galoot, ocrachán hungry needy individual, santachán greedy person, scloitéir gluttonous, greedy person, slamaire voracious eater, slogaire glutton, gulper, swallower, smalcaire greedy eater; pipe smoker, suthaire guzzler.” At other moments, there is a seductive succinctness in the description of bodily misfunction, “rup rap diarrhoea and vomiting together”. Running through the entire volume is the clear delight speakers take in the expressive possibilities of Irish, the way words re-energise and revitalise our engagement with the world.
Ken Hale, the MIT linguist and renowned specialist on endangered languages, once observed: “Languages embody the intellectual wealth of the people that speak them. Losing any one of them is like dropping a bomb on the Louvre.” Garry Bannister’s remarkable labour of love takes us inside the Irish Louvre, detailing the splendours of over two millenniums of continuous and productive use. But this book is a tribute to living language not a mausoleum to a dead one. Against the explosive destructiveness of indifference or neglect, the Teasáras offers us an invitation to reconnect with a cultural past and reimagine a language future. If Fénius was around to see the results of his handiwork in print form, he might reflect that, on balance – given the striking inventiveness of Irish down through the centuries – the fall of Babel was no bad thing.
Michael Cronin is a senior researcher in the Trinity Centre for Cultural and Literary Translation
Further Reading
A History of Ireland in 100 words (Royal Irish Academy, 2019) by Sharon Arbuthnot, Máire Ní Mhaonaigh and Gregory Toner. A deft and engaging commentary on 100 Irish-language words that takes in many facets of the history of life on the island of Ireland. The three distinguished scholars in Celtic studies bring their vast erudition to life in a book where we learn, among other things, that speakers of Old Irish had up to 14 words for different kinds of washing.
Thirty-Two Words for a Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape (Gill, 2020) by Manchán Magan who has emerged as one of the most eloquent advocates for understanding the intimate relationship between landscape and language in Ireland. In this work he tracks the power of words in Irish to capture a particular understanding of places and tells us how cáithnín is “the goose-bumps you feel when, for example, you ponder the inter-relatedness of things and how small we are in relation to the whole.”
thin places (Canongate, 2021) by Kerri ní Dochartaigh is a compelling and moving account of recovery from the traumatic experience of growing up in Derry during the Troubles. For the author, the discovery of the Irish language restores a much-needed sense of hope for a shared future.
