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From: respess@ut-ngp.UUCP (John)
Newsgroups: net.nlang.celts
Subject: "Eire" yet again
Message-ID: <893@ut-ngp.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 31-Aug-84 08:56:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: ut-ngp.893
Posted: Fri Aug 31 08:56:16 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 3-Sep-84 09:07:13 EDT
Organization: Comp. Center, Univ. of Texas at Austin
Lines: 71

[To James Beausang: This is a response to your re: Eire posting. I'm
going to keep it up; if you're not interested, hit the delete key quick.
But this bears a lot more relevance to a natural language newsgroup than
Stonehenge articles or even articles about Celtic life do. After all, 
it's about words.]

But, I'm assuming you're still with me. (And if it's happened before,
look at it like this - you're entering  the same river twice. We're
proving Heraclitus was wrong.)

I can understand how you could have thought I was making a political
stand - I was defending someone who had made a political statement
against someone who was responding to that statement. But I hoped that
the subject line would make it clear that I had something else in mind -
that I was responding to another matter. I'm apolitical in this case.
(As regards the problem being semantic, I usually don't know what that
means anymore. Sometimes it's used as a token that allows people to
part amicably, claiming that their differences are "only questions of
semantics"; in other cases, it licenses them to denigrate their adver-
saries by implying they're only playing with words. If however, you 
mean that it's a matter of historical linguistic usage, I think we
can argue sensibly about it.)

First though, I've got to disagree with your rationalization about why
"Eire" appears on Irish coins. Why can we get "United States of America"
on our dimes (which are smaller than any Irish coin I've seen) but the
Irish can't get "Poblacht na hEireann" on their 50p piece, say? I could
make slurs about Stone Age cultures not having the skills to mill fine
minting manufacturies or about the Irish being so pie-eyed from drink
that they wouldn't be able to make out smaller print, but I won't (hav-
ing already done so). But doesn't it damage your argument about lack of
space beyond repair that "Poblacht na hEireann" *doesn't* appear on the
punt? (Here I sit examining a 1980 one. I see the Irish for "Central
Bank of Ireland", but I can't find "Poblacht na hEireann". (Holds it
up to light ... sees Cathleen ... "Nope, not there.") If this is "all
its glory", its effulgence has dimmed considerably since 1948.) Now, I
don't know what's on the larger denominations, but there's not much
more room on those and there's a sufficiency of space if they'd wanted
to put it on the punt.

In the second place, I have to dispute your claim that "Eire" is even mild-
ly derogatory. I have Irish friends and other friends who've either lived
or been in school in Ireland in the recent past who don't find any problems
with that name. And if you think about, it ought to be considered a 
laudatory term, harking back, as it does, to the greatest concessions that
England has had to make to the Irish in 135 years. Granted, the heroes
of '16 - '21 didn't get all they wanted, but they got a damned sight
more than the English wanted to give.

And here's this: Irish dictionaries give the translation of "Eire" as
"Ireland". "Eireann", as in "Poblacht na hEireann" is the genitive of
"Eire". So even the term you claimed was on the currency and which I'll
concede is the official name, is a form of "Eire" - a form which flaunts
the "Poblacht" perhaps, but doesn't divest itself of the "Eire".

My point, at long last, is that there appears to be significant support
in Ireland for the appelation "Eire". The point I was trying to make in
my previous posting was that McGhee had no business telling O Tuama that
Ireland hasn't been called "Eire" in three decades - and hence, by impli-
cation, she was wrong to do so. Joe's dredged something up out of his
musty archives and tried to make it a rule for us to live by. And he's
just plain wrong.

And after all, shouldn't you agree with me now? You deplore the ossifi-
cation of the Irish language; I was only objecting to a pedantic ap-
proach to the other Irish language, Irish English - which, I submit, due
to its cohabitation with Irish, is the richest of the dialects of English.

John Respess
respess@ut-ngp