A friend asked me the other day if there was any reason why I should not
deliver these lectures in Manx. I answered that there were just forty
good and sufficient reasons. The first was that I did not speak Manx.
Like the wise queen in the story of the bells, he then spared me the
recital of the remaining nine-and-thirty. But there is at least one of
the number that will appeal strongly to most of my hearers. What that
is you shall judge for yourselves after I have braved the pitfalls of
pronunciation in a tongue I do not know, and given you some clauses of
the Lord's Prayer in Manx.
Ayr ain t'ayns niait,
(Father our who art in heaven.)
Caskerick dy row dty ennym.
(Holy be Thy name.)
Dy jig dty reeriaght.
(Come Thy kingdom.)
Dty aigney dy row jeant er y thalloo mry te ayns niau.
(Thy will be done on the earth even as in heaven.)
*****
Son dy bragh, as dy bragh, Amen.
(For ever and ever. Amen.)
I asked a friend--it was Mr. Wilson Barrett--if in its fulness, its fine
chest-notes, its force and music, this old language did not sound like
Italian.
"Well, no," he answered, "it sounds more like hard swearing."
I think you must now understand why the greater part of these lectures
should be delivered in English.
Manx is a dialect mainly Celtic, and differing only slightly from the
ancient Scottish Gaelic. I have heard my father say that when he was
a boy in Ramsey, sixty years ago, a Scotch ship came ashore on the
Carrick, and next morning after the wreck a long, lank, bony creature,
with bare legs, and in short petticoats, came into the marketplace and
played a tune on a little shrieking pair of smithy bellows, and then
sang a song. It was a Highland piper, and he sang in his Gaelic, but the
Manx boys and girls who gathered round him understood almost every word
of his song, though they thought his pronunciation bad. Perhaps they
took him for a poor old Manxman, somehow strayed and lost, a sort of
Manx Rip Van Winkle who had slept a century in Scotland, and thereby
lost part of his clothes.
You will wonder that there is not more Norse in our language,
remembering how much of the Norse is in our blood. But the predominance
of the Celtic is quite natural. Our mothers were Celts, speaking Celtic,
before our Norse-fathers came. Was it likely that our Celtic mothers
should learn much of the tongue of their Norse husbands? Then, is it not
our mother, rather than our father, who teaches us to speak when we are
children? So our Celtic mothers taught us Celtic, and thus Celtic became
the dominant language of our race.