Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’

Thisses title might be a bit confusing, coming as it does straight after the last one, so this might end up being even less read than usual due to people thinking it’s the same post. It isn’t. I’m also doing all of this from memory without re-reading or re-watching anything, so I’m hoping I’ve got it right.

There was a time before I read ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, and it was before 1984. My image of it was very different from what it delivered. I imagined it would be futuristic and somewhat like ‘Brave New World’, which I think I read first. There are ways in which it is, from Orwell’s perspective anyway, and there is advanced technology in it, though not often in the way that might be expected. I think for someone who’s read neither, at least in the 1970s CE, the two novels are conceptually smushed together and are just weird high-tech dystopias without much distinction between the two. In fact I once came up with a fan theory to convert Orwell’s world into Aldous Huxley’s, which went on to become H. G. Wells’ ‘Time Machine’ world of the Eloi and Morlocks, but that’s not very literary tinkering of which I’m fond but probably bores most people and can’t be done without altering details of Huxley’s back story unless that’s unreliable in-universe. Once I’d read it, I had to rewrite history with authentic memories.

Winston

With the exception of ‘Coming Up For Air’ and presumably ‘Animal Farm’, which I haven’t read, Orwell’s central characters are generally similar to himself both psychologically and physically. Winston Smith is no exception. In fact, since Orwell was basically dying at the time, Winston is also not a well man. His varicose ulcer in particular gets mentioned a number of times. However, he’s also transposed down in history and some of his experiences are therefore inevitably different. He’s divorced, feels guilty about betraying his mother and sister and is living in the aftermath of a nuclear war. He’s also complicit in the regime, like all Outer Party members, his job being to rewrite history to accord with the current party line. Orwell was involved in the wartime BBC propaganda effort, working from Room 101 of course, and I presume this reflects his ambivalence about this work. However, Winston is far more heavily coerced than the author. He’s constantly surveilled, like all of the Outer Party. Incidentally, it’s notable that the proles are not surveilled to the same extent and seem to have a lot more fun than he and his colleagues have. It’s been said that fascist regimes rely very much on the middle class to succeed, so this may be it, and the low level of education among the poorest is accompanied by lack of political awareness. The working class don’t come across very positively in this novel, and unfortunately given the attitudes stereotypically associated with them in England today, the contempt for them continues. Orwell has seen their lives from the inside and it’s made him pessimistic about the idea that they can be the source of any revolutionary activity. This doesn’t sit well with me even while I suspect it’s often true. However, they’re not a monolith and different people have different attitudes and values.

Novel-writing machines

Julia, Winston’s love interest, works on the novel-writing machines and is of course mainly seen from his perspective in the novel. Recently, the novel ‘Julia’ has attempted to tell the same story from her viewpoint, which also helps the reader see Winston from outside. Julia disguises herself as an enthusiastic member of the Anti-Sex League, and this among other things provokes the thought that the whole society is built on dishonesty and bad faith. Everyone is encouraged to think that everyone else loves Big Brother. The concept of the novel-writing machine is interesting because it doesn’t seem like it fits technologically. The trope arises repeatedly in science fiction and outside it – I think Roald Dahl uses it and Jonathan Swift does too – and I suppose it’s the author’s nightmare and since Orwell seems to have been trying to cram everything he hated into the world of ‘1984’, it finds its place there. At the time of writing, though, it must’ve seemed completely impossible and it seems out of place in the general grimy, low-tech atmosphere of Airstrip One. The solution to this, I think, is that the Party invents anything it needs to keep the populace in check, whether propaganda or some other kind of technology, so where there’s a will, there’s a way. It also makes me wonder if technology is potentially much more advanced than is seen in day to day life by the common people but they only get to avail themselves of it when it helps Ingsoc. This theme is also visited in ‘Brave New World’ where it’s openly admitted that technology is deliberately held back. Focussing on the very obvious thing which hasn’t been said yet, yes this is AI chatbots and they absolutely can produce stories of poor quality with lots of cliches and stereotypes in them, which is exactly what writing in ‘1984’ does. Song lyrics are also written by machine if I remember correctly. Like the real world, the fun creative thing which people actually want to do is taken away from them and they’re left with drudgery. Creativity would be subversive of course. Another aspect of this is that Newspeak is quite mechanical in nature and it might be easier to mechanise textual production in it than in English, but I’ll return to that later.

Telescreens are the most obvious bit of tech in the novel. Supplemented by microphones, they ensure that nobody outside the Inner Party can go unobserved in that manner. In a humorous note, the gym instructor can see Winston failing to do his physical jerks and criticises him through the telescreen. Anthony Burgess, incidentally, provocatively stated that “‘1984’ is essentially a comic book”, but what he seems to have intended by that, apart from being edgy which I think is probably his main motivation, is that Orwell takes the immediate post-war situation in Britain with its austerity and rationing and extrapolated it over almost four decades, leading to a caricature which might not have been meant to be taken entirely seriously. In my desire to make sense of the technological minutiae of the novel, which is never entirely absent from my mind, I’m given to wonder if telescreens use cathode ray tubes like the televisions of the time or whether they’re flatscreens which work in a handwavy way, because there are enormous public telescreens in places like the one in Victory Square which suggests to me that there must be a massive long tube behind them the size of Nelson’s Column or something.

The other notable bit of technology in the book is the machine used to torture Winston during his interrogation. Probably like you, I’m not sure I want to go there in too much detail but it seems able to read his mind and there’s a quantitative rating system which reminds me of electric shock therapy for some reason. I get the impression that the machine can fix transitory thoughts in the mind before doubts set in.

The nature of truth

My English teacher once observed that the novel is as much a philosophical treatise as a work of fiction. This was before I’d formally studied philosophy, so it was presented to me at a time before I had fully formed and thought-through ideas about that, but the main issues seem to be those of history and truth, or perhaps the relationship between language, thought and experience. There’s an incident during Winston’s interrogation where O’Brien burns a piece of paper and says he doesn’t remember it. Winston has some difficulty conceiving of how he can refer to something which he claims is not remembered. This is of course doublethink: being able to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. The idea seems to be not only that one outwardly expresses contradictory propositions but that the actual mental activity involves sincerely embracing the contradiction. It isn’t even a question of some thought being required to reveal the contradiction: it’s just there, blatant, as an object of one’s attention. There’s a theme throughout the novel that the indoctrination goes all the way to the centre of the mind.

This relates to the Party’s hostility to orgasm. An orgasm is a subjective experience, often ecstatic, over which the Party has no control. It can make the outside world as drab as it likes, but because orgasm is generally seen as pure pleasure, often shared between people, it has to be eliminated. There’s no control over it. It’s also possible that the existence of orgasms in such a stark world would reveal that things could be better in other ways too because of the contrast. Beyond this though, it seems to be control for its own sake, and it’s what the Anti-Sex League is about. It’s therefore a particularly telling contrast that Julia of all people is in that organisation. She is using doublethink against Big Brother.

Then there’s history. Winston is aware of the Party rewriting history to attribute the invention of the steam engine to Big Brother. He is himself involved in this activity. O’Brien’s burning of the paper is a reference to the immediate past.

Bad Faith

Parsons is Winston’s neighbour and colleague, and is scarily conformist in a very bad faith kind of way. His wife and he, though not his daughter, have a deeply buried aversion to the regime but cover it not only with a veneer of approval but one which penetrates most of the way to the centre of their identity, though not quite all the way, though they won’t even admit it to themselves. Ingsoc has had more success with their daughter, who is no “oldthinker”. She bellyfeels Ingsoc because they have moulded her from birth, and she’s reminiscent of both the Hitler Youth and the children who were to emerge in East Germany who used to report their own parents to the government. She hardly belongs to the family and is really there as living surveillance. In a somewhat similar move to Winston’s as a boy, she betrays her father to the authorities by telling them the possibly fabricated tale that he said “Down with Big Brother” in his sleep. Although this may be her lie, it could also be that this is really what Parsons said because only in an unconscious state can he admit to his abhorrence of his situation. Whatever actually happened, Parsons praises his daughter for turning him in before the rot had truly set in, that is, before he had to admit the truth to himself.

‘The Place Where There Is No Darkness’

The above is my favourite quote of the entire novel. Winston has previously dreamt that his boss O’Brien is his saviour and he later appears to demonstrate this by letting him into the inner circle of the Party but also the illusory inner circle of the resistance. He imagines that this place is one of hope, but in fact it’s the Ministry Of Truth, where the lights are on all the time to prevent prisoners from sleeping, and also the light penetrates their minds to reveal their secrets, deepest wishes and worst fears. Darkness in this context is simply anything Big Brother wants to get rid of such as sexual pleasure and happiness in general. Although it’s not his intention, I feel very much that this metaphor of light as evil and darkness as good is very productive, and also reflects the fact that Oceania is an ethical photographic negative, also shown by slogans such as “Freedom Is Slavery” and “War Is Peace”.

Maintenance of hatred to distract and unify

A very familiar aspect of the novel is its emphasis on the need for an external enemy, whether Eurasia or Eastasia. Dorothy Rowe, the psychotherapist, used to concentrate very much on this idea and I once went to a talk from her on this subject where she pointed out that soon after the Cold War ended and many people expected a new era of peace, the first Gulf War ensued and we all of a sudden had a new enemy to distract us. During the real 1984, one recent manifestation of that enemy had been Argentina. Nowadays many people would say it was immigrants and asylum seekers, and here I have a question. Some people use this novel to defend what they see as the Free World against other agents and forces such as what they call communism, and then on the Left we would tend to see it as about the likes of totalitarianism and fascism in a more right wing sense. It’s interesting that it should work so well in such a double-edged way. Orwell leads us to see that Ingsoc calls itself socialist when it clearly isn’t, and that would seem to accord with the general left wing view of state capitalism as manifested in the Soviet Union and China, but it seems to work just as well the other way around. Recently we’ve had the “War Against Terror”, which is more abstract but the same thing. Big Brother also regularly retcons the constant alternating wars with Eastasia and Eurasia, more or less entailing that the other two powers constantly shift between alliance and war. Each needs the other two as enemies. This is a particularly vivid and relevant aspect of the novel today.

Newspeak

English is called “Oldspeak” in Oceania. The idea of Newspeak is twofold. One aspect of it is within the regime, to close down thought and reasoning subversive to Ingsoc, but it also serves the purpose for Orwell of being ugly and unpleasant, and also kind of mechanical, not requiring deep thought but rather doublethink. There’s a third aspect to it which I’ll come to in a bit. I’m not entirely sure about this but I have the impression that there are no capital letters. Winston doesn’t use them in his diary, which is in Oldspeak, and there are also no capital letters in Minitru memoranda. Winston observes that someone using Newspeak speaks like a block of text with no spaces between the words, or it may be an aspect of simplifying the language while losing nuance – destroying it actually. However, there are some capitals, such as “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” and “INGSOC”. I’m sure I don’t need to go into much detail about the language if you’ve read the book. Orwell seems to buy very much into the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language shapes the world, and therefore that restricting language is restricting freedom of thought. I don’t agree with this and in fact the hypothesis is, I think, largely discredited nowadays. Interestingly, to me, Suzette Haden Elgin tried to do the opposite by creating Laadan, a constructed language specifically geared to women’s experience, but later decided that it wasn’t actually any harder to articulate that in natural languages although other women have taken and developed her conlang and disagree. It does appear to be true that we think of things differently to some extent depending on the language we’re able to use: I found it much harder to express philosophical ideas in Gaidhlig than English and I don’t think that was my lack of competence in the language.

The extra aspect of this I mentioned, and I’m not sure whether it’s intentional, is that the simplicity of Newspeak reflects Esperanto, which had reached its peak about fifteen years previously. In fact I have written a short story in Newspeak to explore this, set in a community where only Esperanto is spoken. I’m not aware of any other fiction written in Newspeak. In general, Esperanto was considered progressive at the time, so I have some difficulty reconciling this, but then Orwell was also like that – he engaged in doublethink himself to an extent, so maybe he was externalising a habit of mind. Zamenhoff’s popular conlang had its momentum destroyed by fascism and Nazism.

Film Adaptations

To be fair, this should be called “The Film Adaptation” because although several have been made I have the 1984 version in mind. I found it very faithful in terms of the events. It would have been difficult to reproduce Winston’s thoughts verbatim there, but at one point O’Brien bends down next to him in the torture chamber looking old and tired and the text in the book reads ‘you are thinking. . . that my face is old and tired.”. I was of course primed by having read it, but that does, I think, get very clearly communicated in the film. Mike Radford, the director, said that there was nothing in the film that wasn’t happening somewhere in the world that year, a very similar claim to Margaret Atwood’s concerning ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ that nothing in that had not been done to women somewhere. Orwell seems to have anticipated that one day the technology would exist to keep tabs on people minutely, which by the time of the real 1984 had already seemed to have gone too far and since then has only gone further. In a review of the film from the time of its release, “Shoplifters Will Be Prosecuted” was said to be the “real” version of “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”. That year, the Met had set up a bank of cameras at Brent Cross which could recognise number plates of cars leaving and entering London by that route and cross-referenced them with DVLA records in Swansea. That was over forty years ago now. There were also concerns about computers keeping track of credit card transactions and cheques. Nowadays of course everything is done by card or bank transfer and those worries seem trivial, which just shows how much we’ve normalised all this. MI5 had also just bought two ICL mainframes with 20 Gb of storage, which doesn’t sound like very much now but compared to the 5 Mb which many hard drives could accommodate at the time, it was a heck of a lot and this had been done secretly – why? Another notable aspect of the film is that it shows nothing which didn’t exist in Orwell’s lifetime, so for instance IT is still based on valves. This leads to a little distortion in the story, particularly in the interrogation scenes, as they were clearly supposed to be more advanced than is shown on screen. Since Orwell’s central characters are self-inserts, John Hurt must have resembled him quite closely physically at the time, and I get the impression he must have starved himself to achieve that gaunt appearance. Apparently Orwell’s inspiration for the idea of altering back copies of ‘The Times’ originated from the editing of ‘The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia’ in the 1930s under Stalin’s orders, where articles on, for example, Trotsky were deleted and photos of scenes from the Russian Revolution airbrushed. Radford points out that for all the disquiet and woe of his situation, created by the Party itself, Winston actually genuinely seems to enjoy his job. Another character, possibly Symes, says that the destruction of words is a beautiful thing, and given that O’Brien has said that the only source of pleasure the Party wants to continue is the pleasure of a jackboot stamping on a face forever, much more overtly Symes but Winston also, both enjoy that aspect of their work in different ways. Symes is part of an effort to shrink English vocabulary to a size convenient for Ingsoc’s ideology and Winston destroys words printed on paper by burning them. Other sources of pleasure are denied them. During a break in filming, Radford watched a news item showing the Queen laying a wreath on the tomb of Jomo Kenyatta, who fought to liberate Kenya from the British in the ’50s. At the time he had been painted as Satan incarnate by the media, but all of a sudden he was rehabilitated and revered. Not that he should or should not have been, but the complete volteface is rather familiar. The year 1984 also saw the computerisation of much political campaigning, with for example the targetting of election leaflets on education to addresses of parents of school age children. All the stuff about our data being used to manipulate us is not new at all, although of course it’s become all-pervasive today.

A bit of an aside: there were two annoying pubic hair incidents in 1984, one connected with Nena’s armpits (okay, not pubic hair but you know what I mean) and the other Suzanna Hamilton’s, which was visible on screen. I didn’t give it a second thought at the time, but apparently more recent audiences have found it quite shocking and worthy of comment. To be honest this reminds me of the incident with the fillings in the mouth of the screaming woman, who had been born into the post-nuclear world where there was presumably no dentistry, at the end of ‘Threads’, in that it really seems like a distraction from the real point of the film, but if you like you can actually shoehorn it in, in that women in Airstrip One don’t want to squander their paltry wages on using razors to remove body hair but in fact I very much doubt anyone at all in Britain was doing that in 1948. A few other things: Richard Burton’s health was failing at the time and took forty-five takes to do one of the scenes because he couldn’t remember his lines, so he was in fact very old and tired at that point. He actually died two months before the film was released so I’m guessing it was his last movie. The scenes generally kept pace with the diary dates in the book, so the opening scenes, for instance, were filmed on 4th April. This meant, of course, that it couldn’t be released until late in the year. In connection with both the theme and the insistence on using technology contemporary with Orwell’s life, Radford wanted to film it in black and white but Virgin refused, so instead the footage was put through bleach bypass to give it the washed-out appearance it had in theatres. This added to the cost of production because it meant that silver couldn’t be reclaimed from the negative or positive prints.

Then there’s the peculiar issue of the music. The initial plan had been to use David Bowie because of his album ‘Diamond Dogs’, but he was too expensive, so the Eurhythmics were approached instead and there is of course an album of their music for the soundtrack. However, all of that was Richard Branson’s idea and he hadn’t told Radford, who had hired Dominic Muldowney to do it, who ended up scoring the entire movie. Branson then vetoed Radford’s choice and the result is that in the initial theatrical cut most of the music is the Eurhythmics’, although it does seem rather quiet and brief most of the time, but some of it, for instance ‘Oceania, ‘Tis For Thee’, which plays in the opening scene in the cinema after the Two Minutes’ Hate, is by Muldowney. Some versions of the film on Blu-Ray give viewers the option of choosing between soundtracks but there’s also a DVD which only uses Muldowney’s, which I guess is much sought after because it’s out of print. Personally I like the Eurhythmics soundtrack but think it reflects the kind of impression one has before one has read the book and the Muldowney version is much more in keeping with the atmosphere of the film because Orwell didn’t forsee popular music going in the direction it in fact did.

The other thing about the film is its influence on other near-contemporary works. In particular, Terry Gillam’s ‘Brazil’ shares a very similar aesthetic, and Apple’s initial ad for the Mac is also self-consciously very similar to the first scene.

To conclude, it probably doesn’t need saying that there’s a lot that did need saying about this novel. When I tried to write an essay about it at school, I ended up just giving a detailed synopsis because I felt it said what it did so well that it was practically impossible for me to rephrase it in any way which would be helpful, which is, I think, a general problem with literary criticism of sufficiently high-quality works. There may never have been a point when ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ couldn’t’ve been taken to describe the world outside the window, but that’s equally true now and that’s a true mark of the universalism of a great work of literature.

Is Gàidhlig Exceptional?

We had a conversation in a café in Dail Bheithe (Dalbeattie) yesterday which rather surprised us. We got into a conversation with someone at the next table who was learning Welsh. She was clearly thoroughly Scottish, so this was an interesting choice, although one also made by another acquaintance living here. It then turned out that a family at another table were actually Welsh and fluent in the language, and all of us ended up discussing various things about the surviving Celtic languages, particularly Gàidhlig and Welsh. One of the things they said about Welsh is that it’s “the hardest language”. This reminded me of how Japanese speakers are fond of saying that their language is hard and that the learner’s polite response to this is said to be to acknowledge it and say one is working hard on learning it. People seem to be proud of the idea that their native language, or one they associate with their heritage, is in some way difficult or special.

My knowledge of Welsh is very limited, more so than my knowledge of Gàidhlig, substantially because it isn’t really part of my heritage. There’s an argument that Welsh is the heritage of most White people with English ancestry because in a sense Welsh used to be the main language spoken in what would become England and being from Kent, there are plenty of “Welsh” placenames in the area such as Dover and Wye. However, one reason for me not even trying very much with Welsh is that when I read the chapter on it in ‘Language Made Plain’, Anthony Burgess pointed out that the initial consonants often changed according to their setting and grammatical context, and I found that so off-putting that I didn’t pursue it any further. In fact it’s quite common for languages to do this, particularly the surviving Celtic languages, which as far as I know all do it. From a practical perspective it makes it difficult to look words up in the dictionary when one hears them spoken.

Regarding Welsh in particular, English speakers in England and parts of Wales are often quite hostile to it, making the following comments:

• It hasn’t got any vowels. This is obviously nonsense and refers to the spelling using letters used for consonants in English, W and Y, being used for vowels in Welsh.
• It involves a lot of phlegm and spitting. I’m guessing this is about the voiceless consonants which are unusual in modern English, namely CH, LL and RH.
• It’s spelt impenetrably. This is deeply unfair. Welsh spelling is actually quite close to Old English spelling and is very close to being phonetic compared to English nowadays. One would be hard-pressed to find another Western European language with better spelling. Spanish, Basque and German are about on the same level. English, French, Faroese and the continental Scandinavian languages are decidedly not.

Earlier that day, we’d been wandering about what might be called the machair, although I’m not sure it counts as true machair as we live in the southwest, and it reminded me of the concept of the ionad as it was one of several examples of a border between two things being considered as a place in itself. Whether or not it was actually machair, it was definitely that, and I’ll come back to that. There were also what initially appeared to be large, smooth pebbles stranded along the shoreline among the plants, and we quickly realised they were jellyfish, Aurelia in fact, which gave me to wonder if they were osmotic conformers who couldn’t cope with the low salinity of the water. Coincidentally, the Welsh people in the café brought up the Welsh way of referring to jellyfish, which opened up a can of tentacles, because one nickname used appears to be “pysgod wibli-wobli”, which incidentally illustrates how very phonetic their spelling is. I’m not entirely convinced this is true because of the “popty ping” thing, which they also mentioned, but apparently that too is a nickname and not just a joke to be played upon the Sassenach (I’m vaguely aware of a Welsh word “Saesneg” but I’ve probably got it wrong so you’re stuck with the Gàidhlig there). The term for microwave oven is probably not problematic in Welsh, but it turns out one term for jellyfish definitely does need a euphemism because it’s “cont y môr”, which translates literally as “C-word of the sea”. Makes me think of vagina dentata, which in turn I usually associate with sea urchins myself.

Becoming curious about the Gàidhlig for jellyfish, I find the word “sgoldrach” and a further term “muir-tèachd” – “sea gel” – and “sgeith-ròin”, which seems to mean “puke hair”, and that does make sense to some degree, and even edges into offensive territory, which I’m guessing “cont y môr” is supposed to be as well. The Welsh term seems to have a double connotation in that it refers to the animal’s shape and probably also to its threatening character to humans, although that presumes that words for genitals are considered pejorative in Welsh, since apparently they aren’t in Gàidhlig, so I’m told.

All of that, then, has led to highly fruitful cogitation over the use of these words in Celtic languages, and their unfamiliarity to a Sassenach is very stimulating in this respect. However, I’m not quite finished with Welsh yet. One of the remarkable things about Welsh is that the oldest written records in the language are not from Wales but apparently from around here, what became southwest Scotland. They comprise poems attributed to Taliesin and Aneirin. Wikipedia provides the following picture of a page from the ninth century CE book, Llyfr Aneirin:

Impressed upon me as a non-speaker of Welsh, this looks very Welsh indeed to me, which I find rather surprising. I’d assumed that the Brittonic language spoken along much of the western part of Great Britain varied more than that, but to my eye this just looks like Welsh, even in its spelling, which I mention because I’ve seen archaic spellings of Welsh using the likes of LH instead of LL. However, maybe it isn’t Welsh. Cornish and Breton aren’t Welsh and my understanding was that Cumbric was the Brittonic language spoken here immediately before Gàidhlig arrived from Ireland and Man. Whatever the language was, it survives in the well-known counting rhymes used by shepherds, which resemble Welsh quite closely.

Before I leave the topic of Welsh for now, I want to point out that neither of the two people I know living locally who are learning it were aware that it used to be spoken here. They just decided to learn it anyway, and I wonder if that means there’s more to it than it seems. Is there something about this region which hints that it used to be Welsh-speaking? It’s hard not to be doubtful about that idea as it sounds supernatural. It is genuinely the case, though, that the placenames around here are sometimes Welsh, a notable example being Cummertrees, whose first two syllables may in fact have originally been something like “Cymru”. There also used to be a Welsh-speaking kingdom here called Rheged, which as far as I understand it stretched from Ayrshire to Ynys Môn (I’m probably wrong about that). Awareness of its existence made me feel slightly better when we went to Carlisle recently, which incidentally is Caerliwelydd in Welsh. Nonetheless, this is all ancient, well mediaeval, history.

Turning to Goidelic, i.e. Q-Celtic for the purposes of modern times, languages and their possible exceptionalism, there’s a second issue. Apparently some Goidelic speakers regard their speech as part of a continuum of the same language which Sassenachs perceive as separate. I’ve seen, and unfortunately forgotten, evidence that the Gàidhlig spoken in Galloway was close to Manx, which wouldn’t be surprising, but as few traces remain the version we’re learning is that of the Gaidhealtacht (sp?), insofar as that’s unified. I’ve also heard that Enya’s Irish is closer to Gàidhlig than more southerly Irish speakers’ because she’s from Donegal in Ulster. It actually seems like a pity to me that we’re not learning a reconstructed Galwegian Gàidhlig, as that would to some extent restore the continuum, but presumably resources and the reasons people learn it preclude this. So when I ask whether it’s exceptional, what do I mean by that? Am I talking about the extinct Galwegian Gàidhlig, the almost extinct but very similar Manx, Gàidhlig as spoken in the Gàidhealtachd (which I can’t spell, apparently) or the entire gamut of living and recently extinct Goidelic languages?

I suppose I mean three things, as applied to the style of speech I’m learning: vocabulary, phonetics and grammar. One of the issues with living Celtic languages appears to be an historical academic bias towards classical European languages, mainly Latin and Ancient Greek, and later to what’s been called “Standard Average European”, or SAE. This was apparently originally Benjamin Whorf’s idea, and it involves the hypothesis that European languages have tended to become more like each other due to being in constant close physical proximity, leading to common features in syntax, grammar, vocabulary and usage. Two examples of how this can perhaps surprisingly manifest itself are found in many terms in Tok Pisin, an English-based creole in New Guinea, which uses “gras bilong hed” to refer to “hair”, when this way of thinking of hair would never occur to most Europeans – “head grass”, and in dvandva compounds, where two words are combined with equal force and type of reference such as “mother-father” meaning “parents” rather than something like “maternal grandfather” as occurs in Swedish. We don’t even know we’re doing it. This leads us to become less aware of other possibilities or features in languages which are unlike these, which is basically a form of ethnocentrism. Another aspect of this, from Swedish, is /ɧ/, a sound almost unique to that language and with its own phonetic symbol, but at the same time the click sounds of Khoisan languages were for a long time analysed into separate letters when they were actually single sounds rightly represented by single, but different, letters.

And the situation with Celtic languages as spoken today is that they’re on the fringe of Europe, not in a pejorative way but in terms of being less influenced by other European languages and less likely to be pulled towards them. To a limited extent this is also seen with Icelandic, which along with Faroese is an outlier with respect to other Nordic languages in spite of being the one which has changed least in the last millennium or more. In both cases, social forces have failed to pull these languages into the general homogeneity. It’s also alleged that the standard system for representing speech sounds, the IPA or International Phonetic Alphabet, is actually not very adequate for transcribing Goidelic languages. Other stuff is going on with their pronunciation which is hard to set down on paper because the notation is missing. This is clearly manifested in the apparently perverse spelling, but there is a reason why it’s like this. My personal opinion is that it should be written using Cyrillic script, the alphabet used for Russian and various other languages, but this is obviously never going to happen. It is, though, notable that the Slavic languages too, particularly Russian, are on the margins of Europe and therefore less driven towards SAE.

Thus in this case it does actually seem to make sense that Gàidhlig, or whatever it is I’m learning, is an exceptional language and that the thoughts and experiences of the Gaels are less forced into a SAE filter. Goidelic languages are from “outside the empire” and the fact that they were the languages of barbarians is a potential point in their favour. There is also a paradoxical sense in which these ultimately Western European languages, Irish, Gàidhlig, Manx, Faroese and Icelandic, are among the least Standard Average European languages in Europe! The well-known Balkan Sprachbund in southeastern Europe also tends to differ radically from more centrally located languages, perhaps for similar reasons.

I can’t say I have sufficient grasp of the grammar to make sweeping and accurate statements about it, but one thing which is notable is that the older terminology used to describe it is often inappropriate. The words “infinitive”, “dative”, “subjunctive” and “aspiration” are all used to describe features of the grammar and in the last case also phonetics which really don’t apply to the language at all. They may for all I know represent some kind of historical feature in a much earlier stage of the Celtic languages, but they really don’t make sense any more and it’s probably better not to use them. As I’ve said though, my understanding of the grammar is quite poor.

Vocabulary is slightly better. I’ve already written about “ionad”, the word for place or centre (in the sense, for instance, of “leisure centre”), and due to that word being used in maths, in itself it’s enough to revolutionise my perception of reality. It also very much anchors the word in my mind: I’m always going to notice when someone says “ionad” from now on. It’s a very inefficient way to learn a language of course, but the words get properly learnt this way. This also means you have to be careful to get it at least roughly right, in order not to have to make a greater effort to unlearn them otherwise. But many words can be treated as meditations from which one attempts to distil the water of life. That doesn’t make Gàidhlig exceptional, except in the usual sense that every language is exceptional, but adopting that attitude towards it may help one get the most out of it.

Somewhere else on the internet, some guy running a Gàidhlig group in Baltimore Maryland has singled out a number of words for the learner’s consideration. I can’t help thinking that this is rather precious in a distinctly American way which attempts to romanticise the language inappropriately, but it’s still interesting. His post can be found here on WordPress. Nine words are involved: cèilidh, slàn, dùthchas, cliù, aiteal, smùirnean, crith, lannair and deò.

“Cèilidh” was familiar to me from the late 1970s CE, when my English teacher and year head was in a band called the Oyster Cèilidh Band, now just known as the Oysterband and closely connected to Fiddler’s Dram and their one-hit wonder ‘Day Trip To Bangor’. I had no idea it was Gàidhlig at the time, and it has of course been extensively used in English since. It actually came to me after my first attempt to learn the language was over. The word is linked to “visit”, although I think this has now been replaced by another word. The precise image it brings up in my mind is the very English but also universal experience of a social gathering in a village square in Chilham, Kent, with gaily attired folk dancing round a maypole, getting drunk, playing instruments and singing songs. It’s actually quite “hey nonny-nonny” for me, and although Morris dancing is also a Scottish tradition – Dannsa na clag as it’s known – the strong association I make with that is there too for me. I’m a Sassenach, what do you expect? Nonetheless, I think it makes perfect sense to transport the spirit of such an occasion to Scotland and make the appropriate associations. Cèile also means “partner” or “spouse”, so although that may be coincidence, the idea of “partnering”, perhaps in a dance or accompanying each other in music is suggested to me here. It also implies belonging.

“Slàn” is the root of slàinte or “health”, and this actually feels like a fairly prosaic and boring word. It isn’t that it doesn’t have interesting associations, this time with wholeness, unbrokenness and the wholesome, but that kind of association exists between words linked to health and completeness in all sorts of languages, so it’s interesting and it helps one remember it, but it doesn’t seem special to me.

“Dùthchas” provides more food for thought in this respect. It has various reasons such as “place of origin”, “homeland”, “heritage”, “heredity” and also refers to a legal form of inherited land tenure. Hence the connotation of “place” exists with this word in a similar way to the connection between that concept and “ionad”. I find this a little worrying because I can see it lending itself to fascistic and negatively nationalistic urges, but I also hope that’s not so big a problem here and there are positive ways of being patriotic, such as admiring tolerance and care for the vulnerable if those are strong traditions in a place. My own dùthchas is of course partly Scottish, as is that of the whole diaspora. I wouldn’t presume to be as Scottish as an actual Scot but this place is keen on adopting others as their own and I’m hoping to be able to aspire fairly to that. In legal terms, links have been made between the right of indigenous peoples to their land in countries with colonial history such as Australia and the US and rights to clan lands here. It’s also been described as expressing the idea that people belong to places rather than places to people.

“Cliù” means “reputation” and “renown”, also “praise”, and therefore also “character”. It expresses the idea that one is proud of being useful to a community. It’s apparently summed up in Iain Crichton’s essay on being a Gael, ‘Real People In A Real Place’. It seems to be about being perceived as more than a “character”, and escaping from the, I don’t know, mysticisation and mistification of Na h-Eileanan an Iar as a kind of misty and mysterious place at the end of the Earth, and the romanticisation of the Gael. It’s a little like the essay ‘For All Those Who Were Indian In A Former Life‘ in that it makes the outsider question how they approach the cultures of others. I fervently want to be an asset to this community, not in a proud way but just to have a good idea, and the motivation, to know how I can be the most value to the people who live here. I suppose that’s cliù.

Next comes a bit of a departure from the communal and social in the form of “aiteal”, which I can’t help noting is a lot easier to type than most of the other words here. This reveals the absence of a proper Gàidhlig keyboard layout for computers in general. On this Chromebook I have a dozen keyboard layout options, none of which are suitable for the language. Leaving all that aside though, “aiteal” can be translated as “glimpse”, “sprinkle”, “slight breeze”, “ray of sunshine” and “smidgeon”. Maybe a “breath”. It’s a hint of things to come or the hidden, a bit like the idea of an iceberg being mainly hidden below the surface.

“Smùirnean” also refers to a small thing, like an atom or a mote of dust, and it’s at this point that I feel the guy in Baltimore has kind of gone off on one. I think it’s okay to engage in this kind of thing to fix the concepts in one’s mind, but this is also an everyday, working language spoken by real people who share in the universals which are also part of us. Anyway, “smùirnean” has a more figurative meaning of an initial inkling about something, the start of a realisation. But then he goes on about “the interconnected nature of life” and I start to be reminded of ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and ‘Jonathan Livingstone Seagull’, but maybe it’s I who am failing to appreciate the authenticity of this take.

He does the same thing again with “crith”: tremble, be in a tremor, the ague, shaking, quaking, shivering. This to him conveys the transient nature of an apparently solid and reliable order of things, the way an earth tremor reveals that this apparently sturdy, steady and monumental land we all live on is ultimately anything but, and that we’re almost here on suffrance, or rather that the world is indifferent to us. It can also refer to the shimmering of a mirage, something I perhaps ignorantly assumed is not a common experience in the Gaidhealtachd, although there are certainly mirages here. Maybe the “Fata Morgana” is a frequent experience here. This is the appearance of a distorted, distant object beyond the horizon, often seen above ice, and it does in fact refer to Morgan Le Fay of the tales of King Arthur, although we’re not in the Brittonic realm here, or at least not any more. It could refer to a deceptive thin layer of moss floating on a bog which makes the ground appear more solid than it really is, or possibly the misleading nature of a heath with hidden crevices into which one’s foot might slip and be trapped, as is apparently the case in Clan McIntyre country, and I’m sure many other places. The world is in fact less stable and substantial than we tend to think of it, although it can be hard to live confidently without assuming that. This is true both in terms of the illusion of security many people have and more literally so in the fact that matter is almost entirely empty space, as is the Universe beyond this planet.

Next there’s “lannair”: “radiance”, “gleam”, the glitter of fish scales or swords. Again I feel the author, whose name is Richard Gwynallen incidentally, is somewhat romanticising things in referring to the glint of swords. It can refer to the inner gleam of light that appears in someone’s eyes which presages something to come, once again. There’s a definite theme in many of these words and it’s hard to tell whether this says more about our Richard or more about the language.

His last word is “deò”: breath, vital spark, ghost, spark of fire or ray of light, once again. He speaks of it as the moment where the water of a river slips into the sea and we humans become part of a greater whole.

I don’t know what to make of all this. It’s a personal view and it seems rather fanciful and poetic. Then again, maybe the language is primarily poetic. I’ve felt for a while that it’s almost meant to be sung rather than spoken, so maybe he has a point with all this. Comparing German, because of reading Heidegger and other philosophers in German, pretty much prosaic, ordinary things expressed in that language come across to me as somewhat philosophical in nature and in fact Heidegger was himself quite attached to the idea that the common folk’s use of terms made them more significant, therefore preferring terms like “Geworfenheit” and “zuhanden” to rather more classically-based language. It’s not advisable to go too far with this because he was a Nazi, something I’d like to come to terms with. Even so, the poetry and song composed in Gàidhlig could be a demonstration of how the language also tends to go in ordinary conversation, so maybe Richard Gwynallen is right.

In the end, then, maybe Gàidhlig and her sisters really are exceptional, substantially because they’ve not been squashed down into the homogeneity of SAE. Maybe Gàidhlig is the “Anti-Esperanto”, not only due to its small number of native speakers but also because there’s no rule to force it to follow. It seems quirky to the outsider, to the Sassenach and no doubt even to many Scots, but it has a freedom and spontaneity, the foam, froth and white water of a mountain burn or waves breaking on the white sand of a Hebridean beach, rather than the flatness and standardisation of the speech of central Europe. Maybe this is what we can get from it. And we need to let it flow over us and our ears, trying to swim in its relentless flood, and one day we will succeed.