Green English: Ireland’s Influence on the English Language by Loreto Todd (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviews: Leirmheasanna Within this pious literature, the Other for the Protestant woman is the specter of the superstitious, priest-ridden or drunken Catholic "biddy." The Catholic literature, on the other hand, is rnore concerned with defining the larger secular and material British culture as the inferior, irreligious Other. Brozyna hints in Labour, Love and Prayer that there is a relationship between the construction of the ideal of female piety and political identity during this period of intense social and political change in Ireland. Because the narrative is thematically rather than chronologicallydriven, however, it is impossible to sort out and evaluate her rnost provocative and intriguing suggestions. "-' MICHELE O'NEILL Green English: Ireland's Influence on the English Language, by Loreto Todd, pp. 159. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, [Minneapolis: Irish Books and Medial, 1999. $25.95. "Green English is a grafted tongue, an English foliage on an Irish stern, still nourished by an Irish root;' writes Loreto Todd in her examination of how the language of Ireland's colonizers nearly succeeded in ousting Irish Gaelic-but not without being influenced by it. Todd's contention about the worldwide influence ofIrish English admittedly runs counter to the claims of scholars of the history of the English language that "outside of place names ... the influence of Celtic upon the English language is almost negligible." The settlement of Ireland by English speakers from Scotland and England produced a variety of Scots English known as Planter English, which takes two main forms: AngloIrish and a variety of Scots English known as Ulster Scots. Hiberno-English refers specifically to the English spoken by people whose ancestral mother tongue was Irish, and is strongest in the Gaetachtai, rural areas, and isolated mountain regions. Observing that "the very name of the country Ireland (Eire-land) indicates a linguistic and cultural grafting that is part of our heritage;' Todd pays particularly close attention to the rnany ways that Irish Gaelic has been grafted onto the English language, making its mark on the lexical, syntactical, and phonological levels of many varieties of English. For example, such familiar words such as "puke;' "crack" (joke), and "spree;' all listed in "etymology unknown" in the Oxford English Dictionary, have cognates in the Irish piochan, craic, and spreidh. The use of unstressed an provides a rationale for the common practice in informal English of beginning questions with "and." While, according to Todd, the English personal pronoun "she" could not have originated frorn any dialect of English or Norse, the Irish third-person feminine si, prounounced ex159 Reviews: Leirmheasanna actly like the modern "she" is a likely source. "Green" English may account for specific features in many varieties of English, such as the Caribbean tendency to pronounce "this" and "that" as dis and dat (many Irish speakers use of"t" or "d" for "th;' as in "tank" for "thank" and "dey'' for "they"), the American "so long" goodbye (from the Irish slan), the Canadian narrative "eh;' and the African and Asian tendency to confuse "bring" and"take:' While Todd makes an excellent case for the influence of Green English on Received Pronunciation, a clearer explanation of the sources for its differences from R.P. would have been helpful: for example, the apparent mispronunciation of"th" as "t" or "d" undoubtedly stems from the Irish Gaelic use of"t" in words spelled with "th" in English, such as "tri" for "three." While Todd often uses boxed text effectively to enhance the arguments of her main text, or to set apart charts and lists, she sometimes uses it indiscriminately, thereby distracting readers from her main argument. Nonetheless, Green English is certain to appeal to linguists and lay readers alike. c-..., DONNA POTTS 160 ...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".