Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/116

 CH. VII.] for the ingions,' as I once heard a woman say in Limerick.


 * 'Men are of different opinions,
 * Some like leeks and some like ingions.'

This is old English; 'in one of Dodsley's plays we have onions rhyming with minions' (Lowell.)

The general English tendency is to put back the accent as far from the end of the word as possible. But among our people there is a contrary tendency—to throw forward the accent; as in ex-cel´lent, his Ex-cel´-lency—Nas-sau´ Street (Dublin), Ar-bu´-tus, commit-tee´, her-e-dit´tary.


 * 'Tele-mach´us though so grand ere the sceptre reached his hand.'


 * (Old Irish Folk Song.)

In Gough's Arithmetic there was a short section on the laws of radiation and of pendulums. When I was a boy I once heard one of the old schoolmasters reading out, in his grandiloquent way, for the people grouped round Ardpatrick chapel gate after Mass, his formidable prospectus of the subjects he could teach, among which were 'the raddiation of light and heat and the vibrations of swinging pen-joo´lums.' The same fine old scholarly pedant once remarked that our neighbourhood was a very moun-taan´-yus locality. A little later on in my life, when I had written some pieces in high-flown English—as young writers will often do—one of these schoolmasters—a much lower class of man than the last—said to me by way of compliment: 'Ah! Mr. Joyce, you have a fine voca-bull´ery.'

Mischievous is in the south accented on the second syllable—Mis-chee´-vous: but I have come across this