Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/57

42 equivalent to ‘of course you may, there's nothing to prevent you.’

That old horse is lame of one leg, one of our very usual forms of expression, which is merely a translation from bacach ar aonchois. (MacCurtin.) ‘I'll seem to be lame, quite useless of one of my hands.’ (Old Song.)

Such constructions as amadán fir ‘a fool of a man’ are very common in Irish, with the second noun in the genitive (fear 'a man,' gen. fir) meaning ’a man who is a fool.’ Is and is ail ollamhan, ‘it is then he is a rock of an ollamhollamh‘ [sic] (doctor), i.e. a doctor who is a rock [of learning]. (Book of Rights.) So also ‘a thief of a fellow,’ ‘a steeple of a man,’ i.e. a man who is a steeple—so tall. This form of expression is however common in England both among writers and speakers. It is noticed here because it is far more general among us, for the obvious reason that it has come to us from two sources (instead of one)—Irish and English.

‘I removed to Dublin this day twelve months, and this day two years I will go back again to Tralee.’ ‘I bought that horse last May was a twelvemonth, and he will be three years old come Thursday next.’ ‘I'll not sell my pigs till coming on summer’: a translation of air theacht an t-samhraidh. Such Anglo-Irish expressions are very general, and are all from the Irish language, of which many examples might be given, but this one from ‘The Courtship of Emer,’ twelve or thirteen centuries old, will be enough. [It was prophesied] that the boy would come to Erin that day seven years—dia secht m-bliadan. (Kuno Meyer.)