Page:English as we speak it in Ireland - Joyce.djvu/59

44 ag éirghidh. During the height of the great wind storm of 1842 a poor shooler or 'travelling man' from Galway, who knew little English, took refuge in a house in Westmeath, where the people were praying in terror that the storm might go down. He joined in, and unconsciously translating from his native Irish, he kept repeating ’Musha, that the Lord may rise it, that the Lord may rise it.’ At which the others were at first indignant, thinking he was asking God to raise the wind higher still. (Russell.)

Sometimes two prepositions are used where one would do:—‘The dog got in under the bed:’ ‘Where is James? He's in in the room—or inside in the room.’

‘Old woman, old woman, old woman,’ says I, ‘Where are you going up so high?’ ‘To sweep the cobwebs off o’ the sky.’

Whether this duplication off of is native Irish or old English it is not easy to say: but I find this expression in ‘Robinson Crusoe’:—'For the first time since the storm off of Hull.'

Eva, the witch, says to the children of Lir, when she had turned them into swans:—Amach daoibh a chlann an righ: ‘Out with you [on the water] ye children of the king.’ This idiom which is quite common in Irish, is constantly heard among English speakers:—‘Away with you now’—‘Be off with yourself.’

‘Are you going away now?’ One of the Irish forms of answering this is Ní fós, which in Kerry the people translate ‘no yet,’ considering this nearer to the original than the usual English ‘not yet.’