Irish English and the Ulster Scots Controversy by Jeffrey Kallen
From: Ulster Folk Life Vol.45, 1999. (Published by Ulster Folk & Transport
Museum, Cultra)
The use of inflected be (specifically bees, as past tense beed is not generally attested) has been the subject of some attempts at localisation, but not of systematic study. Bliss offered the view that bees is common 'in the north of the country', though he did not give a geographical specification of 'north'98. Inflected be has been reported in Meath and in Co. Dublin in the east, 99, and in Roscommon and Sligo in the west, 100, although studies based on Dublin city English do not include examples of it. 101, and it is not mentioned in Beecher's work on Cork slang or Moylan's on Kilkenny English. 102. Joyce's evidence is somewhat equivocal since it conflates different uses of be, but he described the 'use of be for is' as 'common in the eastern half of Ireland from Wexford to Antrim' 103. This partial trail of evidence may or may not give credence to the view that there is a northern (or at least non southwestern) trend to the use of inflected be in traditional dialects; it does not however, support restriction of the form to Ulster. Scots aye 'ever, always' however is not found outside of Ulster. An interesting question, for which I can find no answer, is the extent to which aye may have diffused out of the Ulster Scots zone into more general Ulster English 104. Equally, more research is needed to ascertain whether or not the Scots use of final s as a habitual marker has been diffused more generally.
With our knowledge of variation in the use of generic/habitual marking still incomplete the origins controversy is necessarily speculative. As usual, however, the literature focuses on the Irish language and British dialectal or historical English as the possible sources the structures involved. An early association between do be and Irish bionn, the verb bi be marked for continuous present aspect, is suggested by the translation in Lynch'' Irish grammar of the forms bion-me, bion-tu, etc. as 'I do be, thou dost be' and so forth. 105. Since Lynch's choice of translation is not explained, it can only be inferred that the habitual sense was to be understood by his readers, in which case Lynch's is the earliest known scholarly observation of the form. 106. Todd builds her recent presentation of the Irish source for this construction on distinctions in Irish between (1) habitual form such as Bionn Maire ag dul ar scoil, literally translated as 'Be + habitual scoil 'Be Mary at go to school' and (3) a more general sense of regularity in Teann Maire ar scoil, translated literally by Todd as 'Goes Mary to school'. Following from this point, Todd argues that 'Irish speakers used to such fine distinctions, expected their English to provide similar nuances'. Thus, she claims ' speakers of Hiberno-English added an extra feature of differentiation' in contrast between Mary biz/bees going to school, which 'suggests regularity' and Mary does be going to school, in which 'both regularity and habitualness' are suggested. 107. Though Todd's analysis is problematical for the variation controversy, in so far as her sense of Hiberno-English is based on a unitary rule system which contains both the do be and inflected be forms (contrary to much of our existing empirical evidence) it is in keeping with an Irish-based analysis on the question of origins. 108
Two types of source are usually examined in looking for English antecedents
for modern Irish English generic/habitual markers; so called 'periphrastic
do' as found productively in standard Middle and Early Modern English, and
dialectal uses of do which may or may not be related to the standard periphrastic
use. It is well known that from the 16th to the 18th centuries, do in British
English underwent an expansion beyond its earlier uses as a causative verb
or pro-verb standing in the place of other verbs, and was much more freely
used than its current centring around questions, negatives and emphatic
contexts. 109. I have suggested elsewhere that periphrastic do may have
acquired a focused temporal marking function in Irish English, citing a
strong tendency in Irish documents of the 16th and 17th centuries to use
periphrastic do in conjunction with adverbs of habit or regularity, as in
his friends......said it was but a dream of phantasy of the night that every
man doth dream commonly and yet she doth continually extort on poor people.
110. Though the remoteness of Old English evidence may render its impact
weak at best, it may still be relevant to note the distinction between Old
English beon and wesan (cognate with modern be); according to Traugott,
there was 'no absolute distinction' between these two verbs, yet there was
a tendency for beon 'to be preferred for reference to habitual, repetitive
and therefore pluralised situations', while wesan was favoured for 'singular
situations......or situations regarded as eternal and therefore singular.'111.
On this reading, modern habitual bees could be a carryover from much older
English sources shared formally, if not semantically, with Scots. |
