ABSTRACT

In an essay published in 1993 on the ideology of Irish royalism in the seventeenth century, Breandán Ó Buachalla remarked on some innovations in political vocabulary in the Irish language that accompanied the development of this ideology. 1 One word mentioned was the newly minted borrowing náision, or ‘nation’. Conversely, I myself have discussed the lexicon, syntax, and rhetoric of the concepts of ‘right’, especially hereditary right, portrayed as indefeasible, inalienable, and therefore ‘natural’ as they are expressed by long-established words in the language like dúthchas (‘native land, heritage’). 2 This native lexicon becomes central to the concepts of homeland and patriotism in the Irish of the early colonial period, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It is an area that has all too often been neglected in the study of early modern Ireland: the intersection of history, literature, and language, specifically the semantics and pragmatics of the original language, Irish, in which that literature is written.