英美概况之爱尔兰4.pptVIP

Chapter 14: Irish Culture: Language, Literature and Arts Language The issue of language is heavily politicized. Traditionally, the Irish people spoke their own language, called Irish or Erse. It is a very ancient (and difficult) language with a rich oral culture. Language Under English colonial policy, much pressure was brought to bear(推动） to stop the Irish people speaking their own language and to learn standard English instead. Since the Irish people felt, instinctively（凭直觉）, that to lose their language was to lose their native culture, they resisted this policy strongly. Until the mid-19th century Irish was still spoken widely by the peasant classes. Language The death blow to the Irish language was the Great Famine of 1845-48, in which about two million Irish people emigrated or died. Most of the Irish-speaker were peasants. After the first Irish national state was set up (the Free State of 1922), under Eamonn De Valera’s government, the school system was reconfigured （重新恢复）so that it taught the Irish language to all Irish children from the age of four until they left school at fifteen. Language No one may enter the civil service or the diplomatic core or the teaching profession in first- and second-level schools without having a certain level of competence in the Irish language. Despite such official pressures, the language that is spoken universally in the Republic of Ireland is a version of standard English known as Hiberno-English. Oral Culture Although the Irish do not generally now speak Irish, they do retain one element of their native culture: they talk. The Irish value good talk, and they love a good story. The basis for this is, of course, in the original peasant culture, which made the transfer from an oral to a written culture only slowly in the late 19th century. Art Culture Ireland is a traditional culture and it is true to say virtually every art form in Ireland derives from its rich folk heritage. In Ireland, writers may publish in eithe