Irish homonyms

Image of Seamus Heaney from the Guardian

Irish English, the language of Yeats and Joyce, Behan and Heaney, is known and loved for its sensuous sound and its poetic sense.

A feature that differentiates it from British, American, and Canadian English is the missing /th/ consonant blend. Irish people normally drop or elide this, or substitute a /d/ sound.

Recently I've been listening to my favourite Irish folk songs, as well as live native Dublin speech. Here a few of the homonyms I've noticed: tank and thank; tings and things; pint and point; other and udder; den and then; true and through; tree and three.

These sounds remind me of my mother. Born of long-established Newfoundland descendants of Wales and Devon, she also had a lot of Irish speech patterns. Of course many Irish also settled early on "the old rock." Their speech patterns remain audible in St. John's.

"Mompy" carried these speech patterns of her native city for life. With her siblings, who lived out their lives on the island, they were accentuated, and included pronoun variations not heard in the rest of Canada: "He haves to go to work early."

For a visitor to Newfy, a stroll along Duckworth Street on the St. John's waterfront or a Sunday drive along the Irish Loop to see the puffins at Cape St. Mary's provides a great opportunity for the linguophile to hear the homonyms mentioned above.