Introduction
By 1495 and the reign of Henry VII, attempts to stamp out Irish language and culture in ‘The Pale’, the area of English governance in Ireland, had largely failed. And a good thing too, said Irish priest John Lynch, writing in 1662. Exiled in France thanks to Cromwell’s brutal rampage in Ireland, he decried the politicisation of language by ruling powers.
A KNOWLEDGE of many languages, so far from being an incumbrance or discredit, has ever been prized as desirable and useful. It is not the least among the glories of Mithridates, King of Pontus,* that he understood the languages of the twenty-two nations which owned his sway, and was able to converse with their delegates without the aid of an interpreter.* The Romans themselves did not think the Phoenician language beneath their notice, finding that it could boast of some works of no inconsiderable merit.* A knowledge of many foreign languages was never despised by the ancients; it has been at all times a laudable study.
Wisdom of the highest order has rewarded the labours of those men who travelled through many foreign countries, and were able to converse with their inhabitants in the native language. Homer’s eulogy of Ulysses is summed up in the words
“The towns and laws of many lands he knew.”*
Travellers, by resigning for a time the domestic hearth and the sweet society of friends, and surveying the wonderful things of various nations, soften down the asperities of their native character, and apply to native rudeness the corrective of foreign civilization.
* Mithridates VI Eupator, the Great, was King of Pontus (in what is now Turkey) from 120 to 63 BC, and one of the Roman Republic’s most formidable opponents in the East. Lynch is relying on the testimony of Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, VII, 24.
* Elizabeth I of England (r. 1558-1603) was another gifted linguist, who did diplomacy in several languages: see Queen of Arts. Among her possessions was a ‘small and elegantly written volume’ containing the Irish alphabet and some parallel phrases in Irish, Latin and English, compiled for her by Christopher Nugent (1544–1602), 6th Baron Delvin.
* “The Phoenician race” said Pliny the Elder in his Natural History V.13 “has the great distinction of having invented the alphabet and the sciences of astronomy, navigation and strategy.” He recorded in XVIII.5 that the agricultural treatises of Mago (a writer of uncertain date from Carthage, who composed his treatises in Punic, a Phoenician tongue) were saved from the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC and translated into Latin on the order of the Roman Senate.
* Ulysses is the Roman name for Odysseus. “Many were the men whose cities he saw” said Homer at the start of the Odyssey, “and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades.”
Précis
Writing at the start of Charles II’s reign, Irish priest John Lynch reminded readers that from Classical Greece and Rome onwards, a good knowledge of foreign languages has always been regarded as a worthy accomplishment. A smattering of foreign tongues, and a little foreign travel, widens one’s horizons and smooths down the rough edges of one’s own national character. (59 / 60 words)
Writing at the start of Charles II’s reign, Irish priest John Lynch reminded readers that from Classical Greece and Rome onwards, a good knowledge of foreign languages has always been regarded as a worthy accomplishment. A smattering of foreign tongues, and a little foreign travel, widens one’s horizons and smooths down the rough edges of one’s own national character.
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Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: although, if, just, must, or, since, unless, until.