HE LOAN-WORDS from Scottish and Irish Gaelic here discussed are 1 those brought into American speech largely during the nineteenth century, in the great migration. Such words as Tory or galore, though they are eventually of Gaelic provenience, came into the language fairly early, in the main stream of English, and were felt not as loan-words but as true English. On the other hand, such words as colleen (Ir. cailin, a maiden) and asthore (Ir. a stoir, O treasure) are not Gaelic loan-words in American, for though Americans use them-very occasionally-they are felt as foreign not naturalized words.2 Shanty, a hastily-built or tumbledown house, is a word concerning which Mencken remarks that there have been bitter etymological battles.3 The DAE and NED derive it from the lFrench chantier; the NED further notes that shanty-man is exactly equivalent in meaning to homme de chantier, a lumberman, and that shanty is of Canadian origin. On the other side of the argument is the Irish phrase sean-tigh, an old house, which is pronounced practically the same as shanty.4 The NED cites (from 1864) an Australian slang word shanty, meaning a public house, particularly an unlicensed one. The influence of Canadian French on Australian slang must have been very slight; the influence of Irish much greater. Unlicensed public-houses must often, by the very nature of their business, have been rather tumbledown shacks; the extension of meaning from old house to unlicensed groggery would thus have been very easy. In America, we have also the phrase shanty-Irish, meaning those Irish who have not made enough money to live in anything but a shanty, or in shanty-town., as opposed to those who have done rather better and become lace-curtain Irish. Further, Patrick Breen, a native Irishman who was a member of the Donner party, uses the word shanty in his diary, where his contemporaries would normally have used cabin.5 Though Breen had
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Feb 1, 1967
Arthur E Hutson 