Page vii

Preface 
To attempt Such a Lexicon as this of the Gaelic or Irish in Finnegans Wake
probably seems today, even in the abstract, less derisory a task than it
might have seemed a decade ago. The actual extent of the present list may
occasion some surprise, but certainly not so much as it would have when the
fashion still was to assume that Joyce knew little or no Irish. Partly Joyce
himself is to blame for the prevalence of that assumption, for he intimates
in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that Stephen Dedalus dropped the
Irish course in which he had enrolled after only one lesson. Taking fiction
for fact, readers were content in the comfortable belief that the Gaelic
in Finnegans Wake could not amount to more than a smattering—more perhaps
than of Basque or Albanian, but not a great deal more. The belief was all
the more comfortable in that Irish is a difficult language with a thorny
orthography and opaque even' to the most polyglot of ordinary readers. 
 That old assumption has more recently been not so much shattered as slowly
dissipated. More and more snippets of Irish have been dredged up, by one
reader or another, from here and there in Finnegans Wake. Above all, the
undesigned revelations of Stanislaus Joyce have shown that his brother left
Ireland with a better initial knowledge of the language of his ancestors
than anyone had previously supposed. The Irish lessons James Joyce submitted
to, for instance, lasted sporadically for about two years rather than the
single session Stephen Dedalus undertook: with Joyce's linguistic flair even
a desultory attention for so long would have given him at least a modest
competence in Irish. Stanislaus shows also that he and his brother shared
a penchant for etymologizing the names of the places where they lived—Glengarriff
Road, for instance, and Clontarf. He provides, too, some pleasant vignettes
of the Reverend Patrick S. Dinneen, Professor of Irish at the National University
in Dublin while Joyce was a student there. Dinneen published in 1904 the
first edition of what has since been recognized (especially since the second
edition of 1927) as the standard modern dictionary of Irish. Father