I have just received an answer to my last post from Hugh Curran. As I suspected, he doesn’t speak Irish. Here are his comments and my answers to those comments.
First of all, I never claimed to be a fluent Irish speaker but I have explored the etymology of Irish names and places fairly extensively.. My cousins, my parents, my aunts and uncles are all fluent Irish speakers. Our family immigrated to northern Canada when I was only eight years old so we seldom spoke Irish after that.
No, you never specifically stated that you were a fluent Irish speaker. However, as I pointed out, anyone reading your comment would assume that you were fluent. If someone said that they taught French and were born in France, you would assume they were competent in the language. What reason do you have for telling people about your Irish credentials at the start of the comment other than to imply that you are qualified to make a judgement on this question, which you obviously aren’t? And as for your relatives speaking Irish, what relevance does that have? You are the one making the comment and you don’t speak Irish and are unqualified to decide what constitutes plausible Irish or implausible Irish.
I”m surprised at the degree of vituperation in your response, especially by calling me a “liar” because of my comments on Cassidy’s book. This is. to my mind, beyond the pale. Then you also feel the need to bring in my Buddhist background, which you have absolutely no knowledge of, which is so bizarre that there is little use in further discussion.
As for the degree of vituperation, that depends on whether Cassidy was a misunderstood genius or a half-crazy con-man. Strangely, this is an issue you don’t discuss in your message. This is the crux of the whole thing. Either Cassidy’s work is an appalling hoax which no decent human being would support, or it’s a revelatory work of linguistics. If it’s the former (which it is) then your comments are supporting lies and my anger is justified.
I have been working for years to inform people about Cassidy’s lies and his exploitation of the Irish language. The evidence is freely available but clowns like you continue to pretend that that evidence doesn’t exist and that you know better than all the scholars and linguists and lexicographers. It makes me angry to see people championing these lies, helping to fleece the gullible and worse still, encouraging people to believe that arrant nonsense like fo-luach and sách úr and gus óil are genuine Irish.
I am not a Buddhist, though I do know a fair amount about Buddhism and I have more respect for Buddhism than for most religions. You think it’s bizarre that I mention this but to me, Cassidy’s work is about egoism and bigotry and dishonesty. Unless I’ve been misinformed, Buddhism sets great store by honesty and truth and humility. In other words, I think there’s a degree of hypocrisy in your position.
I presume from your comment that “there is little use in further discussion” that we probably won’t hear from you again. You are welcome to reply and I will publish and answer anything you say. However, I would remind you that I challenged you (as I’ve challenged every supporter of Cassidy) to read the posts here and provide evidence to refute my refutation of his nonsensical book. A cynic might say that you are refusing to engage in further discussion because you know that this is an argument you’re not going to win, because myself and the other critics of Cassidy are the ones who are telling the truth.
However, this isn’t about you and it isn’t about me. At the end of the day, this is about Cassidy and his lies and it’s about ensuring that as few people as possible are misled and cheated. Remove your comment from IrishCentral and I will take down this post and the other two. Continue to act as an enabler for a dead con-man, and I will consider myself entirely justified in continuing to call you a liar.
cassidyslangscam 