A' chàirdean,

If you think Bunting or his source made a big day out of 'chanas',
wait until you read about JFC Lacy who reinterprets and reworks the
poor benighted verb form even further than Bunting. On 2 June 1890,
F. St. John Lacy presented a paper to the Royal Musical Association
called Notes on Irish Music which contains the following information:-

"There was one grand scale in use which went by the name of
Ardfideach, and this was divided into three parts, called Basascanus
(or bass), Cionar (tenor), and Riunchanus (treble). When the harpers
met at Belfast in 1792 this was the scale they used, and which I here
reproduce from Bunting, as it gives the compass of their harps ..."

Nowhere does Bunting transmit the information that any scale of the
Gaelic harp was named 'ardfideach', which is a misspelliing
of 'airfideach', a old, poetic Gaelic word that Bunting simply and
rightly presents, in p30 of the General Vocabulary in his 1840
volume, as meaning 'music, musician, harmony'.

The last A in the element 'chanas' is spelled as a U, a convention
indicates that 'chanas' is understood here as a noun rather than a
part of a verb. This follows the precedent of the spelling and
interpretation in Bunting's 1840 Introduction. Lacy's word 'cionar'
seems to derive from 'ciontar/cionthar' (music/melody) on p31 of the
Vocabulary and 'riunchanus' also seems to have derived from 'rinn'
(music/melody) on p35. According to Bain, the word 'cionthar' is
translated as 'music' in Shaw's dictionary of 1780. The Highland
Society's Dictionary of the Gaelic Language spells it -cion'thar- and
translates it as 'querulous music', using Alasdair mac Mhaighstir
Alasdair as a source.

'Rinn' may in fact derive from the ancient masculine word 'rind'
(point). It is equivalent in meaning to the latin word 'punctum' and
was mainly used in relation to poetry. It may have been one of the
Gaelic words for a musical note but there are no clear examples of
such usage. Bunting's term 'rim ceól' or 'rimm ceol' may derive
from 'rím ceoil' which may have meant 'counting of music', referring
perhaps to the counting of beats during the process of musical
composition, in a fashion analogous to counting the syllables of
rhyme.

Beannachdan,



Alasdair