Bergin was born in
Cork, sixth child and eldest son of Osborn Roberts Bergin and Sarah Reddin, and was educated at Queen's College Cork (now
University College Cork). He then went to
Germany for advanced studies in
Celtic languages, working with
Heinrich Zimmer at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin (now the
Humboldt University of Berlin) and later with
Rudolf Thurneysen at the
University of Freiburg, where he wrote his dissertation on
palatalization in 1906. He then returned to Ireland and taught at the
School of Irish Learning and at
University College Dublin. Within one year of becoming Director of the School of Irish Studies in the
Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Bergin resigned both the senior professorship and his office of director. The reason for his resignation was never made public. Bergin did not seem to have felt the need of
institutional religion and, during his lifetime, he rarely attended religious services. He developed Irish nationalist sympathies and remained a firm nationalist all his life but without party affiliations. From the number of Irish speakers living in Cork, Bergin quickly mastered the spoken Irish of West
Munster. By 1897, his knowledge of spoken and literary Modern Irish was so strong that he was appointed lecturer in Celtic at Queen's College, Cork. It was during this time that he became an active member of the Gaelic League. He published extensively in the journal for Irish scholarship, . He is best known for his discovery of
Bergin's law, which states that while the normal order of a sentence in
Old Irish is
verb–subject–object, it is permissible for the verb, in the
conjunct form, to be placed at the end of the sentence. His friend
Frank O'Connor wrote humorously that, while he discovered the law, "he never really believed in it". He wrote poetry in Irish and made a number of well-received translations of Old Irish love poetry. He is celebrated in
Brian O'Nolan's poem
Binchy and Bergin and Best, originally printed in the
Cruiskeen Lawn column in the
Irish Times and now included in
The Best of Myles. He was noted for his feuds with
George Moore and
William Butler Yeats, but he enjoyed a lifelong friendship with
George William Russell. Frank O'Connor, another good friend, describes Bergin's eccentricities affectionately in his memoir ''My Father's Son''. Bergin died in a nursing home in Dublin at the age of 76, having never married. == References ==