New Learning Resource

I really should give this a mention here.

Thanks to Dr. Mary Stenson and somebody going by the online moniker “Phouka,” a resource is now available to supplement Ó Siadhail’s Learning Irish.

Apparently, some years ago, Dr. Stenson created a set of exercises to accompany Learning Irish. They used to be available on a university website but apparently they were swept away during a recent overhaul and, lamentably, Dr. Stenson no longer had softcopy versions of them to make available.

However, it seems that as she was developing them, she published them one by one in an online discussion forum known as GAEILGE-L for constructive criticism from her peers.

“Phouka,” bless his or her soul, dredged up the original submissions from that forum, reformatted them all, and posted them up on his website, free for whoever wants them:

http://phouka.com/stenson/intro.htm

Both questions and answers are located there as separate MS Word documents. Avail yourselves!

Valuable Aid to Achieving Fluency

Hey, is féidir go bhfuil sé éifeachtach.

Bhí mé vs. Bhíos ... SMACKDOWN !!!

For whatever it's worth (which is probably exactly nothing), I had dinner with a lovely Irish coworker of mine recently. I specifically asked her about an issue that is obviously of cataclysmic importance based upon what I read on certain Irish-language discussion forums:

"For the Love Of God And Everything Holy, is it bhí mé or is it bhíos ???!"

She smiled and said, ".. well ya know, Dan, we're all just a buncha tribes over there, ya do know at least dat dontcha? Oneupsmanship masquerades as authority, don't let anybody fool ya. But anyway, so ya know, it's 'bhí mé' -- those pretentious Cork people love to sound archaic and put themselves above everybody else but isn't it hilarious that the Gaeltachts there are so tiny relative to everywhere else?"

I don't know that I can remember a time when multiple layers of ironic tongue-in-cheek-but-not-really-yet-yes-kinda-really were layered so successfully into a single delivery.

My take-away is that bhí mé = bhíos = "I was" and I shall learn both and be done with it, already. Sweet Jesus.

Changes to Beginnings of Words Spawned by the Definite Article in the Nominative, Accusative, and Genetive Cases of Irish

UPDATE: The graph below has been reviewed by numerous people and seems to reflect accurate information, so I'm fairly confident that it won't lead you astray. If you do see an error in it, please email me so I can correct it. Thanks!

How's that for a brief headline title? Yikes.

Anyway, my intent here is to post something up for people far more knowledgeable than I to take a look at and see whether I've managed to distill the cryptic and unclear pronouncements of the grammar resources I've been consulting.

When corrections have been made, I'll retire the original picture and replace it with a corrected version, lest anybody stumble upon this site and presume I know what the hell I'm talking about here.

So, a chairde: an bhfuil mo chairt seo cruinn? Bhur dtráchtanna, le bhur dtoill!

Irisher Than Thou

Eventually, every student who decides to learn Irish is presented with the choice of which dialect to study. Will it be Munster-, Connemara- or Ulster-Irish? Or will it be the Caighdeán Oifigiúil (an artificially constructed “Standard Irish”) which would seem to have the advantage of a neutral, dialect-agnostic grammar and vocabulary, but is also apparently somewhat viscerally rejected by exponents of each dialect.

Perhaps the greatest splash of cold water in the student’s face is the degree to which internecine fighting among exponents of each dialect gets personal and nasty, as if every speaker of a different dialect is single-handedly responsible for the demise of Irish in Ireland, and every speaker’s own dialect can rightfully lay claim to the purest, most unadulterated form of Irish currently spoken.

Interestingly, the Irish-on-Irish insults hurled against speakers of dialects other than one’s own seem to be conducted as frequently in English as they are in Irish. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what this says about the current state of affairs. Far be it from me to say it’s reminiscent of a bucket full of crabs.

For my part, I elected at long last to study Connemara Irish because the study-aid best suited to my learning style teaches that dialect. I was also fortunate in that my family hails from that area of Ireland, so there was that additional incentive to learn Connemara Irish.

Imagine my surprise when one disgruntled student of Connemara Irish claimed that he’d supposedly “wasted” a year learning it and had since gone on to learn the supposedly purer Munster dialect. Apparently, the retention of certain older genitive verb-forms, considered antiquated in Connemara but still extant in Munster, qualified Muster as a “realer McCoy.” In fact, to hear him say it, Connemara Irish was to Irish what Ebonics is to US English.

I don’t know what to make of this. I keep coming back inexorably to the fact that, after many moons studying this language on my own, my American ears discern no differences among dialects that supposedly make one sound trashier or more refined to another, let alone make them mutually unintelligible. I have a Pimsleur course based entirely on Munster Irish and the greatest difference I can discern from it is that Munster Irish:

• Is melodious in a way that Connemara Irish is not;
• Pronounces the “s” in “anseo” and “ansin” as a pure “s” instead of a “sh” sound;
• Pronounces lenited consonants marginally differently.
  

Kill me if I don’t think the Spanish Irish Inquisition is called for here.

Irish Slender R

I think I'm finally getting the hang of this strange sound. I classify it midway between a "z" and a "zh." Or perhaps better yet... you know how you can whistle using the tip of your tongue pressed almost, but not quite, to the roof of your mouth? It sounds like that (in a very exaggerated way... it's closer to an "r" than that, but that sound approximates what becomes of that "r").

I wish I knew how widespread the use of this sound is. It's clearly used in the Cois Fhairrge dialect I'm learning presently, but I've been told it doesn't occur so much in Ulster, for example.

Which Ancient Language Are You?

And now for something completely different...

Here's a stupid little test that just cracked me right the hell up. I suppose this could be minimally related to the topic of this blog if you happen to get Ogham as your result!

Your Score: Akkadian

You scored

You are Akkadian, a blend of the incomprehensible symbols of the Sumerians with the unwritable sounds of the early Semitic peoples. However, the writing just doesn't suit the words and doesn't represent everything needed, so you end up a schizoid mess. Invented in Babylon, you're probably to blame for that tower story. However, crazy as you are, you're much loved and appreciated, and remain actively in use by records keepers long after schools have switched to other languages.

Link: The Which Ancient Language Are You Test written by imipak on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test