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That’s very interesting! I didn’t know that, thanks.
Any suggestions on what happened with the nasalization of vowels in Munster then?
Jonas-
“That’s not the only reason. Passing from synthetic forms to analytical forms is common phenomena in lots of languages. It’s complete in Scandinavian languages, for instance, and even fully synthethic written languages like Finnish or Italian actively use personal pronouns in the spoken language.”
That’s true, but I feel that that particular change was fairly gradual, whereas in Munster Irish this seems to have happened fairly rapidly. And I find this worrying because continuity and inter-generational transmission is so important to endangered languages.
Also, in many languages (German, for instance) the written form is more conservative than the actual spoken language and causes the language to undergo change at a slower pace. In Irish, a conservative written form was replaced by a modernised and simplified form.
An Lon Dubh-
Thanks! That actually makes a lot of sense.
Go raibh maith agaibh!
It’s sad to hear that the synthetic forms are passing, but I can’t say I’m really surprised either, given the pressure from the standard language. :down:
In a similar vein, does anybody actually say “Conas taoi?”
Just wanted to chip in and say thanks to Wee_Falorie_Man for putting up the link to the conjugations on Cork Irish! I was using the site already, but I wanted to check the conjugation for verbs like léigh and nigh and I didn’t know it gave them in detail as well
“As Lughaidh knows, the most popular French producer of language courses, Assimil, has a short introduction to Irish (more like a phrasebook with grammar). This course, written by an Irishman in France who probably is an English-speaker, actually teaches that “ch” should be pronounced [k].”
That is ridiculous. It’s that sort of thing that sometimes makes me wonder whether making Irish compulsory in schools is really such a good idea.
Ja, I think that attitude seems to influence the way Irish is taught in schools. There seems to be a lot of emphasis on reading poems and short stories, but less on speaking and listening.
Which meant that I’d hear people simply pronouncing the “ch” as a “k”, broad “gh” or “dh” as if it was just a “g”. My ex-girlfriend once complained that whenever I spoke Irish it sounded like I was shouting at her. This worried me for a bit, until I listened to my recordings again and realised that it was the stress pattern in spoken Irish that was freaking her out.An lon dubh:
I know exactly what you mean about the “objective attitude to learning Irish”. I had many a “disagreement” with my Irish ex-girlfriend because of it. As you say, I don’t think it’s a case of outright lying, but rather the idea that “Irish people can instinctively speak Irish.”. As well as ” Well, that’s not how I learnt it at school!”.
That said, thank you for the encouragement it definitely helps!
Onuvanja:
Actually, while I was studying Celtology, I was actually easily outnumbered by the people studying Sanskrit or Latin! :gulp: (Which was also one of the reasons I decided to quit studying Celtology).
But ja, I had been considering the TEG as something to go for in the future.
Héilics Órbhuí:
That’s definitely true, personally, I’m just more concerned about how much time my Irish study takes up, rather than whether I could mentally handle that many languages. In fact, studying Irish has probably benefitted my study of other languages just because having had to work so much on pronunciation has kind of “loosened up my mouth” for speaking other languages.Gur maith agaibh!
Well, I do enjoy it, but there are definitely other languages I could be spending my time on.
The reason I started studying Irish was that as an Afrikaans-speaker I have some perspective on what it’s like to speak a language that has had to historically defend itself against the all-mighty English. Moreover the Irish and Afrikaners had a fairly close connection until the rise of Apartheid.
I also found it interesting that whereas both languages started out in roughly the same position from some perspectives (languages spoken by the ill-educated rural poor confronted with English as the language of the urban middle and upper classes) Afrikaans has gone on to thrive whereas Irish has continued to decline.Since then, I’ve just come to love the language itself, it’s particularly rich and pleasant to speak and very expressive and it’d be a shame if it died out.
I was never particularly worried about the fact that so few people actually speak it and there is at least some measure of literature to enjoy, even if much of it is quite old. What has come to annoy me far more is the way so many Irish people claim to be able to speak the language, yet can’t. (But that’s a rant for another time.)
I suppose what it comes down to is that studying Irish sometimes feels a bit like an ecentric hobby, and that I just wish at times it was more like learning Italian or French. (Or rather, I sometimes feel that it should be. It is after all an official language of the EU.)
