Scottish? I can’t even understand Donegal Irish! But when it’s written down it’s easy, once you get used to the differences (cha instead of ni, for example).
Your Manx phrase looks to me like “What are you coming on?” the idiomatic meaning of which escapes me; I guessed it meant “Where do get that idea?” or “What are you talking about?”
The TV program I saw showed an annual cultural festival (a kind of Manx Eisteddfod, I can’t remember what it’s called). On reflection I think it’s possible that the people in question were actually speaking Irish.
Some speakers of which would say they can understand Scots Gaelic better than Munster Irish
D’you think? I’ve also heard it said that the spoken languages are more mutually comprehensible than the written languages. Horses for courses, I guess.
Close, it meant “What do you mean?”
Jomo Mojo’s post sort of proves an earlier point. There are cognates between Welsh and Irish (as there are between English and Irish), but it’s very clear that they are two distinct languages. Of course you might well get the same idea about Irish and SG by comparing their names for the months, but never mind that …
Thank you for the translation ruadh, but after Celyn’s post now I have the sneaking suspicion that your sentence actually means “I’m with that stupid Swiss guy”.
Cognates between languages are not always self-evident at first glance. Take a look at these pairs of cognates from the list I already posted, and see if you notice any pattern:
ceithre pedwar
cúig pump
ceann pen
crann pren
This is why Gaelic is classed as “Q-Celtic” while Welsh is “P-Celtic.” The Proto-Indo-European labiovelar initial *kw- differentiated into a velar /k/ in one and a labial /p/ in the other.
Interestingly, the exact same split happened in the Italic languages: Oscan has p- wherever Latin has qu-. This shows that the P/Q split happened way back in Italo-Celtic, before it became divided into Italic and Celtic.
An older priest at my church who knows Latin got one of those shirts that says in Latin “If you can read this, you are over-educated” and he read it and it really said something like “If you are able to read this, your brain is full of knowledge”.
I believe this is not Scots Gaelic but Scots, which is a different thing all together. I’d say it’s essentially a dialect of English but I’m sure that others would differ.
While we’re on the subject, I know that about 20% of the population of Wales (half a million people, give or take) speak Welsh as a first language. I’m sure that exact figures are available from ONS but I can’t be bothered finding the right now.
What proportion of the population of Scotland and Ireland speaks Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic respectively as a first language? I realise that definitions of “first language” are contestable, so for that sake of argument I mean something like they spoke it as a child before they spoke English, it’s the main language they use with their immediate family and friends (compensating for geographical displacement) and so on.
My understanding is that the numbers are small but that both languages are enjoying something of a second-language revival now.
For Ireland, a figure of around 50,000 (c. 1%) is often quoted. However, many more people have had their entire schooling in Irish and are therefore functionally native speakers.
Questions relating to Irish language proficiency are routinely asked in censuses, and misleading or wishful answers are routinely given by the populace, the result being that we are none the wiser about actual numbers. As a rough estimate, we may say 1 million people (c. 20%) have a high degree of fluency.
Scottish is a very different story. I am sure there are more native speakers in Glasgow than in Gaeltacht regions. Lacking the official encouragement through education and mass media that Irish has enjoyed, I would say the number of people with any degree of fluency is in the tens of thousands.
Actually, that’s weird re. Edinburgh - I think the thing there must be to do with “highest concentration” as the amount of Gaelic speakers in Glasgow is likely to be more. No cite for that last remark, 'cos I didn’t think you’d especially want one.
Here is a very good page on the history of Scots and here is the same site’s take on the language-v-dialect issue. I personally think it’s a pointless exercise debating which of those categories Scots falls into, but the author of these pages certainly makes some compelling arguments and, I think, demonstrates that at the very least Scots deserves more respect as a historical entity than most non-Scottish Anglophones usually grant it.
hibernicus, maybe you can explain something to me. I’ve often wondered how Irish students (outwith the Gaeltacht and excluding those who attend Gaelscoileanna) can get so many years of Irish education and still be completely unable to speak the language. I know lots of people here say that they hated being “forced” to learn it at school but still one would expect that more of it would have been absorbed than it seems to have been. Is it just that it’s taught exceptionally poorly, or what?
ruadh’s question is a genuine mystery. To put it in context, we learn Irish every single day of our school lives for fourteen years and still come away unable to speak it. Later in our schooling we spend between two and six years learning continental European languages, and commonly end up reasonably competent. Because I don’t know the answer, I will present some possibilities as they occur to me.
There is a very strong pressure to speak Irish perfectly or not at all. I have seen somebody shunned from conversation for a single tiny grammatical error (“ceithre duine” instead of “ceathrar”).
Hence we apply different standards to our ability in Irish and in French, for example. Maybe we can, actually, speak Irish better than French. But if you can’t speak Irish perfectly, you say “I can’t speak Irish”. If you can’t speak French perfectly, you say “I speak French quite well”.
Eventually we lose our ability through disuse.
Possibly the teaching is bad, though I imagine there are good and bad teachers like any other subject.
The philosophy of Irish teaching is wrong. It is not taught as a foreign language. Reluctance to admit that it is not the native language of the students leads to a very unusual, and highly ineffective, teaching methodology.
Some students hate the language (the example you gave) and actively resist learning.
In general it is very hard to learn a language unless you perceive a genuine and compelling use for it. Examinations represent a compelling but artificial and time-limited motivation.
Your guess is correct. Strathclyde region includes Glasgow. The Western Isles have the highest number of Gaelic speakers, followed by Strathclyde. With the increased number of Gaelic Medium Units in schools, it’ll be interesting to see how the 2001 census turns out.
Thatns for the link, ruadh. He does make some compelling points, but I suspect that whether you define something as a language or a dialect is as much a matter of politics as linguistics. The reason I referred to it as a dialect is that, contrary to his assertion, it is largely comprehensible to many non-Scottish English speakers, certainly more so than, say, Middle English, which would count as a separate language from English on his definition.
Compare, for example:
(Burns) with
(Chaucer)
Is the latter English while the former is a foreign language?
Personally I think it can be put down to a couple of reasons.
They way Irish is thought is different to the way other languages are thought. When you are learning, for example, French in school it is in the context of real life examples, whereas Irish is all about reading stories and writing silly essays about going to the shops.
For most Irish youngsters there is no desire to learn the language because we all know it is a largely defunct language which in reality will have no use to you in later life.
Which is pretty much what Ruadh said. It is strange I suppose, because it isn’t a very complex languge. I always thought myself reasonably good at it in school but within about 2 years of leaving school I pretty much lost any ability to speak the language at all.
I wonder how many people would choose to continue learning the language if it were not a compulsary subject ?
Personally I think that kids would be better off learning an European language from a young age insteed.
But, TomH those examples are separated by a period of over 350 years (Chaucer c1343-1400, Burns 1759-1796), so I don’t know if that is really an appropriate comparison.
[temporary hijack] ronan, I don’t know if you’re in or near Dublin, but if so there’s a group of us meeting up on Friday evening. Check out this thread.
[/temporary hijack]
TomH, your example doesn’t work for me. I understand the Chaucer better than the Burns. (Every word in the Chaucer, but damned if I know what a “bield” is).
You know that if you become fairly fluent in Cornish, you can become a Cornish bard? Shame there are less than a hundred people that can understand what you’d be saying.
I can’t say it’s an issue that I feel terribly strongly about, but the site ruadh linked to argues that “a language is a collection of mutually intelligible dialects” and that Scots is therefore a different language from English on the ground that it is not intelligible to non-Scottish English speakers.
I disagree with both the premises in this argument and I posted the quotations from Burns and Chaucer to make the point that mutual intelligibility cannot be the only test of whether two things constitute dialects of the same language (I agree that the time difference spoils the comparison somewhat). Also to show that Scots is not “unintelligible” to the non-Scottish English speaker.
I think that, except in clear-cut cases (e.g. English and Welsh are clearly different languages), the distinction between different dialects of the same language and different languages is a political one. Catalan and Castilian are perfectly mutually-comprehensible, for example.
“Bield” means shelter. It occurs in Middle English and is still found in some dialects of Northern England, along with a lot of other Scots words.
This raises another point from the comparison of Chaucer and Burns: most of the words in the Burns which are not familiar to Modern English speakers are common in Old and Middle English.
I agree with ruadh’s suggestion that Scots probably deserves more respect than it is sometimes given, but I think the same is true of other dialects of English and I don’t see why we should have to pretend that something is a separate language in order to accord it respect. The danger is that some dialects will be taken seriously for political reasons and others, which are of equal value, will be allowed to whither on the vine.
The last native Cornish speaker, Dolly Pentreath, died in the mid-18th Century, though some of the yellow tartan brigade still describe Cornish as their “native language”.
Well actually what the site does is give that definition (which it quotes rather than argues as its own) as one possible definition of a language, and then argues that Scots fits it … and then further on down the page it gives a few other reasons to consider Scots a language, before finally concluding that it’s really all a matter of opinion and there’s no definitive answer anyway.
Just to clear things up
I don’t believe anybody thinks it is.
I don’t understand a lot of the Burns passage. And I spend a lot of time around Scottish people! I’m sure there’s a lot of other Anglophones who wouldn’t understand it, either.
Not “perfectly”, but close enough. But then so are Spanish and Portuguese. I’ve always read that Catalan is a closer relative of Occitan than of Spanish, and that it’s even derived from a different branch of Latin than Spanish is. I haven’t studied the matter and can’t speak to the veracity of these statements but if they are true they certainly provide compelling non-political arguments for Catalan being a language in its own right.
Also, its orthography (superficially) appears to me to be closer to French than to Spanish. I remember stepping off a plane in Barcelona, momentarily going brain-dead and forgetting about the existence of Catalan, and wondering why all the signs in the airport were in French.
Just to wrench the topic back to the OP for half a mo (Sorry!) . . .
Is the phrase in question fluently set out, like it was thought up by a native-speaker, or is it “fake Irish” put on by someone who doesn’t really know the language?
I ask because I know “English [language]” t-shirts are (or used to be) big in Japan, and for many of them you could tell that the phrase was offered by someone who didn’t know much English – like, “Refresh You Up Coke!” or “We Disco Dancing!”
