I picked up the Berlitz book on Gaelic. Big mistake. Near as I can tell the damned language was first written down by somebody with only a rudimentary idea of how a written language works. AND I had thought I could learn a bit from a book without hearing it. Nope. It’s a spoken language.
And ruadh, I actually recognize what you wrote to me! I don’t know for sure what it means, but it was used on the sign down at St Juliana’s when a new priest started, so I’m guessing it means “Howdy!”
Howdy backatcha! But if you are not one of our Mickish sisters, may I ask about your background?
sighs I sooooo want to learn Gaelic… I only know Cead mile faltche (I think that’s the spelling) which quite a few people already know. I would prefer to learn specifically Scots Gaelic (I am Scottish but we (well just me) think that there might be a bit of Irish on Grandpa’s side.)
dropzone, I’m American of Scottish and Spanish ancestry. Been living in Ireland for just over a year now - been a Gaelophile for about 16-17 years though.
Most of my Gaeilge studies have been on my own, though I did do an immersion course a couple years ago to help with the pronunciation which, as many have noted, is a bitch. Unfortunately the teacher (Derbhile Ní Churraighín from TG4’s Now You’re Talking, for the actual Irish reading this) on my immersion course was from Donegal and spoke the Ulster dialect, which is very different from the Irish most people here know. As a result I still tend to shy away from trying to actually speak the language.
The Irish here, though, mostly would have learned Gaeilge in school as it is a mandatory subject for all students. Unfortunately, for reasons hibernicus best explained here, few students retain much of the language.
The thing about Irish is that once you know the rules of pronunciation it really isn’t very difficult to say an Irish word with at least a reasonable amount of accuracy. Many letters aren’t pronounced as they would be in English, but there’s a lot more regularity in their pronunciation than there is in English! And, unlikely as it may seem, the spelling is a lot less complicated now than it used to be following mid-twentieth century reforms that removed a lot of letters that had become essentially silent from the orthography. My own username is a perfect example - it’s pronounced “rua” and is now spelled that way in Irish; in Scots Gaelic, which hasn’t undergone these reforms (and consequently makes Irish look simple by comparison) it’s still spelled “ruadh” and has a slight hard-g sound at the end.
Oh, and dropzone, céad míle fáilte means “100,000 welcomes”. If you aren’t scared off by now
Irish spelling at least came about in order to deal with the broad (velar) and slender (palatal) consonants the language has. On top of that, initially there are mutated and unmutated forms.
According to the article on Irish orthography, in the book “The World’s Writing Systems” by Daniels and Bright (I HIGHLY reccomend this book if you can afford it):
So, that explains why there’s a lot of extra letters in Irish words, at least by the Early Modern Period. Here’s some words showing what the second quoted paragraph means. First word is Old Irish, second is modern:
Fintan - Fiontan: Fintan
Déclán - Déaglán: Declan
úa Cellig - Ó Ceallaigh: O’Kelly
úa Cennétig - Ó Ceinnéidigh, Ó Cinnéide: O’Kennedy
Érenn - Éireann: Of Ireland
I wont attempt to show the pronunciations of Irish orthography unless asked (it’s complicated and i’d have to use ASCII IPA in order to represent the pronunciations)
But i’ll give a sample from this book to show the three developments. It shows some words and names.
First Old Irish orthography, then Modern, and then the Caighdeán Oifigiúil - The Modern Irish StandardÑ
-Buiden, slegán, celebrad, mac Mathgamno, úa Domnaill, úa Ségdai
-buidhean, sleaghán, ceileabhradh, Mac Mathghamhna, Ó Domhnaill, Ó Séaghdha
-buíon, sleán, ceiliúradh, Mac Mathúna, Ó Dónaill, Ó Sé
-host, slane/turf spade, celebration, son of Mathgamain ‘bear’ > McMahon, grandson/descendant of Domnall ‘world leader’> O’Donnell, grandson/descendant of Séagdae > O’Shea
<gratuitous, tastless, and inappropriate Troubles joke that plays on typical American ignorance that there are no Troubles in the South>
Why? You afraid someone might shoot you?
**
Thanks. I had been wondering.
**
Takes more than a short and enlightening linguistics lesson to scare me.
Yes, I’d say that Scots Gaelic is harder. The spelling is more complicated and there’s an additional noun case (nominative, genitive, vocative and dative, whereas Irish has only the first three). There are also half a dozen variations of the definite article, depending on whether the noun is masculine or feminine, singular or plural, nominative or dative case, what letter it begins with and, if it starts with an s, what the second letter is. And that’s not even mentioning the initial mutations that often must follow the article! In Irish, it’s either an (singular) or na (plural).
A further complication, although this is more a pain in the arse than a difficulty in learning the language, is that Scots Gaelic has a formal second person (sibh, which is identical to the plural second person form). As Scots Gaelic is historically a dialect of Irish that eventually became distinct enough to be considered a language in its own right, it’s something of a mystery why it should have this form when Irish doesn’t. The explanation you usually hear is that it’s due to the French influence on Scotland, but nobody knows for sure.
BTW, the correct pronunciation of “Gaelic”, if you’re speaking about the Scottish variety, is GAL-lic (rhymes with “phallic”). The Irish variety you can call GAY-lic, though it’s technically proper simply to call it “Irish”.
