When you study a new language, you should learn some things by heart. Below are some common Irish phrases, with rough guides to pronunciations put between slashes. Try to memorize these. It would be great if you could find an online source with sound files so that you can hear native voices speak them. One source can be found at this site: http://www.daltai.com/phrases.htm
[I still need to add some fadas (accents) below]
Hello. Dia dhuit! /DEE-uh GWIT/ or /JEE-uh DITCH/ up north
Response to hello. Dia's Muire dhuit. /DEE-uh iss MWEER-uh GWIT/
How are you? Conas ta tu? /CUNN-us TAH TOO/
I'm fine. And you? Ta me go maith. Agus tusa? /TAH MAY guh MAH; AHG-us TOO-suh/
[Much more coming soon!]
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Web Resources for Irish
It is almost unbelievable the number and quality of web resources now available for students of Irish. I will just list a few right now, but I will come back to this issue from time to time.
One fantastic site is published by "Foras na Gaeilge," and the web address is http://www.irish.ie/default1.asp?lang=en. At this site you can chose to read in Irish or English, and the resources available are incredible. The site states, "Foras na Gaeilge, the body responsible for the promotion of the Irish language throughout the whole island of Ireland, was founded on the second day of December 1999."
Another interesting site is www.daltai.com ("Daltai" means "students," as in "Students of Irish."). I enjoy looking at the language forums on this site.
[more coming]
One fantastic site is published by "Foras na Gaeilge," and the web address is http://www.irish.ie/default1.asp?lang=en. At this site you can chose to read in Irish or English, and the resources available are incredible. The site states, "Foras na Gaeilge, the body responsible for the promotion of the Irish language throughout the whole island of Ireland, was founded on the second day of December 1999."
Another interesting site is www.daltai.com ("Daltai" means "students," as in "Students of Irish."). I enjoy looking at the language forums on this site.
[more coming]
Do You Need a Dictionary?
Yes, you need a dictionary. Amazingly, the Pimsleur materials work without a dictionary or even written transcripts (though they are available--see previous post). And of course children learn to speak their native languages without dictionaries. But we are adults, and we don't live in areas where Irish is the community language. For this reasons, dictionaries are very helpful.
My friend Mike Gerrity is a Russian translator and he often uses online dictionaries in his translation of technical Russian materials. So online dictionaries are good tools and they're usually free of cost. Here's a fairly decent one: http://www.irishdictionary.ie/home. Still, I rarely use them. I much prefer old-fashioned bound dictionaries. If you go to Amazon.com and search for "Irish dictionaries," you will find there are lots available, at quite a range of prices. One that popped up first when I did my search on Amazon was the "Irish-English/English-Irish Easy Reference Dictionary," Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 480 pages, for $11.53. What a deal!
My favorite dictionary is "Focloir Scoile English-Irish/Irish-English Dictionary," published in Ireland by An Gum, the largest publisher of Irish books. The price is around $25. This is a very fine dictionary and it has a feature many Irish-English dictionaries lack--it gives phonetic transcriptions of the Irish words. That is a problematic thing to do because of the tricky dialect differences in Irish, but it can be helpful to a beginner. Here are the ISBN's of this dictionary: ISBN-10: 1857911210 and ISBN-13: 978-1857911213.
The best modern dictionary of Irish is a one-direction work, Irish to English (without the English to Irish dimension that most beginners would need) : Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla (by Niall Ó Dónaill). This is a huge and sophisticated dictionary, one needed by serious intermediate and advanced students of Irish. It is available in both a paperback and hardback version. I believe the paperback version, around 1300 pages in length, can be purchased for around $40.
My friend Mike Gerrity is a Russian translator and he often uses online dictionaries in his translation of technical Russian materials. So online dictionaries are good tools and they're usually free of cost. Here's a fairly decent one: http://www.irishdictionary.ie/home. Still, I rarely use them. I much prefer old-fashioned bound dictionaries. If you go to Amazon.com and search for "Irish dictionaries," you will find there are lots available, at quite a range of prices. One that popped up first when I did my search on Amazon was the "Irish-English/English-Irish Easy Reference Dictionary," Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 480 pages, for $11.53. What a deal!
My favorite dictionary is "Focloir Scoile English-Irish/Irish-English Dictionary," published in Ireland by An Gum, the largest publisher of Irish books. The price is around $25. This is a very fine dictionary and it has a feature many Irish-English dictionaries lack--it gives phonetic transcriptions of the Irish words. That is a problematic thing to do because of the tricky dialect differences in Irish, but it can be helpful to a beginner. Here are the ISBN's of this dictionary: ISBN-10: 1857911210 and ISBN-13: 978-1857911213.
The best modern dictionary of Irish is a one-direction work, Irish to English (without the English to Irish dimension that most beginners would need) : Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla (by Niall Ó Dónaill). This is a huge and sophisticated dictionary, one needed by serious intermediate and advanced students of Irish. It is available in both a paperback and hardback version. I believe the paperback version, around 1300 pages in length, can be purchased for around $40.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
The Pimsleur Irish Approach
Here's an idea for getting started learning irish--the Pimsleur Irish Language tapes or CDs. They can be purchased for as little as $10 (up to about $35) and they will get you speaking and understanding some basic Irish in hours. To find these resources, either google "Pimsleur Irish" or go to Amazon.com and search for "Pimsleur Irish." There are a few different versions of the Pimsleur program, but they will all get you started. The advantages are that you will speak and understand basic Irish quickly; the disadvantage is that you will be learning the Munster dialect of Irish, which is a bit different than the Connacht and Ulster dialects. That's not a huge problem and you will hear other dialects as you progress through other Irish materials. Another problem is that the Pimsleur materials work without transcripts, without pencil or paper. You are learning aurally, as a child would. If this drives you nuts, you can locate a transcript of the Pimsleur materials online (http://www.gaeilge.org/pimsleurtranscript.html). When you examine the transcripts, you will discover how unusual the Irish spelling system is--how different it is from what you may have expected.
I recommend the Pimsleur approach as a first step. It cannot be the last step, and you won't be too deep into the language when you are finished. But you will be able to understand and speak some basic Irish (with a Dingle accent, no less!).
Here's a link to the Pimsleur-Irish site: http://www.pimsleurirish.com/.
I recommend the Pimsleur approach as a first step. It cannot be the last step, and you won't be too deep into the language when you are finished. But you will be able to understand and speak some basic Irish (with a Dingle accent, no less!).
Here's a link to the Pimsleur-Irish site: http://www.pimsleurirish.com/.
Irish-Gaelic--What a Language!
In my other blog (at http://www.northcoastview.blogspot.com/), on September 20, 2008, I posted the following entry on the Irish language. I thought it worth repeating here:
Irish-Gaelic--What a Language!
So you have a drop of Irish blood in your veins and you are thinking about learning Gaelic, the language of your ancestors. Think again . . . then go ahead and dive into the deep end!
What's the Name of This Language?
Everything about Gaelic is complicated . . . and fun. Grist for lots of humor and conversation over a couple/few Guinness. Even the name of the language is tricky. When speaking English, the Irish don't normally call their language "Gaelic" --they sometimes save that term for the language of the Highland Scots. They call their language "Irish." When they are speaking in their Celtic tongue (and only about 1/4 of the Irish can do this (some estimates range up to 42%)), they call their language "Gaeilge"--unless they come from parts of Munster, southwest Ireland, where the language is called "Gaelinn." In a few isolated places, there are even other names for this language. This issue of the name of the language has political ramifications to it--don't get me started on that! Here is what Wikipedia says about the name of the language: "Other forms of the name found in the various modern Irish dialects, in addition to south Connacht Gaeilge mentioned above, include Gaedhilic/Gaeilic/Gaeilig or Gaedhlag in Ulster Irish and northern Connacht Irish and Gaedhealaing/Gaoluinn/Gaelainn Munster Irish." Anyway, it's hard as hell to figure out what this language is even called!
At the Edge of Annihilation.
Irish came this close to extermination. The forces of annihilation included the power of British government and law, forces that greatly feared and disdained Gaelic Ireland; the devastation of the Great Famine of the mid 1800's; and the imperial power of English and American popular culture. In the 1800's the language began retreating underground and became mostly the oral language of the poor, those without land, money, or means (our ancestors!). This despite an almost 2000 year written history and a rich literature. When the famine, An Gorta Mor, hit in the mid 1840's, a huge number of the poor Irish-speaking population died or emigrated to save their lives (about 1/4 of the population died or left). Astonishingly, we find large Irish-speaking emigres in the most unlikely places--for example, in the mining communities around Butte, Montana, and in the Gold Rush communities in the Yukon and Alaska.
A. Astonishing, Byzantine Grammar.
My teachers, Warren Clay and Paul Curran, and sometimes Ellen Holland Keller, often begin an Irish grammar lesson by saying something like, "You can't make this stuff up!" That is how astonishing and byzantine the grammar of Irish is. The truth of the complexity is beyond any fiction you could invent. What many people don't realize is that their own native language is filled with hundreds of rules, exceptions to rules, and options as strange as those in Irish. I know that entire books have been written about the use of articles (a, an, and the) in English. What seems second nature to a native speaker is like Chinese torture to those learning English (or Irish, or whatever) as a second language. I won't go into the details of Irish grammar here, but let's just say that almost every element of the language, from vocabulary to syntax to pronunciation, is different and at times feels much more foreign than, say, German or French.
B. Difficulty in Using a Dictionary.
Irish isn't the hardest language for using a dictionary. Can you imagine trying to figure out how to use a Chinese or Japanese dictionary? But it is tricky because Irish words and their spellings transmute in various situations. One reason they change is because of tense, when verbs are involved, and in grammatical case, when nouns come into play. Noun plurals change much as in Latin, but without Latin's regularity (as far as I know). So the noun cara (friend) is cairde in the plural (friends). but in so many real contexts, these words appear as chara and chairde, and those spellings won't be found in Irish dictionaries. This is because of a process called lenition, in which the initial consonant of Irish words is "softened," changed--sometimes rather dramatically! There are rules for this process, so it's not a big problem after about five years of studying the language! But at first it seems like an insane problem.Verbs can also present a big problem because many common verbs have wildly irregular forms, and because verbs change endings under many circumstances. This same thing is true for most Indo-European languages, and probably many other language families.
C. How Do You Pronounce This?
The first time you try to read a passage written in Irish-Gaelic is an eye-opener. The letters look like the familiar Roman alphabet (unless you are reading an older Irish font--that presents some modest problems at first). But you won't be able to come very close to actual Irish pronunciation. Before I get into some actual details of Irish pronunciation, let me try to describe what the language sounds like. My first impression was that the language sounds like the wisperings of the wind, with lots of soft, breathy sounds. And there is some truth in that--some passages, some poems and songs, sound like the West Wind blowing in from the North Atlantic. Other times, the language sounds oddly like German or even like Hebrew. You hear/ch/ sounds as in words like loch (lake) or oiche (night)--sounds which don't exist in many dialects of English. The sentence rhythms seems very unlike English too. Sometimes the rhythms of Irish remind me of Scandanavian rhythms. Also, you can begin to notice the heavy accenting of initial syllables, the presence of strong /r/ sounds (and a few odd /r/ sounds similar to the "hairy r" in Czech words and names like Dvorak). All in all, the lanuage as spoken by a native sounds very very foreign, quite different from English (except Hiberno-English, the Irish twist on English, which picks up many feaures from the Irish-Gaelic). My teacher Paul Curran always reminds us that "Irish is pronounced exactly the way it's spelled." That is a bit of a joke, because it takes a couple years to figure out the letter-sound correspondences of Irish. But for the most part, the language is consistent, unlike English. In that regard, Irish is more like Italian or Spanish--or a better analogy might be French, which is mostly consistent but strange indeed!
D. Strange Words Where None Exist in English.
It is never possible to translate word-for-word from one language to another. Those little computers they sell as translators make me laugh--they can do some things well, but they can't make perfectly accurate translations!A fun part of studying a foreign language is discovering words that don't have a simple corresponding word in your native language. A couple of examples from German are the words Gemuetlichkeit and Fingerspitzengefuehl. You can explain these words with an English phrase or sentence, but usually not with a single word. Fingerspitzengefuehl is a nice German word that literally means the "feeling-you-have-at-the-tips-of-your-fingers." We might say that it means "intuition," but that's not exactly right or accurate--it's more than that.
Here are some fun Irish words and their definitions:
Baclainn, "crooked arm," the way your arm is when you bend your elbow (to carry a baby, for example). Bhi an leanbh ina baclainn aici, "She was carrying the child in the crook of her arm."
Ioscaid, the hollow space behind your knee.
Ladhar, the space between your fingers and your toes.
Masach, having big buttocks.
There are many more and I will add to this list as I run across interesting new words.
E. Lack of Words for Certain Things.
There is no simple way in Irish to say the following things: yes, no, to have, to want. You can say “yes” in Irish by saying a version of “it is” (and "no" by saying “it isn’t” in some contexts). Other times you need to repeat the verb. So if you are asked something like “Do you drive a car?” you could answer “I drive.” In some ways this is like Latin (which from ninth grade Latin I remember this rule: “To say ‘yes’ you can say sic, vero, itaque, certe, or repeat the verb”). Saying “no” also involves a negative particle plus a verb or a repetition of the sentence with a negator. Maybe this is why the Irish are so garrulous!To indicate possession (we do it in English with the verb "have"), Irish speakers say something like: “The book is at me,” Tá an leabhar agam, word-for-word, “is the book at-me.” The Irish also distinguish between having a book temporarily and owning the book (they make this distinction by using different verbs and different syntax). All in all, there are many idiomatic ways to express things in Irish that strike an English speaker as odd.
F. English Words Borrowed from Irish Gaelic.
A sampling.
Words:
banshee (bean sí, literally, woman of the fairies)
bard
blarney (name of a town and castle near Cork, Ireland)
bog (bog, soft)
boreen (botharín, little road)
brogue (bróg, shoe)
cairn (carn, pile of stones, often a prehistoric archeological site)
clan (clann, children)
colleen (cailín, girl)
galore (go leor, much, many)
glen (gleann)
gob (and gob-smacked)
keen (caoinadh, crying, wailing)
kibosh (from the Online Etymological Dictionary: "One candidate is Ir. caip bháis, caipín báis "cap of death," sometimes said to be the black cap a judge would don when pronouncing a death sentence, but in other sources identified as a gruesome method of execution 'employed by Brit. forces against 1798 insurgents' [Bernard Share, 'Slanguage, A Dictionary of Irish Slang']. ")
leprechaun
loch (lake)
poteen (poitín, homemade whiskey)
shamrock (seamróg)
shanty (sean tí, old house)
shillelagh
slew
slogan
smithereens (smideríní, little pieces)
tory
whiskey (uisce beatha, water of life)
Other possibilities: lynch, hooligan, shenanigans . . .
Phrases:
Erin go bragh, from Irish Éire go brách, or Éireann go Brách, (Ireland forever); dún do bhéal (shut your mouth); póg mo thóin (kiss my behind); céad míle fáilte (a hundred thousand welcomes); sláinte (health; toast).
Personal Names: ( a small sampling, using mostly Anglicized spellings)
Brigid, Brian, Cieran, Colleen, Conal, Cormac, Deirdre, Dermot, Donal, Eamon, Ellen, Enya, Erin, Fergus, Finbar, Kathleen, Kenneth, Kevin, Malachy, Molly, Murray, Maeve, Maura, Maureen, Maurice, Murphy, Neil, Niav (Neeve), Nuala, Owen, Patrick (a name adopted by the Irish--their language originally did not have the letter "p"), Rosheen, Rory, Ryan, Sean, Shiela, Tadg (or Ty), Una (or Oona), and so on!
Place Names:
So many place names are borrowed from Irish! A surprising one is Baltimore, a town in county Cork and a city in Maryland. Here in Ohio we have our own Dublin, which means "black pool." Derry, Vermont has its namesake in Ulster. The name means something like"oak grove." Coleraine is a township in southwest Ohio and a town in the north of Ireland. So many towns, subdivisions, and roads are named after Irish cities and villages that it would be impossible to list them! My great-great grandparents, Daniel and Mary Crowley Coughlin, lived with their children, including my great grandfather Cornelius Coughlin, on Cork Road, in the Town of Scipio, Cayuga County, New York. These immigrants brought parts of Ireland with them and gave these names to their new homes.
Irish-Gaelic--What a Language!
So you have a drop of Irish blood in your veins and you are thinking about learning Gaelic, the language of your ancestors. Think again . . . then go ahead and dive into the deep end!
What's the Name of This Language?
Everything about Gaelic is complicated . . . and fun. Grist for lots of humor and conversation over a couple/few Guinness. Even the name of the language is tricky. When speaking English, the Irish don't normally call their language "Gaelic" --they sometimes save that term for the language of the Highland Scots. They call their language "Irish." When they are speaking in their Celtic tongue (and only about 1/4 of the Irish can do this (some estimates range up to 42%)), they call their language "Gaeilge"--unless they come from parts of Munster, southwest Ireland, where the language is called "Gaelinn." In a few isolated places, there are even other names for this language. This issue of the name of the language has political ramifications to it--don't get me started on that! Here is what Wikipedia says about the name of the language: "Other forms of the name found in the various modern Irish dialects, in addition to south Connacht Gaeilge mentioned above, include Gaedhilic/Gaeilic/Gaeilig or Gaedhlag in Ulster Irish and northern Connacht Irish and Gaedhealaing/Gaoluinn/Gaelainn Munster Irish." Anyway, it's hard as hell to figure out what this language is even called!
At the Edge of Annihilation.
Irish came this close to extermination. The forces of annihilation included the power of British government and law, forces that greatly feared and disdained Gaelic Ireland; the devastation of the Great Famine of the mid 1800's; and the imperial power of English and American popular culture. In the 1800's the language began retreating underground and became mostly the oral language of the poor, those without land, money, or means (our ancestors!). This despite an almost 2000 year written history and a rich literature. When the famine, An Gorta Mor, hit in the mid 1840's, a huge number of the poor Irish-speaking population died or emigrated to save their lives (about 1/4 of the population died or left). Astonishingly, we find large Irish-speaking emigres in the most unlikely places--for example, in the mining communities around Butte, Montana, and in the Gold Rush communities in the Yukon and Alaska.
A. Astonishing, Byzantine Grammar.
My teachers, Warren Clay and Paul Curran, and sometimes Ellen Holland Keller, often begin an Irish grammar lesson by saying something like, "You can't make this stuff up!" That is how astonishing and byzantine the grammar of Irish is. The truth of the complexity is beyond any fiction you could invent. What many people don't realize is that their own native language is filled with hundreds of rules, exceptions to rules, and options as strange as those in Irish. I know that entire books have been written about the use of articles (a, an, and the) in English. What seems second nature to a native speaker is like Chinese torture to those learning English (or Irish, or whatever) as a second language. I won't go into the details of Irish grammar here, but let's just say that almost every element of the language, from vocabulary to syntax to pronunciation, is different and at times feels much more foreign than, say, German or French.
B. Difficulty in Using a Dictionary.
Irish isn't the hardest language for using a dictionary. Can you imagine trying to figure out how to use a Chinese or Japanese dictionary? But it is tricky because Irish words and their spellings transmute in various situations. One reason they change is because of tense, when verbs are involved, and in grammatical case, when nouns come into play. Noun plurals change much as in Latin, but without Latin's regularity (as far as I know). So the noun cara (friend) is cairde in the plural (friends). but in so many real contexts, these words appear as chara and chairde, and those spellings won't be found in Irish dictionaries. This is because of a process called lenition, in which the initial consonant of Irish words is "softened," changed--sometimes rather dramatically! There are rules for this process, so it's not a big problem after about five years of studying the language! But at first it seems like an insane problem.Verbs can also present a big problem because many common verbs have wildly irregular forms, and because verbs change endings under many circumstances. This same thing is true for most Indo-European languages, and probably many other language families.
C. How Do You Pronounce This?
The first time you try to read a passage written in Irish-Gaelic is an eye-opener. The letters look like the familiar Roman alphabet (unless you are reading an older Irish font--that presents some modest problems at first). But you won't be able to come very close to actual Irish pronunciation. Before I get into some actual details of Irish pronunciation, let me try to describe what the language sounds like. My first impression was that the language sounds like the wisperings of the wind, with lots of soft, breathy sounds. And there is some truth in that--some passages, some poems and songs, sound like the West Wind blowing in from the North Atlantic. Other times, the language sounds oddly like German or even like Hebrew. You hear/ch/ sounds as in words like loch (lake) or oiche (night)--sounds which don't exist in many dialects of English. The sentence rhythms seems very unlike English too. Sometimes the rhythms of Irish remind me of Scandanavian rhythms. Also, you can begin to notice the heavy accenting of initial syllables, the presence of strong /r/ sounds (and a few odd /r/ sounds similar to the "hairy r" in Czech words and names like Dvorak). All in all, the lanuage as spoken by a native sounds very very foreign, quite different from English (except Hiberno-English, the Irish twist on English, which picks up many feaures from the Irish-Gaelic). My teacher Paul Curran always reminds us that "Irish is pronounced exactly the way it's spelled." That is a bit of a joke, because it takes a couple years to figure out the letter-sound correspondences of Irish. But for the most part, the language is consistent, unlike English. In that regard, Irish is more like Italian or Spanish--or a better analogy might be French, which is mostly consistent but strange indeed!
D. Strange Words Where None Exist in English.
It is never possible to translate word-for-word from one language to another. Those little computers they sell as translators make me laugh--they can do some things well, but they can't make perfectly accurate translations!A fun part of studying a foreign language is discovering words that don't have a simple corresponding word in your native language. A couple of examples from German are the words Gemuetlichkeit and Fingerspitzengefuehl. You can explain these words with an English phrase or sentence, but usually not with a single word. Fingerspitzengefuehl is a nice German word that literally means the "feeling-you-have-at-the-tips-of-your-fingers." We might say that it means "intuition," but that's not exactly right or accurate--it's more than that.
Here are some fun Irish words and their definitions:
Baclainn, "crooked arm," the way your arm is when you bend your elbow (to carry a baby, for example). Bhi an leanbh ina baclainn aici, "She was carrying the child in the crook of her arm."
Ioscaid, the hollow space behind your knee.
Ladhar, the space between your fingers and your toes.
Masach, having big buttocks.
There are many more and I will add to this list as I run across interesting new words.
E. Lack of Words for Certain Things.
There is no simple way in Irish to say the following things: yes, no, to have, to want. You can say “yes” in Irish by saying a version of “it is” (and "no" by saying “it isn’t” in some contexts). Other times you need to repeat the verb. So if you are asked something like “Do you drive a car?” you could answer “I drive.” In some ways this is like Latin (which from ninth grade Latin I remember this rule: “To say ‘yes’ you can say sic, vero, itaque, certe, or repeat the verb”). Saying “no” also involves a negative particle plus a verb or a repetition of the sentence with a negator. Maybe this is why the Irish are so garrulous!To indicate possession (we do it in English with the verb "have"), Irish speakers say something like: “The book is at me,” Tá an leabhar agam, word-for-word, “is the book at-me.” The Irish also distinguish between having a book temporarily and owning the book (they make this distinction by using different verbs and different syntax). All in all, there are many idiomatic ways to express things in Irish that strike an English speaker as odd.
F. English Words Borrowed from Irish Gaelic.
A sampling.
Words:
banshee (bean sí, literally, woman of the fairies)
bard
blarney (name of a town and castle near Cork, Ireland)
bog (bog, soft)
boreen (botharín, little road)
brogue (bróg, shoe)
cairn (carn, pile of stones, often a prehistoric archeological site)
clan (clann, children)
colleen (cailín, girl)
galore (go leor, much, many)
glen (gleann)
gob (and gob-smacked)
keen (caoinadh, crying, wailing)
kibosh (from the Online Etymological Dictionary: "One candidate is Ir. caip bháis, caipín báis "cap of death," sometimes said to be the black cap a judge would don when pronouncing a death sentence, but in other sources identified as a gruesome method of execution 'employed by Brit. forces against 1798 insurgents' [Bernard Share, 'Slanguage, A Dictionary of Irish Slang']. ")
leprechaun
loch (lake)
poteen (poitín, homemade whiskey)
shamrock (seamróg)
shanty (sean tí, old house)
shillelagh
slew
slogan
smithereens (smideríní, little pieces)
tory
whiskey (uisce beatha, water of life)
Other possibilities: lynch, hooligan, shenanigans . . .
Phrases:
Erin go bragh, from Irish Éire go brách, or Éireann go Brách, (Ireland forever); dún do bhéal (shut your mouth); póg mo thóin (kiss my behind); céad míle fáilte (a hundred thousand welcomes); sláinte (health; toast).
Personal Names: ( a small sampling, using mostly Anglicized spellings)
Brigid, Brian, Cieran, Colleen, Conal, Cormac, Deirdre, Dermot, Donal, Eamon, Ellen, Enya, Erin, Fergus, Finbar, Kathleen, Kenneth, Kevin, Malachy, Molly, Murray, Maeve, Maura, Maureen, Maurice, Murphy, Neil, Niav (Neeve), Nuala, Owen, Patrick (a name adopted by the Irish--their language originally did not have the letter "p"), Rosheen, Rory, Ryan, Sean, Shiela, Tadg (or Ty), Una (or Oona), and so on!
Place Names:
So many place names are borrowed from Irish! A surprising one is Baltimore, a town in county Cork and a city in Maryland. Here in Ohio we have our own Dublin, which means "black pool." Derry, Vermont has its namesake in Ulster. The name means something like"oak grove." Coleraine is a township in southwest Ohio and a town in the north of Ireland. So many towns, subdivisions, and roads are named after Irish cities and villages that it would be impossible to list them! My great-great grandparents, Daniel and Mary Crowley Coughlin, lived with their children, including my great grandfather Cornelius Coughlin, on Cork Road, in the Town of Scipio, Cayuga County, New York. These immigrants brought parts of Ireland with them and gave these names to their new homes.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
What Does Irish Look Like? Sound Like?
Here is the Lord's Prayer, the Our Father, in Irish:
Ár n-athair, atá ar neamh: go naofar d'ainm. Go dtaga do riocht. Go ndéantar do thoil ar an talamh, mar dhéantar ar neamh. Ár n-arán laethiúl tabhair dúinn inniu, agus maith dúinn ár bhfiacha, mar mhaithimid dár bhféichiúnaithe féin. Agus ná lig sinn i gcathú, ach saor sinn ó olc. Óir is leatsa an Ríocht agus an Chumhacht agus an Ghloir, tré shaol na saol. Amen.
Here is an attempt to show the pronunciation (but, alas, without the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, the only way to give a halfway accurate account of the sound of speech). I'll use typical American English sounds and spellings in the following attempt.
Aur NAH-hir, ah-tah ar nahv, guh NEE-fur DAHN-um. Guh DAHG-uh duh REE-ucht. Guh NANE-tur duh hull er un TAHL-uv, mar YANE-tur ar nahv. Aur nuh-RAHN lay-hool tor DOO-in INN-yoo, AH-gus mah DOO-in aur VEE-uch-uh, mar WAH-huh-midge daur VAYCH-oon-uh-huh fane. AH-gus nau lig shinn ih GAH-hoo, ach seer shin oh ULL-uck. Oar iss LAHT-suh un REE-ucht AH-gus un KUH-wacht AH-gus un Glore, tray heel nah seal.
The "ch" digraph above (as in REE-ucht) is used to represent the ch sound we hear in the word Loch or the German word Nacht; I capitalize stressed syllables in multi-syllabic words (if I don't capitalize a syllable, the stress is rather even).
What might strike you as astonishing is my claim that Irish is quite phonetic, far more regular and predictable than English pronunciation and spelling. But there are things you must learn to unlock the system of Irish sound-letter correspondence. More on that at some other time.
There are some Irish-Gaelic songs posted on the website "youtube." Here's a link to an Irish song from the Donegal Irish-speaking region (Gaeltacht): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcxNfm-siL0 The song is called "Sláinte na nÉanach (Cór Thaobh a' Leithid)" and you can follow the text as you hear the song. There are many other Irish songs on Youtube. Try to find "Oro, Se Do Bheatha 'Bhaile" by Sinead O'Connor. This link might work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JmUYF7kHro Unfortunately, these performances are sometimes deleted from the Youtube site (copyright issues?).
Ár n-athair, atá ar neamh: go naofar d'ainm. Go dtaga do riocht. Go ndéantar do thoil ar an talamh, mar dhéantar ar neamh. Ár n-arán laethiúl tabhair dúinn inniu, agus maith dúinn ár bhfiacha, mar mhaithimid dár bhféichiúnaithe féin. Agus ná lig sinn i gcathú, ach saor sinn ó olc. Óir is leatsa an Ríocht agus an Chumhacht agus an Ghloir, tré shaol na saol. Amen.
Here is an attempt to show the pronunciation (but, alas, without the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, the only way to give a halfway accurate account of the sound of speech). I'll use typical American English sounds and spellings in the following attempt.
Aur NAH-hir, ah-tah ar nahv, guh NEE-fur DAHN-um. Guh DAHG-uh duh REE-ucht. Guh NANE-tur duh hull er un TAHL-uv, mar YANE-tur ar nahv. Aur nuh-RAHN lay-hool tor DOO-in INN-yoo, AH-gus mah DOO-in aur VEE-uch-uh, mar WAH-huh-midge daur VAYCH-oon-uh-huh fane. AH-gus nau lig shinn ih GAH-hoo, ach seer shin oh ULL-uck. Oar iss LAHT-suh un REE-ucht AH-gus un KUH-wacht AH-gus un Glore, tray heel nah seal.
The "ch" digraph above (as in REE-ucht) is used to represent the ch sound we hear in the word Loch or the German word Nacht; I capitalize stressed syllables in multi-syllabic words (if I don't capitalize a syllable, the stress is rather even).
What might strike you as astonishing is my claim that Irish is quite phonetic, far more regular and predictable than English pronunciation and spelling. But there are things you must learn to unlock the system of Irish sound-letter correspondence. More on that at some other time.
There are some Irish-Gaelic songs posted on the website "youtube." Here's a link to an Irish song from the Donegal Irish-speaking region (Gaeltacht): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcxNfm-siL0 The song is called "Sláinte na nÉanach (Cór Thaobh a' Leithid)" and you can follow the text as you hear the song. There are many other Irish songs on Youtube. Try to find "Oro, Se Do Bheatha 'Bhaile" by Sinead O'Connor. This link might work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JmUYF7kHro Unfortunately, these performances are sometimes deleted from the Youtube site (copyright issues?).
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
What Does the Irish Alphabet Look Like Like?
Irish (or Irish-Gaelic) is written with the Roman alphabet, the same alphabet we use in English. Oddly, it manages with just 18 letters (plus eight more for unusual or foreign words). These letters are: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U. Irish also uses one important diacritical mark, called the fada (more technically, the síneadh fada). The fada looks like the French "accent aigu," and makes a vowel long (the word fada means "long"). Short vowels and long vowels in Irish sound different and make a difference in meaning.
Here are the vowels with fada marks over them: á, é, í, ó, ú. I have trouble typing these directly into my blog and find that I have to type them into a MS Word file and then cut and paste them into my blog. The procedure I use in MS Word is that I hold down the Ctrl key while typing the apostrophe, then I type the vowel, and voila, the vowel appears with the fada over it. I don't know if all word processors work this way (probably not). If I find another or more efficient way of doing this, I will post it in this blog.
Irish used to have one other diacritic, a dot put over certain letters (principally consonants) in certain circumstances (you will pull your hair out, if you have any, when I explain this to you at some later time). In recent decades this point or dot has been replaced by the letter "h" after the consonant. This process "lenites" or mutates the sound of that consonant. Much more on that later.
Check out this Wikipedia entry for more on Irish spelling and writing, including examples of the older Gaelic fonts (still seen from time to time): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography
Here are the vowels with fada marks over them: á, é, í, ó, ú. I have trouble typing these directly into my blog and find that I have to type them into a MS Word file and then cut and paste them into my blog. The procedure I use in MS Word is that I hold down the Ctrl key while typing the apostrophe, then I type the vowel, and voila, the vowel appears with the fada over it. I don't know if all word processors work this way (probably not). If I find another or more efficient way of doing this, I will post it in this blog.
Irish used to have one other diacritic, a dot put over certain letters (principally consonants) in certain circumstances (you will pull your hair out, if you have any, when I explain this to you at some later time). In recent decades this point or dot has been replaced by the letter "h" after the consonant. This process "lenites" or mutates the sound of that consonant. Much more on that later.
Check out this Wikipedia entry for more on Irish spelling and writing, including examples of the older Gaelic fonts (still seen from time to time): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_orthography
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The First Baby Steps
If you are thinking about learning to speak and read Irish-Gaelic (what we prefer to call "Irish"), you need to do some general reading and thinking about this language, and language learning in general, before diving in. Secondly, I want you to know that I think you are flat-out crazy if you want to learn this language; you probably should get your head examined. You are crazy--and I love you!
Irish is a difficult language, but it's not impossible. It's not Chinese, Japanese, or English, for God's sake! Three-year-old children growing up in a Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) region in Ireland can speak this language! And you can slowly and surely make progress in learning this tongue--which may be, by the way, the language of your ancestors. It was indeed the language spoken by my great great grandparents, Daniel Coghlin and Mary Crowley, and their four children when they left West County Cork in 1857 and landed on American soil. That's part of my motivation, and perhaps part of your own.
As a first step, I think you should google "Irish-Gaelic" or "Irish language" and see what's out there. Read a Wikipedia article on the language (but don't trust Wikipedia as God's truth!) or get hold of a print article from a good bound encyclopedia. Here's a link to the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language. Don't get overwhelmed by the detail, but try to pick up some general knowledge about Irish. That would be a good start.
Irish is a difficult language, but it's not impossible. It's not Chinese, Japanese, or English, for God's sake! Three-year-old children growing up in a Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) region in Ireland can speak this language! And you can slowly and surely make progress in learning this tongue--which may be, by the way, the language of your ancestors. It was indeed the language spoken by my great great grandparents, Daniel Coghlin and Mary Crowley, and their four children when they left West County Cork in 1857 and landed on American soil. That's part of my motivation, and perhaps part of your own.
As a first step, I think you should google "Irish-Gaelic" or "Irish language" and see what's out there. Read a Wikipedia article on the language (but don't trust Wikipedia as God's truth!) or get hold of a print article from a good bound encyclopedia. Here's a link to the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language. Don't get overwhelmed by the detail, but try to pick up some general knowledge about Irish. That would be a good start.
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