Learning Irish
Today I received a parcel from Amazon I'd ordered last week on something of a whim. They included this novel and two Teach Yourself book+CD language kits: Irish and Spanish. I want to learn Spanish because I'm travelling in a Spanish-speaking country later this year and need to be able to buy beer/chat up senoritas/fend off hyenas. I want to learn Irish because I've actually recently fostered the opinion that it's quite a pretty language. And also, I suppose, because I feel some bizarre sense of guilt that I should know it, at least slightly, because I'm Welsh and in some way a Celtic linguist and, therefore, should know something about my own language's sister languages.
Anyhoo. What has put me off Irish for years is what I suspect has also put anyone else off, namely the spelling system. To the casual observer, Irish orthography is so off-the-wall that you as well just use hieroglyphs. To the trained linguist, it's still fuck-off daunting. (It's like a trained crocodile hunter dangling his man-jewels in a crocodile's open maw: even though he knows everything there is to know about the nature and behaviour of the scaly beast currently encircling his nadgers, he's still going to cack himself.)
So, you would imagine, any Irish teacher who wants to persuade others to learn their language would in some try and diminish the scariness of Irish spelling by, say, introducing it bit by bit or beginning with the most usual forms and then introducing exceptions to the rule later.
Try telling the Teach Yourself Irish book that.
What they provide, brilliantly, before you even get told how to introduce yourself, is nine pages of dense pronunciation guidelines. NINE FECKING PAGES. And laid out in such a horrifically un-user-friendly fashion that the authors might as well have not used the spacebar -- ever -- and just written something like:
Notethatlonlunchandleonlionaredistinguishedinsoundonlybythekindofltheyeachbeginwith Youcannowseethesignificanceofsuchvowelcombinationsasaioieiouandiu.
To be honest, that would have been easier to pick up.
The sad thing is that, I think, the basics of reading Irish and making it sound roughly right is fairly easy to pick up, certainly with the vowel clusters that have long vowels in them.
Anyway. I'm going to take it on trust that they mean well, and that they intend you to use that bit as a reference guide for later rather than memorising it all here. I expected to go a bit pale when reading the section on orthography, but I suppose I'll pick it up bit by bit.
Anyhoo. What has put me off Irish for years is what I suspect has also put anyone else off, namely the spelling system. To the casual observer, Irish orthography is so off-the-wall that you as well just use hieroglyphs. To the trained linguist, it's still fuck-off daunting. (It's like a trained crocodile hunter dangling his man-jewels in a crocodile's open maw: even though he knows everything there is to know about the nature and behaviour of the scaly beast currently encircling his nadgers, he's still going to cack himself.)
So, you would imagine, any Irish teacher who wants to persuade others to learn their language would in some try and diminish the scariness of Irish spelling by, say, introducing it bit by bit or beginning with the most usual forms and then introducing exceptions to the rule later.
Try telling the Teach Yourself Irish book that.
What they provide, brilliantly, before you even get told how to introduce yourself, is nine pages of dense pronunciation guidelines. NINE FECKING PAGES. And laid out in such a horrifically un-user-friendly fashion that the authors might as well have not used the spacebar -- ever -- and just written something like:
Notethatlonlunchandleonlionaredistinguishedinsoundonlybythekindofltheyeachbeginwith Youcannowseethesignificanceofsuchvowelcombinationsasaioieiouandiu.
To be honest, that would have been easier to pick up.
The sad thing is that, I think, the basics of reading Irish and making it sound roughly right is fairly easy to pick up, certainly with the vowel clusters that have long vowels in them.
Anyway. I'm going to take it on trust that they mean well, and that they intend you to use that bit as a reference guide for later rather than memorising it all here. I expected to go a bit pale when reading the section on orthography, but I suppose I'll pick it up bit by bit.