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icepixieBah. Netflix is taking forever these days. I'm on the one-at-a-time plan, and I sent back my last DVD on Tuesday. They're just now shipping out the next one, for arrival on...Tuesday. More than a week after the last one. Pah. (I guess, technically, this is actually the USPS's fault. The last time I had Netflix, they would've had the next disc to me by Saturday. Perhaps the volume has gone up faster than can be handled.)
But anyway, more Ballykissangel tomorrow! To celebrate, I'm using one of my two new Assumpta icons. Isn't she purty?
I did manage to get the "Ballykissdibley" Comic Relief special from my library yesterday. Heh. I'd never seen Vicar of Dibley before, but I'd heard of it. I watched some of the actual episodes on the DVD as well; it's definitely amusing, but unfortunately I can also predict the next joke about fifty percent of the time, so I don't think I'll watch any more. But I would like to see some of the French & Saunders sketch show, 'cause Dawn French is hilarious.
As well as getting that DVD, I wandered into the poetry and the Irish history sections. Yeah. As usual. The Nashville Public Library apparently has greatly increased its stock of LitCrit volumes since I was last there, not to mention of modern poets. I got a bunch of Seamus Heaney1, and a couple travel essay collections or memoirs, and a book on the Troubles in Belfast from the seventies to the nineties, because I still don't know as much as I ought about that place and time period. I usually stuck to the Celtic Twilight and the Easter Rising when researching and writing about Irish independence movements.
Have also been reading, er, Ballyk fanfic, very little of which is any good. But they've got the names of the characters spelled out, which is interesting. I will never understand how one can get something like "Porrig" out of "Padraig." Where does the "d" go? And let's not even go into "Shivan" from "Siobhan," although at least I knew that one already. Irish spelling is on crack. Or "craic," as they'd spell it. *facepalm*
I keep thinking, "Hey, it would be neat to learn Irish!" And then I look at the orthography and run screaming. Even if that weren't a problem, I could never learn this language because I will never in a million years be able to wrap my brain around cases. A semester of Old English taught me that much. Any number of irregular verbs in Spanish didn't phase me in high school, and gendered nouns were even okay, although I didn't ever really get why they were gendered, but the idea of declined nouns just makes my head spin.
Speaking of reading and writing, does anyone else find that letting an LJ entry sit for a while just takes away any desire to finish it and post it? I have a half-finished entry on rereading Tam Lin (which segues into rereading Alma Mater and to W.B. Yeats and then on to some stuff about being an English major...yeah, it's rambly), but it seems that if I don't write an entry and post it in one sitting, I can't bring myself to bother finishing the thing. Hmmm. And I still haven't done the plot vs. language poll I meant to do last week. Oof, I'm lazy.
1 I think after a year in the UK and a trip to Ireland, I can actually appreciate him and his fixation with land much more than when we read him in Irish Lit. Interestingly, the exact opposite has happened with Yeats; not that I appreciate him any less (check out the 4,000-word paper I did on him and William Morris that year, for one), but I've moved on from his early fairies-and-landscape-related stuff and am now more interested in his later works, which don't have much to do with land. Anyway, his poetry that does deal with the landscape of Ireland isn't as...hmmm...true? evocative? as Heaney's is. Of course, the seventy-odd years separating them doesn't help much. Not to mention the fact that Yeats' poetry is generally considered to have gotten steadily better throughout his lifetime. ...I'm destroying my argument here, so I'm going to stop.
But anyway, more Ballykissangel tomorrow! To celebrate, I'm using one of my two new Assumpta icons. Isn't she purty?
I did manage to get the "Ballykissdibley" Comic Relief special from my library yesterday. Heh. I'd never seen Vicar of Dibley before, but I'd heard of it. I watched some of the actual episodes on the DVD as well; it's definitely amusing, but unfortunately I can also predict the next joke about fifty percent of the time, so I don't think I'll watch any more. But I would like to see some of the French & Saunders sketch show, 'cause Dawn French is hilarious.
As well as getting that DVD, I wandered into the poetry and the Irish history sections. Yeah. As usual. The Nashville Public Library apparently has greatly increased its stock of LitCrit volumes since I was last there, not to mention of modern poets. I got a bunch of Seamus Heaney1, and a couple travel essay collections or memoirs, and a book on the Troubles in Belfast from the seventies to the nineties, because I still don't know as much as I ought about that place and time period. I usually stuck to the Celtic Twilight and the Easter Rising when researching and writing about Irish independence movements.
Have also been reading, er, Ballyk fanfic, very little of which is any good. But they've got the names of the characters spelled out, which is interesting. I will never understand how one can get something like "Porrig" out of "Padraig." Where does the "d" go? And let's not even go into "Shivan" from "Siobhan," although at least I knew that one already. Irish spelling is on crack. Or "craic," as they'd spell it. *facepalm*
I keep thinking, "Hey, it would be neat to learn Irish!" And then I look at the orthography and run screaming. Even if that weren't a problem, I could never learn this language because I will never in a million years be able to wrap my brain around cases. A semester of Old English taught me that much. Any number of irregular verbs in Spanish didn't phase me in high school, and gendered nouns were even okay, although I didn't ever really get why they were gendered, but the idea of declined nouns just makes my head spin.
Speaking of reading and writing, does anyone else find that letting an LJ entry sit for a while just takes away any desire to finish it and post it? I have a half-finished entry on rereading Tam Lin (which segues into rereading Alma Mater and to W.B. Yeats and then on to some stuff about being an English major...yeah, it's rambly), but it seems that if I don't write an entry and post it in one sitting, I can't bring myself to bother finishing the thing. Hmmm. And I still haven't done the plot vs. language poll I meant to do last week. Oof, I'm lazy.
1 I think after a year in the UK and a trip to Ireland, I can actually appreciate him and his fixation with land much more than when we read him in Irish Lit. Interestingly, the exact opposite has happened with Yeats; not that I appreciate him any less (check out the 4,000-word paper I did on him and William Morris that year, for one), but I've moved on from his early fairies-and-landscape-related stuff and am now more interested in his later works, which don't have much to do with land. Anyway, his poetry that does deal with the landscape of Ireland isn't as...hmmm...true? evocative? as Heaney's is. Of course, the seventy-odd years separating them doesn't help much. Not to mention the fact that Yeats' poetry is generally considered to have gotten steadily better throughout his lifetime. ...I'm destroying my argument here, so I'm going to stop.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 11:54 pm (UTC)Bwahahaha!! I took an Irish course a few years ago, having bought Mícheál Ó Siadhail's Learning Irish book/tapes a few years before I actually ended up living in NI. I thought this was something I could learn on my own, and rapidly ended up admitting failure, and I had no time to try to learn it in the six months I lived over there, so when I saw that there'd be a local weekly course, I jumped on it, especially as it was using the same text. Lemme tell ya, the orthography is the least of your worries. The patterns eventually start to make sense just like they do in any language. Much more troublesome is that Irish has short and long sounds (called "broad" and "slender"), but unlike English, they're consonants. The sound of the consonant changes depending on what...follows it, if I correctly recall. And some of those changes are so subtle that they're very hard to catch if you're not a native speaker and therefore not used to hearing them, but they make a big difference.
The only thing I really remember from the course was "Ta me go maith?" which means "I am well" and sounds like "Tah may go mah." And I have to bite my tongue every time I hear some well-meaning parent say that they've named their child "Caitlin" but pronounce it "Kate-lyn." It's actual pronunciation is "Caughtch-leen" as it's the Irish form of Kathleen. I did a double-take while I was in NI when someone recommended the music of Michael O'Suilleabhain and realized that the last name was pronounced O'Sullivan. Boy, did English-speaking folks do a number on ethnic names!
In any case, your post cracked me up because you remind me of Bill Bryson at the beginning of The Mother Tongue, where he says "Welsh spellings are as nothing compared with Irish Gaelic, a language in which spelling and pronunciation give the impression of having been devised by separate committees, meeting in separate rooms, while implacably divided over some deep semantic issue." How true!
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 03:52 am (UTC)AWESOME book. *g* I have so many quotes marked in that book, it's not even funny.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 04:54 am (UTC)Old English had a very tiny version of that long/short consonant thing...I think. It had dots over g and c to indicate whether they were pronounced "guh" or "yuh," in the case of g, or like "k" or "ch." They sometimes didn't have dots, and it was understood which sound they took by which vowels were around them. Apparently Irish orthography developed this same way when the printing press became prevalent; no room for dots, so they became understood.
Boy, did English-speaking folks do a number on ethnic names!
But can you blame them? ;)
I love that Bill Bryson quote. And it's one of my many dreams to write something in a similar style to him, so thanks! *g*
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 01:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 04:56 am (UTC)I didn't much care for JG&R. I forget why, now, but I remember thinking, "...Why isn't this anywhere near as good as Tam Lin?" when I was reading it.
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Date: 2006-08-22 05:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 03:51 am (UTC)*giggles and nods emphatically* That was my biggest problem with Scottish Gaelic (which has slightly different pronunciation - "th" in Irish at the beginning of a word is "t", while in Scottish it's "h"). At least in Russian, the letters LOOK different. Trying to reprogram my brain to see an English letter and pronounce it completely differently did *not* happen.
My favorite example - there's been a big push to simplify Gaelic orthography. For example, a word that sounds like "bee" is currently spelled "bithidh". They want to simplify it to "bidh". *g*
Even if that weren't a problem, I could never learn this language because I will never in a million years be able to wrap my brain around cases.
Ooooh, cases are evil. Although with a good teacher, I finally understood most of them for Croatian (there were 7, iirc).
Counting in Scottish was fun, too - they're base-20, so you say "20-and-8, 20-and-9, 20-and-10, 20-and-11.... two twenties." So 74 would be "three twenties and 14." Owwwwww.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 04:59 am (UTC)Cyrillic would be a cakewalk compared to that.
For example, a word that sounds like "bee" is currently spelled "bithidh". They want to simplify it to "bidh". *g*
Bwaaaahahahaha!
Ooooh, cases are evil. Although with a good teacher, I finally understood most of them for Croatian (there were 7, iirc).
I still don't know beans about Old English cases. Although that was a translation class, so it's not like we were ever actually taught them; it was just brought up as we translated. ("Actually, xyz on the ending of that noun means the water was brought to him, not that he brought the water." *headdesk* Damn good thing Klein brought us tea and cookies during class. *g*)
Counting in Scottish was fun, too - they're base-20
OMG. I did not know that. OW. That's worse than cases!
no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 08:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-22 08:27 pm (UTC)