I keep thinking, "Hey, it would be neat to learn Irish!" And then I look at the orthography and run screaming.
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!
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timeasmymeasure
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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!