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The role and usefulness of Irish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| JS-1 Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 5984 days ago 144 posts - 166 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), German, Japanese, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic (Written) | Message 25 of 162 23 April 2010 at 6:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Anyone with an interest in the state of Irish in Ireland might enjoy this short film.
Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom (My Name is Yu Ming) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA0a62wmd1A 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Fazla Hexaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6263 days ago 166 posts - 255 votes Speaks: Italian, Serbo-Croatian*, English, Russian, Portuguese, French Studies: Arabic (classical), German, Turkish, Mandarin | Message 26 of 162 23 April 2010 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | ||
Best movie EVER I think this situation applies to a lot of ex ussr turkic languages as well. The line ''Here, did you know Paddy could speak Chinese'' was the best part. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 magister Pro Member United States Joined 6604 days ago 346 posts - 421 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Turkish, Irish Personal Language Map | Message 27 of 162 23 April 2010 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I liked "An bhfuil tusa ag labhairt liomsa??" Are you talkin' to ME??
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robsolete Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5386 days ago 191 posts - 428 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 28 of 162 25 April 2010 at 9:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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I completely agree with the idea of Irish making a comeback. My hope is that, after the "English boom" has settled, having English as a lingua franca will actually *encourage* bilingualism around the world. It could even stand to relieve cultural tensions between neighbors (India is a good example, where the Dravidian states have started ejecting Hindi from their school curriculums, which many resent as cultural imposition from the north).
But there's always a flip side to nationalist pride: I met an Irish-American guy who had spent two years in Korea pursuing Buddhist monasticism. He'd basically jumped into it and spent a lot of time, energy, and frustration picking up Korean on the fly, and came back to the US fairly proud of his accomplishments. He returned for Christmas, so he ended up being endlessly grilled about his trip by his family, including a few token uncles from "the old country." When he started showing off his Korean on demand, one of them stood up and said "Oh, look at him! Learnin' half the f**kin' CHINK languages when he can't speak his Gaelic! How you like that?" I don't mean to invoke any "sheleighly law" or political furor, but I do wonder whether Irish's association to Sinn Fein, the IRA, and all that hasn't perhaps hurt it over the last few decades as the Irish population has moved further and further from that ideology. Not in any overt way, but more of a "trying to put the troubles behind us" kind of sense. Again, I don't mean to stir any hornet nests--I just did my thesis on (mostly Anglophone) 20th century Irish Literature and I'm curious about whether it informs the issue. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Americano Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6847 days ago 101 posts - 120 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean | Message 29 of 162 26 April 2010 at 6:28am | IP Logged | ||
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Irish is on my list of languages I will learn as my grandfather moved to Ireland as an adult and so though I am an American I still feel a connection to Ireland as the land of my ancestors. I too think it is rather sad that the language has almost been completely wiped from use after centuries of cultural imperialism. Though my grandfather spoke the language fluently he never used it with me as he was worried I would not learn English as well...sigh, I guess it will be through hard work.
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| michi Nonaglot Newbie Austria Joined 5302 days ago 33 posts - 57 votes Speaks: Dutch*, German, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese Studies: Turkish, Arabic (Written), Serbo-Croatian, Indonesian, Japanese | Message 30 of 162 16 June 2010 at 11:51am | IP Logged | ||
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I do hope that the Irish language will revive in Ireland, as much as I hope that not all the Celtic languages will die out in the end. Although much less people have learned Welsh in school than Irish, the situation for Welsh seems to be much better than for Irish.
The only native Irish speaker that I have known lived in my student dorm and came from Donegal. Although he still spoke Irish with his parents, he switched to English with his brother and sister. Which means that Irish will have dissappeared in his family in the next generation. To say the truth I don't really understand why in spite of all the official efforts the Irish Free State was not able to hold up the decline of the Irish language. I have been in touch with Adrian Cain, the Manx Language Development on the Isle of Man. Although the language official died out in 1974 with the death of the last native speaker, the efforts to revive it are quite impressive. There are a few kindergartens and one primary school that use Manx as a medium of instruction and there seem to be new native speakers again. Of course it is still unclear how successful the revival of Manx will be in the end, but I think the people who have revived the Manx language would wish to have such good basis as the Irish language in Ireland. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6440 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 31 of 162 16 June 2010 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||
I like and have always like Irish, and speak it pretty well, not fluently, but I can easily live in Irish, read and understand nearly all of the newspaper, news and radio, although I find some dialects difficult because I'm not used to them. While I do think that there are some difficulties in teaching Irish (mainly that grammar is not formally taught, which leads to very natural but sometimes very careless grammar), I've found that most of those who complain simply haven't any interest in learning Irish, no matter what the teacher did. One experience that I'm sure all Irish people have had, is using Irish abroad when not wanting to be understood. While most of those people can probably hardly string a sentence together, it's something that everyone does at some stage. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6043 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 32 of 162 16 June 2010 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | ||
You make English sound like the big bad wolf.
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