cothromóid Triglot Groupie Ireland Joined 6089 days ago 77 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English*, French, Irish Studies: Spanish, Italian
| Message 1 of 3 19 February 2008 at 12:23pm | IP Logged |
Since we don't really learn any useful vocabulary in school, I have decided to visit
focal.ie (an excellent terminology site run by DCU) each night and pick six random
words to learn. I then record them in genius (mac only, sorry!) and
get to work.
Mar ní foghlaimid aon foclóirín úsáideach ar scoil, tá sé cinneadh agam dul go
focal.ie (suíomh téarmaíochta iontach oibrithe le OCBAC) gach oíche agus sé focail
le foghlaim a piochadh go randamach. Ansin déanaim taifead orthu i
genius (don mac amháin, tá brón orm!) agus tosaím ag obair.
Edited by cothromóid on 19 February 2008 at 12:31pm
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6646 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 3 19 February 2008 at 4:16pm | IP Logged |
I'm pleasantly surprised that it is so easy to pick out the parallel English and Irish words from this bilingual text, - maybe Irish isn't as exotic as I thought..
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cothromóid Triglot Groupie Ireland Joined 6089 days ago 77 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English*, French, Irish Studies: Spanish, Italian
| Message 3 of 3 20 February 2008 at 12:29pm | IP Logged |
Iversen wrote:
I'm pleasantly surprised that it is so easy to pick out the parallel English and Irish words from this
bilingual text, - maybe Irish isn't as exotic as I thought.. |
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You're right. There are a lot of Irish words that are ridiculously similar to English (this is very prevalent in
vocabulary related to modern science and technology). What happened is that when Ireland got independence the
government became fanatical about Irish, and wanted it to be used everywhere.
Irish is an ancient language, so the words for things that have been around for a long time (like names for plants)
usually have very little resemblance to English. When the government went on its Irish spree, it found that loads of
words for modern things simply didn't exist. Accordingly, it started taking the English word and "Irishafying" it. For
example, the word for "oseophagus" (as in anatomy) is "éasafagas".
You may have noticed that the word "randomly" is translated as "go randamach"!
Edited by cothromóid on 20 February 2008 at 12:30pm
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