January 06, 2007

• I'm sorry, I missed the links in comments by homunculus. I think this is still good enough for its own post, but credit is of course due to him.
• I got it from MeFi too, and it is definitely worth posting. Well done.
• The EU has always taken Erse (Gaelic? Irish?) very seriously. I'm told that when Ireland joined they were routinely sent documents in that language, and had to ask, with some embarassment, if they could have them in English, actually. I'm sure it would have been given official working language status from the off if the Irish Government had asked. It's a pretty poor show, though, if official bodies in Dublin can't accomodate Gaelic speakers.
• Slugger thread on the article.
• No feckin' béarla? Feck it all anyway.
• > It's a pretty poor show, though, if official bodies in Dublin can't accomodate Gaelic speakers. A gaelgeoir I knew was brought to court in the 1980s over nonpayment of parking tickets. I think by the time of the case he'd accummulated dozens. His argument was that he didn't have to pay because the tickets were in English only. He won the case, but soon after all tickets were printed in both languages. He continued to park illegaly but then had to pay the fines. Although it looks entertaining, there are some aspects of Machan's "journey" I find disingenuous. Going into a bar off Grafton St and asking for service as Gaeilge, for example. In the bars around that part of town, you're more likely to be served by an Aussie than by an Irish person. As for the video excerpt of the "dirty song" - listening to it three times I had problems making out the words, mostly because he's trying to sing it a bit sean nós but also because of the irregular percussion. I'm not the least surprised that people walked by without batting an eyelid - he's almost incomprehensible when singing, even though he speaks fairly clearly when talking. Although I love the language, I have mixed feelings about Irish as an official EU working language. I think it's important to encourage the use of Irish, but I don't like the idea of continually increasing the number of EU official languages. I don't see why Oc or Catalan or Welsh should be treated differently. I think it would've been better to leave Irish out, to be honest.
• I don't know how French would be received at a Toronto tourism office, though maybe they would think the speakers were actually French, rather than French Canadian. That said, because of our provincial system, French is an official language for the federal government, but at the provincial level, it is only an official language in Quebec (alone) and in New Brunswick (with English). Ontario provides services in French, but doesn't have to. I did meet Quebecquer travelling in BC who spoke just about no English, which was great for me, he forgave my bad French and we had a nice chat, albeit with lots of friendly confusion and hesitation. But he was having a great deal of trouble getting by - no services or directions in French, no bus schedules, etc. Coming from Ontario, which is very anglo, I hadn't realised just how anglo BC was. Though in Vancouver, the bank machines were trilingual - English, French and Chinese. I would hope that people wouldn't be rude, at least. Most of the people he met weren't, and in the videos on his site, he didn't make it easy for them. Maybe it's just the nature of the language, but his Irish came out very rapidly and with lots of syllables :) He says no one understood his dirty songs, but I think there were a couple who passed him with knowing smiles or outright laughter. Someone did point out in the mefi thread that Dublin has not been a Gaelic city for some 1200+ years. It was founded by Danes (speaking a language very similar to Anglo-Saxon), then settled by English in the middle ages (who were called the Old [Catholic] English later, to differentiate them from the New [Protestant] English who settled after the Reformation). --- My favorite line from the short film "Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom"/"My Name is Yu Ming" is -- "did you know Paddy could speak Chinese?"
• Awhile back I tried to learn it, but none of the language resources were clear at all on pronunciation, so I gave up. Even in that main article, you can see there's no pronunciation guidance)
• I thought one point made at the Slugger thread was true - that a lot of people would just assume you were taking the piss in some way, as the is probably no Irish speaker of his age who can't speak English.
• > Someone did point out in the mefi thread that Dublin has not been a Gaelic city for some 1200+ years. I read the MeFi thread last night, and this particular comment made me laugh and laugh. Dublin was theoretically founded in the late 9th century by Vikings, but it doesn't seem to have been a large Viking settlement; there are much larger "Gaelic" settlements within spitting distance that date from earlier and later. The "English" who arrived in the 12th century were Normans (and quickly went native). In any case, I'd wager that the majority language in Dublin and its environs was Gaelic up until the 18th or 19th century. There was a small gaeltacht in north County Dublin as recently as 25 years ago (I don't know what its status is now). The language of power may have been Norse, then French, then English.
• TG4 broadcasts online (complete with annoying ads in English for toilet freshener).
• Wow, thanks 3-DayMonk, I'd no idea. Something strange - I clicked on GAA Cúil na Bliana (goals of the year), and got the last few minutes of the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (as bearla, mind you), before the GAA programme started. It's like someone hit record too early and never bother to trim the recording before putting it online.
• Béars are an official language of the EU now?!! If this doesn't call for a Threatdown, I don't know what does.
• TG4 broadcasts online "Your operating system Linux i686 is not supported. This service currently available only for Windows and Macintosh." You'd think they'd be all about the minority user.
• roryk - Now I don't know my medieval Irish history well at all, but I do know my Elizabethan Irish history a bit better, and Dublin was definitely English as of the 16th century, and early 16th century at that. I know this, because there were the Old English there, and they were Catholic, and there was a lot of tension between them and the New [Protestant] English. (This is a big part of the political/ethnic divisions in Ireland in the late 16th, early 17th century, a three-fold division - English-Protestant, English-Catholic, and Gaelic-Catholic). The assimilation of the "Old English" comes from this period, because of their religion. on the Pale around Dublin (from wikipedia):

  The Pale or the English Pale comprised a region in a radius of twenty miles around Dublin which the English in Ireland gradually fortified against incursion from Gaels. From the thirteenth century onwards the Hiberno-Norman invasion in the rest of Ireland at first faltered then waned, allowing Gaelic Ireland to become resurgent... In the 15th century the Pale became the only real piece of Ireland under the control of the English King's Dublin government and a tenuous foothold for the English on the island of Ireland.... The Pale boundary essentially consisted of a fortified ditch and rampart built around parts of the medieval counties of Louth, Meath, Dublin and Kildare, actually leaving half of Meath and Kildare on the other side. The pale border line cut off an area south of the modern day M50 in Dublin. In 1366, in order for the English Crown to assert its authority over the settlers, a parliament was assembled in Kilkenny and the Statute of Kilkenny was established. The statute decreed that inter-marriage between English settlers and Irish natives was forbidden. It also forbade the settlers using the Irish language and adopting Irish modes of dress or other customs. Within the confines of the Pale the leading gentry and merchants lived lives not too different from that of their counterparts in England, except that they lived under the constant fear of attack from the Gaelic Irish. Eventually, after the 1500s and 1600s, and especially after the Anglican Reformation and the Plantation of Ulster, the English settlers were gradually assimilated into the Irish nation, in large part due to their relative reluctance to give up Roman Catholicism (those who became Protestants were rewarded with a higher status); but they kept the English language for the most part and were in fact joined by other English Catholics fleeing persecution under Queen Elizabeth I and subsequent monarchs. (Even in the 1800s, Leinster had few Gaelic-speakers.) This large body of middle- and lower-class English speakers, combined with their rejection by the ascendant Protestant upper class, provided much of the impetus for the displacement of Irish Gaelic from Ireland's population. This is also why the English spoken in the Dublin area sounds more like early Modern English[citation needed] and is quite different from the Hiberno-English in the formerly-Gaelic-speaking parts of Ireland, such as County Cork (which has the stereotypical sing-song accent which replaces /θ/ with /th/).

  So in the area around Dublin, there were a great many English speakers from 1366 on, enough that the English dialect there is different from the rest of Ireland. Short of a linguistic survey from the 16th century, I would say that English, not Gaelic, was probably spoken by the majority (lower and middle classes included).
• Abiezer - they don't like Opera either :)
• Sorry - that bit about the Pale came off a bit more sharp than I meant. I'm just a bit sensitive when it comes to people downplaying the English presence in places like Ireland or Scotland (where half of the country spoke English even when it was an independent country). I know what you mean about the Danish settlement not lasting, but the English one was lasting and anglophone for centuries before the more recent project to anglicise the rest of the country (linguistically - they had been trying to anglicise the country culturally for a longer time, but didn't really have the educational infrastructure). My roommate was telling me that outside of the Pale, Norman and Old English settlers did become more Gaelic - and that there are Gaelic poems in their honour surviving.
• > So in the area around Dublin, there were a great many English speakers from 1366 on I don't dispute this. I do think that Gaelic is still the majority language, even if not the language of power. > enough that the English dialect there is different from the rest of Ireland. Yes, but every English dialect in a discernible area in Ireland is quite different. Cork vs Kerry for example - contiguous counties that have huge differences in English pronunciation and usage. > Short of a linguistic survey from the 16th century, I would say that English, not Gaelic, was probably spoken by the majority (lower and middle classes included). I think we should agree to disagree, but I thank you for your points. For the record, my assumptions are: - settlers within the Pale make up at most 25 percent of the population - within the Pale there are a lot of farming and servant families to support the 'government' - these families speak Irish at home but English "in the world" - these families have strong ties outside the Pale that encourage them to maintain a linguistic link with "Gaelic-Ireland" - culturally, these families are Gaelic (i.e. their stories, their songs, their dances are from the Gaelic tradition)
• > You'd think they'd be all about the minority user. M$ has been surprisingly good to Irish. Work began on the first version of Word as Gaeilge as far back as 1989 or 90. I tried accessing the TG4 site using a "cloaked" version of Opera on Linux, but no joy.
• Most Gaelic enthusiasts that I have met have been inindistinguishable from fascists. I will comment in more detail later but this post hits a still raw nerve.
• *Insists to intern ultang, at risk of exposing self*
• I am speaking only from personal experience it's late and I have a twelve hour shift in the morning but bring me up in front of your personal Diplock if you want but I will stand by and amplify my comment. Slan leat. (can't work out the fadas on this thing)
• but but but.....
• Surprising how often Irish issues seem to depend on highly contentious events some hundreds of years ago. That said, the percentage of Gaelic speakers in the Pale ought to be a factual matter. I should have thought it was low, but I'll be grateful to anyone who can attentuate my ignorance with factual evidence (a quick Google hasn't produced anything for me). In any case Ireland should surely value and accommodate both languages. It certainly has a literary heritage in both that many larger nations would be rightly proud of.
• Apologies for my drunken saturday night comments, a bad reaction to the black stuff and men in black dresses. I do think though that the Gaelegeors are the languages worst enemy. My sister, who sent her children to a Gaelscoil, recently tried to refamiliarize herself with the language twenty years after doing the leaving. (I can't remember what her mark was but she was an honours student.) However she like me has an ineradicable Cheshire accent and the sneers and putdowns of the teacher led to her withdrawal. A language must be a living thing, which meants it must mutate mate with other tongues, cultures and voices. We have had what is it seventy ? years of compulsory Irish in schools and the language still shrinks. Now whose fault is that?
• > I do think though that the Gaelegeors are the languages worst enemy. I agree that a lot of them are xenophobic, reactionary, overly zealous luddites. I've known some very nice, friendly, fun gaelgeoirs too. My biggest problem with Irish was the school curriculum (I don't know if it's changed). Peig, Fiche blian ag fas, Scothscealta and the Toraiocht are all very good if someone is actively interested, but they're a big turnoff for most teenagers. For the leaving cert in the late 1980s, I studied some of the same books as my grandparents did. Separating the subject into language and literature, keeping the language part compulsory (if absolutely necessary), would make a lot of sense. Similarly for English - you want kids to leave school with good comprehension and expression skills; this doesn't mean you have to force Shakespeare or Chaucer on those who prefer science or woodworking or whatever.
• I'm glad we agree. I'm not sure things have changed much. I did my leaving in 1984 and I was recently shocked to discover how little the curriculum has changed, in all subjects. I think a strong case can be made that compulsory Irish is discriminatory-it effectively barrs non-nationals from primary school teaching.
• There used to be an option that someone born abroad or who had a certain amount of primary education abroad (three years maybe) could avoid compulsory Irish lessons. I'm not sure what the status of this is.
• There is a five year probationary period after which the applicant must prove competence to teach Irish to five to twelve year olds. I suppose any teacher working in a different country must be able to teach in the language of her adopted country. And five years seems like a decent enough length of time to get to grips with a new language. Oh well, another plank in the scafffold of my argument splintered. However now that I'm the same size as the bastards I'd still like to get my meaty Anglo-Hiberno hands on the be-corduroyed leather elbowed hurley gripping dolmen toothed nut jobs who made my school days an utter fucking misery.