Quote:I respect the wishes of those who don't want to be corrected - and they do have the right not to be - but they are in for a much harder task than those who constantly are corrected.
I must say that I disagree to this. I have no respect whatsoever for those who do not wish to be corrected. You either want to learn Gaeilge or you don't want to. I myself, especially in the early days,
loved being corrected. When I'd say something like "Bhí sé ag moladh mé", and then some-one wrote back saying "Bhí sé do mo mholadh", I loved it! I was learning all the time. I don't scrutanize others' mistakes, I just put a simple little note at the end of my posts correcting them. I don't see why nobody agrees with me on how down right stupid it is to not be corrected.
I totally agree about the whole age-ism thing. I think I revealed my age
once on this forum, and ever since it's been "used against me". If ever I acted in a way some-one took exception to, then it had to be on account of my age.
So leave it out!
As for the thing about the Cornish speaker; I remember about a year ago in school I was learning Stair na Gaeilge and we were talking about the other Celtic languages, Cornish and Manxx, and the teacher said that the last fluent speaker of one of them had just died recently; I was pretty sure it was Cornish but it appears I was mistaken. Anyway, for the record, my statement was preceeded with "I believe that...".
And about the phonems thing; I didn't think my answer was too exact. My intention was just to give a broad view. I just thought in my head, "Well, we don't have z in Gaeilge, or that sound in the middle of massage" and went from there.
But then again, can you truly say that a language doesn't have a certain sound? For example, the Gaeilge for "zoo" is "zú". And in languages like French, that sound in the middle of "massage" is much more recognized and used much more often, but we still have a handful of words that have it in English, like "Asia" "vision".
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Fear
na mBróg