For someone who finds Ó Siadhail too dialectal and the Lárchanúint not dialectal enough, I would suggest this paper by Antony Dubach Green "Ó Litriú go dtí Fuaimniú: From Spelling to Pronunciation.
"What I present ..is something of a compromise between Connacht pronunciation and the Lárchanúint. It's more spelling-based than actual Connacht pronunciation, and therefore easier for beginners to learn, but it's not as artificial as the Lárchanúint."
While it incorporates the dialectal vowel lengthening and diphthongization it also gives guidelines for how to pronounce "oi" and "io". Foclóir Póca fails to do that.

FWIW here is the link:

http://img0.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/c/0/3712/3712247_irish__from_spelling_ to_pronunciation_gaelic.pdf

It's bedtime for me but I'm looking forward to reading that at the weekend!

Something to bridge the gap should be helpful for sure as it is a huge leap going from the leaving cert/caighdeán and into a canúint.

I'm starting to think I should be concentrating 100% on the older texts and that anything caighdeán-y can play second fiddle.

Sineadw, do you really think the difference is that great?

I think its clear that school leavers dont know how to pronounce words correctly (if im anything to go by anyway)but ive always put this down to the lack of importance attached to pronunciation on the curriculum.

Or is it that you just dont think the caighdeán is addequate enough to explain how words are pronounced in the gaeltacht?

Unfortunately yes. If you read the caighdeán Irish like it is, and when you are taught by a non-native speaker in secondary school which is almost always the case, what comes out is in the English accent and also sounds exactly as written.
Like

cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?

You don't know that the 'a' does not appear in speech, and that cén is pronounced as 'cé' and it is these things that make a huge difference. That is the blas and the beauty of spoken Irish.

Another one I just took from the paper posted above! (I had a sneaky look :))
Folaíocht.

Now if you are to pronounce this the way you are taught you are pronouncing all syllables. And you don't know that the second 'o' is silent and that makes all the difference.

The caighdeán is having horrible results on people's pronunciation coupled with the neutral English accent that Irish people are getting more and more. I cringe when I hear non Irish speakers reading for the ads on tv with no blas. It's phoney Irish really.

It's worth the effort learning a dialect but you have to keep remembering to say the words differently with the blas and that's a challenge when you've been learning in school! You are actually better off being a total beginner- and I mean in terms of pronunciation.

Well that's how I'm finding it anyhoo!

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If you read the caighdeán Irish like it is, and when you are taught by a non-native speaker in secondary school which is almost always the case

It's the second part of this statement that is really key. No language is pronounced exactly as it's written; there are always a lot of fine details that can only be picked up from hearing native speakers. In light of that, I think it's unfair to blame CO. You could respell every word to match the pronunciation of a particular dialect. (Ó Siadhail pretty much does in Learning Irish.) That still won't give someone a proper accent if they don't have good spoken models to follow.

I think youve hit the nail on the head there- it is very difficult for native english speakers to pronouce Irish correctly, with a blas that is. In my experience anyway.

The debates/discussions on this forum regarding the right way to pronounce a word or a sound are in a sense unique. Because no such debate in taking place in the secondary or university(first year) level. Again only in my experiece.

I happen to think that this isnt such a bad thing, when non native speakers speak irish with no blas whatever, theyre doing so knowingly, they know its not the 'right' way to speak.

But sure isnt it better to be speaking any standard of irish than no irish at all?

Ah without a doubt it is better that people speak caighdeán based Irish rather than nothing, and that's especially fine when you're speaking with other friends of yours who also are learning and have caighdeán, but here -like you're saying- I think some of us are striving to lean towards the dialect we like the most so that we at least have some amount of natural pronunciation going on eventually.

I know I'll never be from the Gaeltacht but I can go as close as I have the ability and desire to I guess.

Besides I love it :D

Domhnaillín: who else can I blame? :D My dad taught me Irish in school so I'd be in trouble if I blamed him! He was a very good teacher and he is fluent in caighdeán Irish himself, and with a bit of a Munster blas.

What's interesting though is that everyone who learns Irish in school finds the Munster dialect the easiest to understand! I have been told that the caighdeán is closer to Conamara Irish but I think that may be in vocabulary- I'm not sure. It could be because they speak more softly and with less of an accent.

And you're right, at the end of the day you need to go and learn how to speak naturally by learning from native speakers. No shortcuts for that.

It's fine to speak caighdéan Irish with other learners but with native speakers they seem to prefer speaking in English rather than with a speaker of caighdéan or book Irish. And indeed some of us are striving for pronunciation and choosing a dialect and talking with native speaker blas is the holy grail for us all. The class is good for grammar I'm going to get a native speaker from Conamara to help me maybe 2 hours a week with learning the dialect Wouldnt it be cool if we could get classes in Conamara or Munster or Ulster Irish just pronunciation classes!

Nice article by Greene, however there's nothing new in it. I think you'd find the same stuff at the end of Learning Irish.
What he says about the pronunciation of io and oi isn't always true (even in Connemara: eg. they say oibre as /aib'r'@/, coicís as /kaik'i:s'/ and oirthear... probably with a slender r).

The most surprising thing, to me, is that he writes his phonological transcriptions between square brackets... In linguistics people use square brackets for phonetics, and slashes for phonology (here he uses a phonological transcription system so that stuff should be between slashes)...

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cén chaoi a bhfuil tú? You don't know that the 'a' does not appear in speech, and that cén is pronounced as 'cé' and it is these things that make a huge difference.

What you're describing is not a problem with spelling or grammar, but a person's ability to speak and understand the text at a natural pace and cadence and eliding sounds that native speakers do. The same can be said of the definite article becoming simple schwa with no 'n' and many others never indicated in writing. When two vowels come against one another in Irish, one is elided unless understanding is hampered. Generally these elisions are for euphonic effect (vowel harmony or sandhi), and described in grammar books. The same can be said for the epenthetic vowel that is not shown in writing. But 'a' should be in the writing because it is indicating a relative.

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Folaíocht. Now if you are to pronounce this the way you are taught you are pronouncing all syllables. And you don't know that the second 'o' is silent and that makes all the difference.

I hope anyone learning aío know that the long vowel is pronounced and the a and o are to indicate broadness. If not, they shouldn't be Irish teachers. That seems to me that that should be known very early on by learners.

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The caighdeán is having horrible results on people's pronunciation coupled with the neutral English accent that Irish people are getting more and more. I cringe when I hear non Irish speakers reading for the ads on tv with no blas. It's phoney Irish really.

That's a bit harsh. Out of a body of people learning a second language, a small percentage may take on a native accent. In Irish people must be taught young by people who speak the way you want them to speak. There is developing a new "accent" surely that will be established because if you have enough learners coming from English then they will constitute a new body of speakers, and probably affect the dialectical pronunciations. It may be hard to accept this, but that will be the success of the Irish language in Ireland. It has to happen to establish Irish among the numerous English speakers, some who may come from families that have spoken English for many generations. It's actually driven more by our biology than people's desires. Some people are better at taking on accents, some are just terrible at it if they don't learn early.

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That still won't give someone a proper accent if they don't have good spoken models to follow.

Just take English. I moved to Tennessee for two years and didn't develop a Tennessee accent, but I could fake it a bit (mimic). Those who move to Ireland may start to sound Irish, but Des Bishop still sounds to me like a Queen's boy with a little Ireland. That may be practically impossible to overcome from his perspective and he may not HEAR it (even though he is well known for mimicing accents). Why do I work with a lot of Asians who after having been in California for 25 years still talk like immigrants? But their grammar and communication is pretty good. I'm not going to fault them for something that may well nigh be impossible for them. But guess what, their kids speak like complete natives!

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I happen to think that this isnt such a bad thing, when non native speakers speak irish with no blas whatever, theyre doing so knowingly, they know its not the 'right' way to speak.

In Ireland there should be pronunciation classes in school. Like a whole year of just talking, before 12 years old. Phonics, word games like Dr. Suess Irish rhyme stuff, etc. To the largest extent possible Irish children should be educated in Irish in my opinion. I know that would cause pandemonium among many Irish, but it would more realistically reflect their language policy on paper.

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I know I'll never be from the Gaeltacht but I can go as close as I have the ability and desire to I guess.

People have to come to language learning willing to learn and willing to take criticism. It takes a lot of leaving the pride at the door and accepting that you're not going to be perfect, but if you stick to it genuinely, you'll make progress.

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It's fine to speak caighdéan Irish with other learners but with native speakers they seem to prefer speaking in English rather than with a speaker of caighdéan or book Irish.

You shouldn't be so harsh on the spelling reform. I think a greater culprit is the foisting of unofficial official pronunciations and spellings on people who don't want them or need them. The spelling reform in itself is set to reflect any local pronuncaition. Examples: tigh, tráigh, go háirid, cinnire, ansa, ansan, mar sin fhéinig, etc. All these are "variants", but they represent a regional pronunciation through the Caighdéan. Anyone can use them. Now the problem may come when this is discouraged in school, and that is the greater grip in my opinion.


I think that classifying Irish into real Irish and fake Irish, or native Irish and foreign Irish is destructive to the Irish language. If Irish is to continue to spread into the English communities, there has to be a realistic view that those people will mostly take on that language with an "English" accent, with English loans, and perhaps some English grammatical devices. Do we think English is not English because we don't speak like King Alfred the Great? English got run through by the Normans et al., and out came what we think of as English -- mostly a Germanic underlay with a Norman overlay. Irish is a robust enough language to take this reality, and if the language adapts, it will. At what point was Irish correct and "pure"? 400 AD, 600, 1200, 1500, 1936, 1958, etc? The reality of today is not that of yesterday. The thing to combat, though, is bad policy, bad teaching, laziness, and the general trend of MANY languages to dumb down everything (but this is a problem greater than language).

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While it incorporates the dialectal vowel lengthening and diphthongization it also gives guidelines for how to pronounce "oi" and "io". Foclóir Póca fails to do that.

For information's sake, Lárchanúint give "oi" as o in stressed syllables, ó before rd, rl, and rn in stressed syllables, and schwa in unstressed syllables. It give "io" as i in stressed syllables and at the end of the personal pronouns, third person singular; and í in the word Iontach.

Yes but even stressed "io" isn't always pronounced /i/...

languages evolve - can we get over it?

most languages have a common dialect for writing and that often spills over to speaking

also - what year was that written in?

eitehr it leaves out a lot or it is ignorant to a lot....

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languages evolve - can we get over it?

Normally languages evolve by the speech of native speakers. Not by what some people write in dictionaries.

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most languages have a common dialect for writing and that often spills over to speaking

But anyway I think very few speakers would pronounce that way, no native speakers and even learners don't use the transcription of the Foclóir Póca to know the way to pronounce words...

Back in the early years of athbheochan na Gaeilge the few teachers who knew the language were probably native speakers, or ardent nationalists who had learnt the language from the Gaelic League.

The new independent state set up Coláistí Ullmhúcháin in the various Gaeltachtaí and gave free secondary education to promising youngsters in a total-immersion setting: the Irish Ulpanim, with a view to having a cohort of Irish-speaking teachers. They survived for twenty or thirty years. The training colleges taught courses through the medium of Irish.

The Sixties saw a withdrawal from the all-out attempt to revive Irish among an unsympathetic population who were willing to support Irish as long as they didn't have to learn it themselves. The introduction of "free" education ensured that the full cohort in each age group got education appropriate to their ability.

Now the Primary teachers who introduce the Irish language to the babies and senior infants may have themselves no more than a C3 Leaving Cert level of Irish supplemented by whatever lectures and lessons they may receive in the Teacher training colleges. Some are enthusiastic about the language others regard it as a chore and given the flexibility afforded by the Curriculum devote the minimum amount of time to it and probably fail to conceal their own patfhuaire from the children.

While most teachers may not be mistaken for native speakers they have achieved a high standard of Irish and being educated people they know what needs to be taught thus the children do learn Irish. Those who are fortunate enough to go to the Gaeltacht (25,000 go every year) hear the native blas and get the chance to imitate it.

Things are not perfect in the Irish education system with reference to Irish hence the growth of Gaelscoileanna but for all that good work is being done in all schools and individual children make good progress in the language. The blas is only one aspect.

Years ago Irish language enthusiasts were regarded as intolerant cranks. Admittedly some carried their intolerant behaviour to an extraordinary degree. (Numerous yarns suppressed here.)

The bulk of the English-speaking population have indicated what their attitude to Irish is -- they will allow it to prosper if those who know it and want to transmit it to their children do so in a discrete unoppressive way. A tea-spoon of honey versus a barrel of vinegar etc.

The point I am trying to make is that the widespread teaching of Irish in some form is the most important objective. Getting it to the mass of the Irish school-going population. By all means teach pronunciation but not to such an extent that children are afraid to open their mouths. Such purism could kill the athbheochan.

If the native speakers keep on using Irish and speaking it to their children there will always be a high standard of pronunciation for learners and teachers to aim for.

TG4 and RTÉ Raidio na Gaeltachta news broadcasts and vox pops show what a high level of Irish has already been achieved in all parts of the country. Not enough for it to become audible as a community language but on TV enough to astonish those who believe the language is dead outside the Gaeltacht.

I didn't mean this to be off-topic but wanted to supply a bit of background.

Adult-learners need to have access to the best native pronunciation from the start if possible. Even they have to make do with the best teachers available -- just as the mass of Irish children do.

It is good to be reminded of the importance of good pronunciation whether dialect or lárchanúint.

No one seems to have picked up on the "io" and "oi" pronunciations in the Lárchanúint. This from Ó Baoill:

"Furthermore, when trying to regularize the pronunciation reflected by the spellings "io" and "oi" the committee instructed me to be uniform despite great variation from one dialect to the next. Hence, "io" became "i" and "oi" became "o" in the pronunciation guide. This is why "anois" appears as it does.

"Tiocfaidh ár lá" becomes [t'iki: a:r la:]. Does ANY dialect pronounce that way? How about "oiread" as [o'r@d] as opposed to [er'@d]? The treatment of these two demonstrates what happens when you bring a poltical solution to a linguistic situation.

Here's one view:
"Another purpose was to create a grammatically "simplified" standard which would make the language easier to learn for the majority English-speaking school population. In part this is why the Caighdeán is not universally respected by native speakers, in that it makes simplified language an ideal, rather than the ideal that native speakers traditionally had of their dialects (or the Classical dialect if they had knowledge of that). Of course this was not the original aim of the developers, who rather saw the "school-version" Caighdeán as a means of easing second-language learners into the task of learning "full" Irish...once the word "standard" becomes used, the forms represented as "standard" becomes used, the forms represented as "standard" take on a power of their own, and therefore the ultimate goal has become forgotten in many circles."

Has anyone in this thread actually looked at the paper? To me the paper posits a win-win middle ground approach: CO spelling with a regularized Connacht pronunciation. The same approach could be used with Munster or Ulster dialects. What's the problem with that?

quote: Sean W:

"I hope anyone learning aío know that the long vowel is pronounced and the a and o are to indicate broadness. If not, they shouldn't be Irish teachers. That seems to me that that should be known very early on by learners"


--- . Irish teachers teaching Irish here mostly are doing so because they love the language as well, like us! And everyone knows that the long vowel is pronounced. That's how I was taught and indeed every school-going kid here knows that thankfully. It is the 'running together' that isn't taught as that is down to dialect and that was the point I was making. It is pronounced as Fol-aí-ocht and taught as such, whereas it is pronounced in Gaeltachts rather differently! As in the two second syllables running together. I hope that makes sense.

And yes I have been swallowing my pride manys the day to get better. It is the only way you'll learn to speak to native speakers and it's always going to be the hardest thing to do. I have come up with things like 'báireach' instead of 'láithreach' etc. as when you are speaking and thinking on your feet there isn't the time to think about what you're saying. Also you will be pronouncing perfectly good words as you were taught 'ionainn' I learned as 'in' starting sound, but in Conamara it is 'un' starting, and I got blank looks!!

If we keep at it, we will get there. I am talking to the radio too, finding that a big help :)

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"Tiocfaidh ár lá" becomes [t'iki: a:r la:]. Does ANY dialect pronounce that way?

Nope.

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Here's one view:
"Another purpose was to create a grammatically "simplified" standard which would make the language easier to learn for the majority English-speaking school population.

Irish is the only language on earth that is being changed and simplified by authorities so that it's easier to learn. It would make everybody else laugh.
If many Irish people don't speak Irish, it's not because it's difficult, but just because it is bad taught and because most people don't want to learn or speak it. That's all. Making it simpler won't change anything. Those who love the language don't want it to be simpler, they love it as it is!

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Making it simpler won't change anything. Those who love the language don't want it to be simpler, they love it as it is!

Heartily seconded!

Making it simpler won't change anything. Those who love the language don't want it to be simpler, they love it as it is!

And heartily thirded!

One of the hard facts of life is that when it comes to really worthwhile things, there just ain't no silver bullets.

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It is the 'running together' that isn't taught as that is down to dialect and that was the point I was making. It is pronounced as Fol-aí-ocht and taught as such, whereas it is pronounced in Gaeltachts rather differently! As in the two second syllables running together. I hope that makes sense.

I'm sorry, but I am not trying to act high-horsed here, but this also seems to me to be first grade stuff that the teacher should know even from English classes. Counting syllables! Folaíocht >>> Fo - laíocht.

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Irish is the only language on earth that is being changed and simplified by authorities so that it's easier to learn.

I think there can be a distinction made between simplification to change the language and simplification to aid the learner. Most learning devices are aimed at the latter method. Almost every grammar book, learning book, and pronunciation scheme whether it is Ó Siadhail, the Lárchanúint, Lughaidh, or the one cited by Alun presents an abstracted view of the language -- static, on paper. Lughaidh in your dictionary you had to narrow it down to NW Ulster, Cois Fhairrge, and Corca Dhuibhne. Who couldn't critique your dictionary for being wrong or trying to set up a standard for the three regions? No volume that I am aware of covers all instances, all options, etc.

Some like Lughaidh, who was able to live in the Gaeltacht, and Aonghus blessed with an Irish speaking household, are in an advantaged position over others. Many have had neither, and some have very little real life input. Be that as it may, I can then see why someone would be able to love the language and want simplifications for themselves and people similar. Note making the language simpler and simplifications to help learning. I'm sure we can see the difference. Now I don't know of anyone here who sticks around longer than a few days who is trying to change and simplify the language in itself. Certainly not anyone in positions of authority. But I do see a lot of sincere learners. And I see that most questions are about pronunciation. Then it is followed by -- which dialect? what dialect are you doing? I'm thinking about switching dialects. Clearly there is no consensus in Ireland. Perhaps some of us are a little more understanding of the learning process and how babies are given milk before solid food. I for one welcome the Lárchanúint, not to change the language but to help get people in the door. I welcome the schemes like that posted here by Alun, to help someone come in and sit at the table. I welcome books like Learning Irish and more in depth pronunciation schemes to set the table. And I welcome the Gaeltacht, actual speakers, RnaG, TG4, Raidio na Life, etc. to feast and converse and have a pint. If that's not loving the language then your view is skewed. Those who don't love the language don't come in the door. They come and knock and give you line, and try to draw you out. So I don't see any moves like that here. Perhaps the elite here will chalk it up to ignorance on the learner's part, but I see the elites quibble about pronunciation mostly while the learners seem to want to learn mostly.

And to think that Irish is being singled out by State policy to be changed and simplified. Almost every prominent language on earth is affected by State policies for good or ill. Take the simplification of the Chinese characters and pinyin for one. The German alphabet changed and script updated. In the USA the almost complete abandonment of traditional grammar to "simplify" things. I'm sure an industrious person can find more than one language being "changed" by States. I mean, that is called curriculum! And it is probably more the half the time not intended. And we don't have to bring up French policy, right?

Irish is neither difficult nor easy, because that is defined by the learner not the thing being learned. One may find broads and slenders easy. Another difficult. Another absolute useless. They are an essential part of the language that someone should learn as soon as possible. The numerous nuances of the Irish letter to vowel pronunciation scheme is hard for some. It should be learned, but it shouldn't be focused on to such an extent that it hampers learning other fundamental things. Example: Few I know pronounced Spanish well when I learned it, but the teacher didn't say a word except if you pronounced well to set an example. Only in the third year when we spoke all Spanish was my teacher making comments about pronunciation in a corrective fashion. See how the gradual learning process is? Was my teacher guilty of "changing" Spanish?

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Irish is the only language on earth that is being changed and simplified by authorities

I am not sure, but I heard something similar about the Indonesian language:

"Even though it is basically the Malay language, Indonesian has in common with Esperanto the fact of having undergone a kind of planned restructuration to simplify grammar and reduce exceptions."

Of course this fact would not vindicate anything done to simplify Irish ...

Quechua is another.

From the original post to the most recent post, the core of this thread, and all like it, can be simplified into two questions:

1) Can Irish be reduced to a level that transcends dialectal differences for a more uniform Irish language?

2) Does Irish need to be reduced to a level that transcends dialectal differences for a more uniform Irish language?

Question 1 is a little easier to answer because there is tangibility to it. Can a language be altered? Yes. People have been doing that since the beginning of time. Can we choose a pre-existing system, or create a new system that can overcome some of the major issues that are bouncing around on all levels of the language? It is not beyond the realms of possibility.

Question 2 is the more difficult to discuss because it a very subjective question.

Someone earlier made a wonderful point that a lot of the people here who say Irish is just fine the way it is, are coming from situations that may not give them a unbiased point of view about the language.

There is an old expression here, "When the harvest is good, no one complains about hunger." This is the same with Irish. People in Ireland or with direct Irish language interaction, cannot relate to those who do not.

Also, one cannot say that Irish has survived for 2000 years and has faced all these hardships, so it will keep on going. Just look at the numbers, they are going down and have been doing so for 2000 years. You cannot deny that. And if the pattern continues, the language will die. It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow. But the Irish language has been slowly bleeding to death for 2000 years now, and unless something is done to heal the wounds, the blood with stop flowing one way or another.

Also, with technology, the domination of English over Ireland is almost absolute. In the past, isolation was the only tool that really aided the Irish language. But with modern technology, media, education...the English language has a strangle hold over Irish that no English king could ever muster.

Why do I think these points are worth debating? The survival of the language needs new speakers. And these speakers are going to come from a non-Irish oriented region. We need to accept that they are not going to speak with an Irish accent. They are never going to have the flow of a person from the Gaeltacht. And if we want to maintain an interest for them to learn the language, we are going to have stop telling them that there is no "correct" way to say something, but there is a "wrong" way. This is the pattern I see more and more with the Irish language.

Irish will have to deal with them on their terms because Irish needs them more than they need Irish at this point.

"Making it simpler won't change anything."

I disagree. We will never know unless we try. So how can anyone say it won't?

A simplified or more unified system, which is how I prefer to think of it, might make learning the language a little simpler for those who do not have the Irishness we "would like them to have."

It is at least worth trying.

(Message edited by do_chinniúint on September 20, 2009)

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Almost every prominent language on earth is affected by State policies for good or ill.

Affected? At most they decide to change the spelling of some words, but they don't decide to change grammar points and to banish some conjugation forms etc...

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Take the simplification of the Chinese characters and pinyin for one.

That doesn't change the language itself.

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The German alphabet changed and script updated.

Ditto.

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In the USA the almost complete abandonment of traditional grammar to "simplify" things.

I guess you mean traditional grammar isn't taught anymore? Ok, but that doesn't change anything to the language spoken by native speakers, since they already know the language.

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And we don't have to bring up French policy, right?

French policy was intended to kill every language but French. They didn't change the French language. All the orthography reforms in France have failed because the orthographic tradition is very strong. And there wasn't any attempt to simplifiy or modify the language itself. Once there was a policy against English loanwords but it has failed. Too hard to influence the way people speak.

(Message edited by lughaidh on September 20, 2009)

The development of language is obviously a hard concept to grasp. Only when studied in hindsight can the changes can be rationalized according to some sort of real or imaginary pattern. I don't think people are aware of the changes when they are happening.

I have experienced the demise of the German language's present conjunctive during the past three decades. It was still in widespread use in news bulletins and broadsheets back in the 80's when it was considered important to emphasize the fo-shuiteach and unvouched for nature of certain items of information being imparted. (Of course, that was before the commercial TV era.)

That was probably the biggest change. The Rechtsschreibreform in comparison, which was engineered from above and which had everybody up in arms for years, was a wee orthographic storm in a tea-cup. So language development has become one of the last bastions of true democracy. ;)

The way people speak English in Ireland (and in other countries too) has also changed rapidly in the last decades. Everywhere you go the middle-classes are now all speaking Mid-Atlantic-Televisionese - with some weak regional variations thrown in here and there. :)

Do_chinniúint has posted a thought-provoking message that deserves notice. His allusion to the expression "When the harvest is good, no one complains about hunger." is valid. Those of us who, for whatever reason, have become surrounded by family and friends who speak Irish imagine all is well and will continue thus. Without renewed effort it won't.

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with technology, the domination of English over Ireland is almost absolute

True. In a recent conversation with a young Aran Islander, as Gaeilge of course, he pointed out to me that he had been reared in front of the television. He did not know much of the folklore associated with Aran. He was no different from any other young person of his age in Ireland although he could speak Irish fluently. And he does. Willingly!

There are a number of points I would make – not in opposition to Do_chinniúint's statement but in response to it:

Technology enables those of us who know Irish to spread our knowledge and help those who want to learn. More Irish has been written and read – actually read! – in the last ten years than ever before a bhuíochas don Idirlíon seo (thanks to this Internet).

Technology also allows Irish-speaking networks to form online. Cén fáth nach scríobhaimid teachtaireachtaí chuig taobh na Gaeilge den bhfóram seo?

There is no dearth of material available for those wishing to study the language. Songs, literature, folklore and dictionaries are now online available to all.

TG4, Raidio na Gaeltachta, and CDs have a huge impact, at least on those interested in aquiring the language.

I found the following statement frightening. Although my own approach to Irish is optimistic I cannot deny the truth of this:

quote:

one cannot say that Irish has survived for 2000 years and has faced all these hardships, so it will keep on going. Just look at the numbers, they are going down and have been doing so for 2000 years. You cannot deny that. And if the pattern continues, the language will die. It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow. But the Irish language has been slowly bleeding to death for 2000 years now, and unless something is done to heal the wounds, the blood with stop flowing one way or another.

Regarding the numbers: Certainly the number of near monoglot speakers is diminishing week by week. In any house where Daideo, Mamó, or an elderly uncle or maiden aunt always spoke Irish everyone else in the house had familiarity with the language. Unfortunately when Daideo or Mamó dies or is put into a nursing home the language vanishes from that home unless the family has some association with "Tionscal na Gaeilge" – an Irish-language summer college or a good job that allows them the luxury of pursuing an academic interest in the language themselves. Once English becomes dominant in their children's lives it is almost impossible for Irish-speaking parents to prevent it taking over in the home as well.


Yet one can look at other numbers which give hope. The number of people who claim to be fluent speakers of Irish – many of whom prove it night after night on TG4 (I know. I never miss An Nuacht!) – give hope that the language will survive for a very long time to come as a second language. If the census returns were viewed as no more than a pobalbhreith – survey – they would indicate support for the language outside the Gaeltacht. Almost 1,250,000 people claimed some knowledge in Irish the last time I noticed the figures from the daonáireamh. Interest and use of the language outside the Gaeltacht in all spheres of life is crucial for the survival of the spoken language.

Another point which got to me is

quote:

The survival of the language needs new speakers.

It set me thinking of where people learn their Irish. Walking down Griffith Avenue in Dublin once the road-sweeper asked me "Cén t-am é". I asked him "Cá bhfuair tú do chuid Gaeilge". His reply, "Sa Churrach le Máirtín Ó Cadhain".

Our electrician goes for a holiday every summer to Corca Dhuibhne and enjoys speaking Irish. He believes old people in his mother's homeplace spoke the language long ago. He always speaks Irish to me. It is a private thing with him. He is just learning it for his own satisfaction. He did not speak it to his children (How do I know that?) although his example had to be a favourable influence on their learning.

Something may be wrong with the teaching of Irish in some schools. Yesterday I asked a young university student "An dtuigeann tú Gaeilge" and he replied, "No. It was the most hated subject in school."

Yet Gaelscoileanna are prospering despite the damper being put on their expansion by the current recession.

My feeling is that more attention needs to be given to encouraging more active speakers of the language especially by creating opportunities for young adults to use the language and hear it used and thus improve their own Irish.

Adult-education classes in Irish were always a haphazard affair depending on the skill and enthusiasm of the tutor. Where the motivation of the tutor went no further than the stipend the classes lost attendees rapidly.

Thankfully Gael-linn and Gael-chultúr seem to be developing good graded courses for adults and the TEG stages should bring about a marked improvement in people's use of the language.

Computer programmes such as Hot Potatoes allow teachers to use the computer as an aid to their teaching and I hope even more such programmes will be produced with content in the Irish language.

As for simplification, you can't tamper very much with a living language without giving offence to someone. There is no easy way of learning a language. There is a minimum that can be presented at first but the wise language learner will know that in addition to the first few simple phrases there are probably half a dozen more complex ways of expressing the same ideas in the real living language. There is no option but to keep at it. The more years you spend learning the better your Irish will be.

A Thaidhgín,

Sorry about the negative post. One should not be allowed to write after 2 in the morning...LOL

I don't mean to be negative; I just want to be realistic. The language is not in good shape, and it needs help.

Yes, over a million Irish claim to have some knowledge. If you tie in the people from all over the world with "some knowledge," then there are millions, and maybe tens of millions, of Irish speakers. And there is some real hope here because it suggests that there is an active interest in the language. But a language is only as alive as the common folk who speak it. And these folks are few and their numbers are falling.

And I will not lie, the internet has brought with it the chance for the Irish language to spread. And it is doing so very slowly. But there are two types of Irish sites out there. The majority of them are "info sites" that give the same basic info that is being written in most teach yourself books. They do not go into any serious level that can take a student beyond a lower intermediate level. Those that do are usually so technical that unless you have native at your side to simplify the babble...it is not very effective.

The second type…the sites by the speakers themselves. I am starting to see more and more. These are the blogs, personal web pages, news pages, and networking sites. They are not really for a student to come and learn. They are for those with the language already to use the language. I won't say a student cannot use them to learn, but one usually swims before they jump into the ocean. Or at a minimum, can tread water.

The final thing that has to be considered is that for every 1 Irish site an Irish will encounter, they will encounter 10+ English sites. This is not a level playing field. At a lower level, this can program into people the dominance of English over Irish.

If it takes throwing mud in faces to make them see that things are not a nice as they think they are, then I will happily do it. Generations can curse me all they want, but it better be in Irish. LOL ;-)

"As for simplification, you can't tamper very much with a living language without giving offence to someone."

This is very true. However, we can minimize if not avoid the majority of the problems. I still believe it might be possible.

If there are 10,000 people who pronounce "a:" a certain way and they are suddenly told that either they are saying it incorrectly or that it will be said this way...then you will have 10,000 grumpy people.

And this is the approach the Irish keeps taking with this topic. I think that Irish are so use to being dominated, that now they are in control they are not realizing they are doing the same thing.

I think the only solution to this problem, is the same one that has been chosen by just about every other major language in this world. They are going to have to choose one naturally occurring dialect to be the official dialect of the language. Yes, this is not going to be fair, and it is not going to be pretty. But it is the only way. And in one or two generations, when all the bitchers like myself are dead and gone, no one will really be caring that this dialect was chosen for whatever reason.

In the pass, the dialect was chosen by the ruling class, or in Italian's case the dominate literal dialect. In Irish's case, we cannot go this route. I think it is going to come down to numbers. It is either going to have to be the dialect with the most speakers, the dialect that covers the largest area of the island, or the dialect that wins a popularity contest with a simple choose one of the following by the Irish people. Once one dialect is chosen, threads like this will be no more.

The separate but equal mentality has never worked in history. I don’t know why people keep thinking that they are somehow different and going to make it work. Eventually in every closed system, a single unit must be take the lead over the others or the entire system will collapse.

Quote SeanW:

I'm sorry, but I am not trying to act high-horsed here, but this also seems to me to be first grade stuff that the teacher should know even from English classes. Counting syllables! Folaíocht >>> Fo - laíocht.


--- I'm afraid Sean that you are being high-horsed and I don't know where you got it from that my teacher didn't know how to count syllables, even from their English. Unlike me, and a lots of other learners, my teacher is fluent in Irish with a Munster blas, so their Irish is high quality and the best you could get outside the Gaeltacht I'm proud to say :)

The fact is that throughout the country the schools are teaching something like 'folaíocht' as being pronounced as fol-aí-ocht. It is being pronounced with three syllables instead of two. And it is because that is how it looks on the page. That is the result of a caighdeán and non-native speakers teaching Irish. I have been to a couple of Irish classes in Dublin previously with people in the same age group as myself(I am 27) and when we read aloud in the class, that is how we had been taught and that is how we were pronouncing that particular word. We all had the same Irish- surely that wasn't a coincidence. I'm happy with what my level of Irish was like after leaving school as I hear some people saying that they can't string a few sentences together when they leave school, so I'm certainly glad that shocked me! But yeah I got a fine Irish education and it has helped me immensely when I went back to Irish this year. It was a tremendous headstart. Am pleased to say my teacher was also much sought after from surrounding counties to give Irish grinds and had to turn down some students as he was too busy.
:) That is the reality- I experienced it.

Now as I am really and truly immersed in Conamara Irish for the past five months and don't hear as much Munster Irish, I have no problem with being incorrect, but I would say that in the Munster dialect 'folaíocht' would be pronounced as 'fol-aí-ocht' i.e. with three syllables-- The last syllable being less pronounced.
But if someone here has/knows Munster Irish - yourself included Seanw, but remember that the third syllable is less pronounced if you comment- I'd be happy to be corrected.

Maybe you went to school ten years ago like myself SeanW and you had a different experience of 'folaíocht' but you do sound like you didn't get educated in Ireland in the past 10 years. Correct me if I'm wrong... :)

Actually if "folaíocht" does exist in Munster, I guess they'd pronounce "flaíocht" /fli:xt/...
According to Gaeilge Chorca Dhuibhne, they pronounce -(a)íocht as /i:xt/.

quote:

I guess they'd pronounce "flaíocht" /fli:xt/

I am not sure that this is true.

There is a rule that the pretonic vowel is only obscured or left out, if the second, stressed syllable contains no í or ú.

So in this case I would say [fo'li:xt] for folaíocht.

S dócha, ach in 'Gaeilge Chorca Dhuibhne', faghthar somplaí le /u:/ (a scríobhtar ó/eo : pionós, fuinneog, tionóntaí, bunóc) (lch. 28)...
Cibé ar bith.

One could follow the Lárchanúint pronunciations except for "io" and "oi". For those two use the suggested pronunciations in Green's paper (which happen to agree with Ó Siadhail).

A chairde,

Tá an-oiread Béarla anso fé láthair. Labhraimís a thuilleadh Gaelainne mara miste libh. Agus caighdeán? Gheóbhaidh sé bás féin níos luaithe nó níos déanaighe, dar liom.

Sineadw,
I was not trying to sound high-horsed. I am sure your education was very good. I am just surprised people would teach such a thing. The word can be interpreted in three parts, namely, fola, í, and ocht. This is guided by the spelling, surely. Linguistically, though, I believe it would always be two syllables: fo and laíocht. The guess there may be a very slight glide into í, but I don't think it would amount to a new syllable (as I understand that none of the on/off glides, nor the diphthongs, create new syllables.

quote:

Maybe you went to school ten years ago like myself SeanW and you had a different experience of 'folaíocht' but you do sound like you didn't get educated in Ireland in the past 10 years. Correct me if I'm wrong... :)

No, I have not been educated in Ireland. My comment was based on linguistics studies.

I haven't read the whole thread, but on the face of it, the confusion might have arisen from the fact that there is an /i:ə/ diphthong in the second syllable of this word: /foli:əxt/. That's the Connemara way of pronouncing nouns ending with -(a)íocht. Hope it helps.

This Lárchanúint thingy has been round for quite a while. I once used it as my key reference for Irish pronunciation until I realised that if one can master the rules outlined in this article there's almost no reason why one shouldn't make the final step into the real Connacht Irish pronunciation (and choose any variety thereof) - what's more, the real-life Irish is noticeably more logical than even this very elaborate version.

(Message edited by peter on September 21, 2009)

quote:

Tá an-oiread Béarla anso fé láthair. Labhraimís a thuilleadh Gaelainne mara miste libh.

Ní miste, bail ó Dhia ort. Tá sé ag tíocht nós an taoille, tá a fhios 'ad. Agus bíonn an líon cainteoirí cumasacha Gaeilge ag méadú ar an gclár plé seo chomh maith, nós a mbeadh an taoille ag teannadh linn.

Mo leithscéal, bhí "a compromise between Connacht pronunciation and the Lárchanúint" i gceist agam insa méid a scríobh mé thuas ("This Lárchanúint thingy has been round for quite a while..."), seachas "Lárchanúint" per se.

Regarding the pronunciation of "folaíocht": in the old spelling it appeared as "folaidheacht" which would suggest a diphthong in the second syllable if not a third syllable.

Learners (like myself) pronouncing Irish do not expend enough effort on each consonant, vowel, and syllable. Listen to a real native speaker and you will hear they give extraordinary resonance to every sound. Those of us armed with the sounds of English can't even come close. Ours is a light pronunciation. They give full weight to everything.

I remember being picked up for pronouncing "níl" as the English "kneel". My native speaker colleague couldn't suffer it any longer and pointed out that the correct pronunciation was "ní fhuil" and did he give wellie to the "n" the "í" and the slender "l". I realised that I had to begin again to listen and learn.

Very often the old spelling with its supposedly superfluous vowels and long comhfhocail is a great aid to correct pronunciation. Take your time, tóg bog é, and give thought to each syllable, savour each consonant, and avoid any sort of rushed staccato delivery. Bíodh blas ar do chuid Gaeilge.

Those of us who have had the privilege of reading for an tAifreann Gaeilge know you have to speak slowly and clearly to be understood.

Some people, not understanding what they are reading themselves, imagine that their hearers will not understand either and just rush through it. Their attachment is to Irish as a symbol not as a live medium of communication.They're pretending. Some politicians are forced into that position also.

Nevertheless we must be thankful that Irish is being used and put before the younger generation as something that has a place in public life and more especially in the home. Irish is not just for school. Nor is Irish just for examinations. Is féidir spraoi agus craic a bhaint aisti agus caradas a chruthú le daoine eile a bhfuil Gaeilge acu. Cá bhfios cá dtabharfadh sé sin tú.

Go raibh maith agat, a Thaidhgín.

Having the old spelling does often give more information for speaker and learner alike. The CO book says idhea > io, and mentions a glide. At the end of the day I am interested in how any Irish speaker pronounces it. I would find it peculiar, though, considering complaints about Irish language schooling and over emphasis on the CO, that they'd be teaching a more conservative pronunciation expressed through older spelling. Just a thought.

Perhaps some do pronounce it like fo-la-idheacht. So I looked at "The Irish of Iorras Aithneach, County Galway". It supports almost completely the pronunciation given by Peter. I wonder what others say? Perhaps it is somewhat different. When looking at the same ending -aíocht, speakers said: iǝxt or i:ǝxt.

In a similar context (same vowel trigraph, but not the same ending -cht) someone used the triphthong aiǝ. Maybe that's what they're teaching. (?)

quote:

Maybe that's what they're teaching. (?)

Who knows. There is no hard and fast rule as to pronunciation. Teachers are like everyone else: they imagine their own speech is correct and fail to see their own errors. Most teachers will have had tuition in the foghraíocht of one or other of the canúintí and will be aware of the major pitfalls. To vary the old saying "ní lia oide ná foghraíocht" [Not -- more numerous -- teacher -- than -- pronunciation].

Those with a Gaeltacht background will have more authentic pronunciation but even those from other parts of the country will not stray very far because there is a lot of Irish "in the air" in Ireland if only in the placenames and official names like Dáil, Seanad, Oireachtas, Taoiseach, Tánaiste, Uachtarán, Áras an Uachtaráin, Córas Iompair Éireann, Bus Scoile, Roinn na Gaeltachta, Cathaoirleach, Garda Síochána, Ceann Comhairle, etc etc.

Irish people raised with Hiberno-English or "Kiltartanese", the language of the Synge plays, will have little difficulty with the pronunciation of Irish. Ask any Dubliner to imitate a "country cousin" speaking English! People new to Ireland face a bigger challenge.

Difficulties arise with slender and broad consonants, "mo chreach is mo chás" for example or "lá breá" and the diphthongs "nuair" and "chuala" etc

quote:

Maybe that's what they're teaching. (?)

Who knows. There is no hard and fast rule as to pronunciation. Teachers are like everyone else: they imagine their own speech is correct and fail to see their own errors. Most teachers will have had tuition in the foghraíocht of one or other of the canúintí and will be aware of the major pitfalls. To vary the old saying "ní lia oide ná foghraíocht" [Not -- more numerous -- teacher -- than -- pronunciation].

Those with a Gaeltacht background will have more authentic pronunciation but even those from other parts of the country will not stray very far because there is a lot of Irish "in the air" in Ireland if only in the placenames and official names like Dáil, Seanad, Oireachtas, Taoiseach, Tánaiste, Uachtarán, Áras an Uachtaráin, Córas Iompair Éireann, Bus Scoile, Roinn na Gaeltachta, Cathaoirleach, Garda Síochána, Ceann Comhairle, etc etc.

Irish people raised with Hiberno-English or "Kiltartanese", the language of the Synge plays, will have little difficulty with the pronunciation of Irish. Ask any Dubliner to imitate a "country cousin" speaking English! People new to Ireland face a bigger challenge.

Difficulties arise with slender and broad consonants, "mo chreach is mo chás" for example or "lá breá" and the diphthongs "nuair" and "chuala" etc

quote:

"Also, one cannot say that Irish has survived for 2000 years and has faced all these hardships, so it will keep on going. Just look at the numbers, they are going down and have been doing so for 2000 years. You cannot deny that. And if the pattern continues, the language will die. It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow. But the Irish language has been slowly bleeding to death for 2000 years now, and unless something is done to heal the wounds, the blood with stop flowing one way or another. "

The numbers going down for two thousand years? Bleeding to death for two thousand years? What on earth are you talking about???

quote:

Learners (like myself) pronouncing Irish do not expend enough effort on each consonant, vowel, and syllable. Listen to a real native speaker and you will hear they give extraordinary resonance to every sound. Those of us armed with the sounds of English can't even come close. Ours is a light pronunciation. They give full weight to everything.

This brings to mind the following from Shán Ó Cuív's "The Sounds of Irish":-

"Most speakers of Irish-English use all the Irish vowels, except the nasal vowels, in their English speech. ... Sometimes, however, the pure Irish quality of the vowels is missing. The articulation, too, is generally not so tense as it is in Irish-Irish. Attention should be drawn to the tenseness of Irish articulation, in the first stages of the study of the language. For all Irish sounds, consonants as well as vowels, the vocal organs take up their positions more precisely than they do for English, the articulation of which sounds indolent to a Frenchman or a native Irish speaker."

Dahtet,

How many Irish speakers, and by Irish speakers I mean people whose daily lives are conducted through the medium of Irish...do you think there are in Ireland today?

This number has been going down for a very long time.




As I said before, Irish has a separate but equal approach to all things Irish. And this confuses me because there is nothing equal about them.

I had the pleasure of attending Oideas Gael many years ago. After few weeks in the Glenn, I went to Gweedore where many locals complimented me on my pronunciation. Now is it possible they were just being kind, absolutely. But as I went about the region, many people were impressed with my local accent.

A few years later I was in An Cheathrú Rua and I tried talking to locals I was constantly being corrected. Now I was aware of the differences. But I wanted to see if they would understand me. And they did. If they didn't know what I was trying to say they would never have tried to correct me. The problem was what they were concentrating in their correction, for example they never said "That's how they saying things in the north."

It was always "That's not how you say that," or "We don't say that," or my particular favorite was "Were did you learn that?" In other words, they were more concerned with the choice of dialect.

That's why topics like these are so frustrating to me. I completely understand people's wanting to speak like the native's. But the problem is that with Irish you have to choose which natives you want to speak like because there is no central core to the language.

That's why I am all for the suggestion of something like the compromise. The problem with the comprimise is that it may be overlooking some things in an attempt to reduce the language down.

This is a very interesting discussion. I have lived in Holland for the last ten years so anything I know about the Irish language on the ground has been garnered from the internet. From my perspective the Irish language is in a much better state than it was ten years ago. Although I grew up in Ireland and did Irish debating at school I was never regularly exposed to native speakers. Where I am from people turned off the Nuacht when it came on, there was no encouragement from my family or community to treat Irish as anything more than a token language. When I did speak to native speakers they often switched to English because of my accent.
Thanks to technology the conditions are now in place to allow those who support the language to engage with it as often as they want. I tune in to TG4 and Radio na Life, I have a subscription to Nós magazine, I have ordered books from Litríocht. Ten years ago the language may as well have been Mandarin to me because I felt so far away from the Irish language community. Now, although I live in Holland, the language is alive for me and I am planning to set up an Irish speaking group with some (English speaking) Irish colleagues.
I have learned several other languages. In the past I was extremely negative about Irish because of the fact that you learned the language at school and then you never had a chance to use it again. Other languages provided me with far more satisfying experiences. Irish is now at the party and I can find the resources I need to push towards the fluency I never had.
I agree totally with the poster who suggested that one of the natural dialects should be the main one. I think that people need to accept that future Irish dialects will sound more and more English (to native Irish speaking ears). The only way to generate a sufficient new body of Irish speakers is for English speakers who have attended Gaelscoileanna to bring up their kids through Irish, the English influences will be unavoidable.
In that respect Irish is far from unique. Frisian is becoming steadily more Dutchified while Afrikaans moves further and further from Dutch and adopts more Anglicisms. That is the way of languages. However, Irish is so different from English that a non-speaker is unlikely to notice. Compare that to Dutch where practically every adoption from English is noticable. Still there is nobody in their right mind who would suggest that Dutch is becoming the same language as English at anything other than a glacial speed.

quote:

This number has been going down for a very long time.

Yes, but 180 years rather than 2000 would be more accurate. The turning point was about 1820.

There are still dialects and you can go back and speak old irish should you wish - good luck prouncing it ''right'' tho.

Irish is not and was not simplified in the sense you mean - it was formalised and standardised. There is a fundamental difference.



Have you been to the gaeltachtaí? They are not ignorant of the caighdeán nor of English, in fact they are highly highly affected by both and for a very very long time.
Before the caighdeán - it is not the big bad demon it is portrayed to be:

by people outside ireland mostly I must add...

Irish has not been in decline for 2000 years - how do you figure that.

It has not been in decline since at least after the normans and has not been in any critical danger since after 1800

as between 1800 and 1900 roughly about 8 million people left ireland (1 million died) and these were mainly irish speakers.

quote:

This number has been going down for a very long time

.

Sorry Do chinniúint but if you think Irish has been declining for two thousand years you have quite a lot to learn about the history of the language!

(Message edited by Dahtet on September 23, 2009)

quote:

That's why topics like these are so frustrating to me. I completely understand people's wanting to speak like the native's. But the problem is that with Irish you have to choose which natives you want to speak like because there is no central core to the language.

Perhaps it is my background growing up in the USA, the old "melting-pot", that forms my view on this most. Everyone tends to operate in cliques while sharing a certain agreed upon "standard" without anyone really stating it. But, in terms of language, if you try to "fake" an accent here, it is seen as utterly foolish. The biggest virtue in terms of language here is fitting in, trying to lessen your "dialectical" accent at least in public discourse. There is a certain barrier before you become "local" and can talk like the locals. The idea then of learning Irish and adopting a "fake" accent seems very strange to me. It seems as strange as an Indian man moving to New York and trying to sound from New York, or a Caucasian man faking an Ebonics, Urban Black accent. (This doesn't apply to anyone who picks up this speech naturally through exposure, but mostly to people who put it on.) As a learner without a live teacher or community there is a dilemma then. I haven't solved it for myself hoping that it will solve itself. I tend to focus on the standard spelling and grammar because, in theory, they would have the widest applicability in Ireland since native speakers would be educated in it to a certain extent. Any given dialect by definition would have fewer users, so, in my mind, it would weaken my learning. The narrowing down would come when a live teacher is found, or I move to an area of Ireland. I think this is why a more nip-and-tuck approach to some things appeals to people like me, of course having the full knowledge that things are not so nip-and-tuck.

What is the Irish virtue? Getting along? Being unique? Being in your provencial clique? Being accepted? Being contrarian no matter what the topic? Is it changing?

quote:

I think that people need to accept that future Irish dialects will sound more and more English (to native Irish speaking ears). The only way to generate a sufficient new body of Irish speakers is for English speakers who have attended Gaelscoileanna to bring up their kids through Irish, the English influences will be unavoidable.

I was watching Aifric and think the young characters were using a borrowing of house instead of teach. I may be wrong, but it wasn't teach. (By the way, in my opinion this is not a show to learn from. Definitely geared toward natives. It moves very fast and is aimed at teenage "coolness".)

English is a big beast coming to every neighborhood in the world from Papua New Guinea to Barundi. Most states I think should treat it like Latin, that is, an international language not native to their country. If you treat it like a native language, it just may end of becoming it. (When you see a sign that has Irish and English and English is bold or bigger, think of the subliminal message that sends ...)

quote:

But the Irish language has been slowly bleeding to death for 2000 years now

Do_chinniúint, that's just plain false. Perhaps you meant that Celtic culture has been in decline? The 19th century is certainly when the tide changed for Irish. The emigrations, the "famine", the ripening of British policy, the ascendancy of English as the international language, and the ripening of the industrial revolution. (One may even thank God that the Irish nation is around concidering all the blows you've taken!) There were a lot of factors that created the right conditions in Ireland for people to drop Irish.

No, actually I do know a lot about the history of the language....

The earliest recorded attempt to remove the language from Ireland was in 431 when Pope Celestine I gave Pallidius orders for the total subjagation of Ireland. "To remove from he land, the tongue a pagans uses. And bring to them order." While he succeeded in conquering parts of the south, he was forced back out because he had no military support.

His report to the Pope would lead to the more "peaceful conversion" as it was called. In 432 Pratricius himself writes "If I am to bring savaltion to this place, I must first teach them how to read." He, and many of the other monkes and bishops there, were not teaching the Irish how to read and write the Irish language. They taught Latin. And more importantly...they only taught the upper classes. Gee, that's strange. Why them? Couldn't be that they were trying to get the upper classes to change and then force the peasants to follow...no, not Patricius, that's impossible.

Let's not forget that after the Christian conversion, most rulers would now use Latin as a language of commerse between Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales.

So at least as early as 1500 years ago that foreign attempts were actively and successfully lessening the hold of the Irish language of their island.

As the vikings became more and more of the presense on the Ireland it is true the often conformed to Irish culture....or did they? Go find out what language they spoke while in Ireland. What language they did business in. It wasn't Irish.

But the real beginning of the fall was 1066. This is an important day in Irish history also. As soon as William is in power he attacks Ireland several times and fails miserably. However, where he succeeds is getting alliances, importicular he contrated on Lenister. That in itself is not a problem, until you realize that his first laws made it very clear that no one was to speak Irish in England, the Irish were not allowed to do business in Irish in England. And when he was in Lenister, no one was to speak Irish in his presence. That's odd don't you think?

Bring on Pope Adrian IV... gave Henry I and his successors the right to rule Ireland and to bring about religious reformation there. "Let us remove from the world the pagan filth of Ireland." His words not mine. LOL

By the 1100's Ireland was steadfeast Christian. Who were the Irish he was concerned for? It was the Irish speaking peasantry.

In 1157 Henry II and Dumbass O'Conner sign the Treaty of Winsdor when makes Connaught subservient to England. And by the way some of the first Penal Codes, although not called that, for not speaking Irish in this region of Ireland.

You think 1840's brought on a decrease in Irish speaking population...try 1340's! While the numbers weren't as high, the percentages were. Ireland was not immunne to the Black Death. Appeartnly whiskey doesn't cure all.

Those who survived the death lived to see the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1366 which forbade the marriage of Irish and English. This was an act by the Irish intended to reverse the Anglo/Norman assimilation that was happening. If the assimilation was not causing enough problems for the Irish leaders, then why make a law against it? The Irish in charge during the 1300's were aware they were losing their control over their island and culture. There are many works of the day, in Latin and French, by the Irish talking about how they need to speak more Irish...LOL

In 1494, Sir Edward Poyning, yes that was really his name...went before the Irish Parliment in Drogheda and asserted that the legislative body will hereafter be subject to the authority of the British parliment! Ballsy, but effective. They held to it. From that point on, they used the language of the day (not Irish) in official Irish matters.

1536, The passing of the English Act of Supremacy. Henry VIII was now the moral compass of Ireland. Not the Catholic Popes who started it all. Henry by the way was obsessed with removing any Irish trace of Ireland.

1542, The passing of the Crown of Ireland Act. Saddest day in Irish history. I am certain it sounded good at the time. But what did the loving English father do with his Irish children, that's right a whole list of things the Irish couldn't do. Number one, speak their language.
Hoozah for Dad! I think there is in an interesting relation in wrods. Henry VIII = HATE Think about it...LOL

Mary I was no sweetheart. "Let us settle this land with the proper race." Curious words to be uttering just before she establishes the plantations and Queens's County and King's Country of Lois and Offaly if you ask me.

In 1558 Elizebth I starts the first attested "penal codes" although previous royalty did this also. This is the first time the phrase penal codes will be used in this instance. Specifically designed to bring Ireland to more English state of being and not Irish. Again the language seems to make it to the top of the list, however, this time the English could punish Irish for speaking Irish without reprisal. There's a contender for the Mother of the Year award.

Look...these are just some of the examples that I could think of off the top of my head, I am certain there are quite a few more. These are some of the more important ones there were directly related to how Irish was thought of and used in the country.

As we get to more modern times...then yes, the number start drastically falling. After the Famine, the rise of English over the world...the numbers take a serious dump.

But the point is that the language has been harped on for a very long time, that goes way beyond the 1800's. I am willing to go from 2000 to 1500 years. But you cannot deny that with the coming of Patricius, the language is now going to be a target for any group that take in interest in the island.

And yes, I know my history. Can you say the same?

(Message edited by do_chinniúint on September 23, 2009)

Sorry Seánw, you must have posted while I was writing my last post...

I am actually talking about the number of Irish speakers and not the Gaelic culture.

When I say "the numbers" are declining, I mean the percentage of Irish speakers in relation to the percentage of non-Irish speakers. And this includes languages other than English.

The events I mentioned above were just some of the more direct events that I could remember from my school days, when I concentrated my studies on Irish history, that had a direct negative affect on the language. If you add in all the passive events, such as education, religion, economic policy, social reforms...you can almost do a year to year report on the matter.

From the 1800-present, one could make the statement that the numbers are going up. But this is deceptive. The numbers are only going up because of natural increase in population. The ratio of Irish speaking to non-Irish speaking is going down.

And questions like "Do you speak Irish?" "How often?" are just not good enough to give a realistic picture.

A person who goes to the pub every day and toasts "Sláinte" could make the case that they use the Irish language daily. But just because one uses a word here and there, or a phrase every now and then; doesn't mean they are speaking the language. Just because a person had Irish at school doesn't mean they can speak it, or that they do. I had six years of Spanish at school. I couldn't speak it if I wanted to. And it would be a lie if I said I did.

The last serious studies that I read for the topic were Hindley and Ó hEithir's works. Both conducted separate studies and put the numbers of native speakers between 10-20,000 people. With some redefining of what a native speaker was the numbers have been fluffed up to about 30-50,000 speakers. But the last time I really looked for the numbers was in 97 I think. Natural increase in the past decade will have caused this number to go up, but again I have to question the ratio.

That's why I think it is important for Irish to declare an official dialect for the language. It allows for regional variations that are going to happen anyway, but it also allows for the creative minds working hard to create new resources to focus their work collectively to give Irish a strong chance.

(Message edited by do_chinniúint on September 23, 2009)

Do_chinniúint,
I've seen this style before. It seems like you are anti-Catholic. It may not be true, but your style seems like it. Mostly it comes off like that because of a strongly one-sided view of history. Basically, the Catholic Church and the Popes did no good in Ireland or for the Irish language.

quote:

The earliest recorded attempt to remove the language from Ireland was in 431 when Pope Celestine I gave Pallidius orders for the total subjagation of Ireland. "To remove from he land, the tongue a pagans uses. And bring to them order." While he succeeded in conquering parts of the south, he was forced back out because he had no military support.

I'd be interested to read more about that. Can you give me the citation to the Latin decree for this order and campaign, or an English translation?

quote:

His report to the Pope would lead to the more "peaceful conversion" as it was called. In 432 Pratricius himself writes "If I am to bring savaltion to this place, I must first teach them how to read." He, and many of the other monkes and bishops there, were not teaching the Irish how to read and write the Irish language. They taught Latin. And more importantly...they only taught the upper classes. Gee, that's strange. Why them? Couldn't be that they were trying to get the upper classes to change and then force the peasants to follow...no, not Patricius, that's impossible.

Uh, everyone did this. This isn't unique to Ireland or Catholic Bishops. Widespread literacy, and wide vernacular use in writing, didn't come down the pike in Europe for quite a while. You don't cite that perhaps many people didn't want to learn to read or write, and that Plato thought of writing and books as a downgrade from the oral culture.

quote:

Let's not forget that after the Christian conversion, most rulers would now use Latin as a language of commerse between Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales.

That seems to make sense to me. Just as it makes sense for the Irish now to use English for international commerce.

quote:

So at least as early as 1500 years ago that foreign attempts were actively and successfully lessening the hold of the Irish language of their island.

I doubt that there was any lessening. Even if rated by percentage, the result would be negligible, I'd think. That's like saying English in England was threatened by the Latin language and Christianity. Not the case at all, but perhaps with other cultures (the Vikings, etc.), but still I think that the case can be made that English was under greater threat from say 700-1400 than Irish. Latin after 400-500 AD was confined to certain spheres of life like the Church, law, and international commerce.

quote:

But the real beginning of the fall was 1066 ...

So the previous beginnings weren't real? The Anglo-Normans were very forceful about almost everything. You could say the foothold was laid at this time, but Irish was in the stronger position shown mostly by the foreigners adopting it.

quote:

Not the Catholic Popes who started it all.

Ouch. I often wonder why people who criticize the Church and the Popes, will not also acknowledge the good done by the Church and other Popes. But I guess enlightened Ireland now has the freedom to not be Catholic (previously they were shackled to it?), and Ireland is becoming a better place for it, right? How long till the baby killing comes to a town near you. Perhaps the Gaeltacht kiddos will be first. There will be the demise of your Irish language. And do you acknowledge Catholics who set vernaculars in the literary tradition? One big one that comes to mind is Dante. I think of Chaucer as well. I also think of the fact that we have Irish works available to us from the past, so someone kept them going right? We're they monks or peasant farmers, or both? I'll be the first to admit corruption in the past and present and future of the Church (sin is not unique to Catholics), but your remarks are overly broad to paint a distorted picture of history.

quote:

I am willing to go from 2000 to 1500 years. But you cannot deny that with the coming of Patricius, the language is now going to be a target for any group that take in interest in the island.

Evil Patrick who lived among the common people of Ireland as a slave, and came back after having escaped. One bishop. The Irish could resist the British Empire, endure as a people through all the muck you just stated, but they couldn't resist one bishop? Any people that are so converted to a religion as to have it permeate almost everything they do from "Dia's Muire duit" to place names like Monkstown, makes me think maybe a few people were willingly interested in what Patrick had to say (in Irish?). The truth is that Irish remained strong in Ireland as long as Catholics held power, pre 16th century. The proof is in the pudding, they say. True the Irish have been unjustly treated in many ways for many generations by their own kin and foreigners. This is the story of humanity. This isn't unique to them, and is unfortunately more common in history than the opposite. To paint such a broad one-sided bigoted picture does not prove your points. I am sorry the discussion had to sink to such a level.

"Evil Patrick who lived among the common people of Ireland as a slave, and came back after having escaped. One bishop..."

No, a group of people were there. You just don't hear about them as much.

And as a practicing Catholic, I can assure you that I am not anti-Catholic. But it was Christianity that first began to drive the negativity against the Irish.

The specific Popes mentioned (not all Popes) and Patricius were just the celebrities that history has chosen to example. In their effort to convert Ireland they did something very negative for the Irish.

They preached that the Irish way was wrong. They preached that the Irish way was inferior. They preached that the only way to salvation was to abandon their Irish culture and embrace the Christian way, which at the time was the Roman way. There is little you can say to refute this is what they were doing at the time.

You want a citation for the decree?

O'Croinin, "Who Was Palladius 'First Bishop of the Irish'?", Peritia, volume 12 (2000), 205-37.

But it actually comes out in the last thing the Pope gave him to remind him of his duties. A copy of the three decrees from the 6th session at Nicaea of which he sat over:

"It is not permitted to produce, speak, write or compose any other creed except the one which was defined by the holy fathers who were gathered together in the Holy Spirit at Nicaea."

This is just a fancy way of saying that the Church is only going to allow the word to be spread by their means and no other. In other words, religion is going to have to be carried out in Latin, and no other means. If you followers don't know it, you're going to teach it and make damn certain they know it.

We're not talking about Plato or other cultures and their experiences. We are talking about Ireland and her experience. They are not the same.

Do the French use English for the majority of the commerce? Do the Germans, Russian, and Japanese? No. They do on the small scale with English speaking partners...but that's it. Irish today speak English because their language was taken from them, not because they chose to lose it.

How can you doubt there was a lessening...there are more than enough numbers out there to suggest if not prove it. Contact the CSO and ask them for a copy of all the sources for statistics on the Irish speaking population. I did this in 92 for a paper I was working on. They were more than happy to send a massive package with sources from England, Spain, France, and Ireland that went all the way back to the 1600's. The ratio of Irish to non-Irish speakers declines from the 1600's on...but it was doing that before. Never does the ratio reverse itself.

Who adopted the language? Who chose to use Irish as their language of choice outside of Ireland after the middle ages? I am not saying it didn't migrate with people, and I am certain there was in interest group here and there...but you cannot tell me that people adopted it. They adopted Irish monastic practice, they adopted Irish clothing, they adopted Irish music...where was there an adoption of the language?

People asked me for historical evidence for the reasons that I think the way I do. That Irish was being targeted for decline long before the 19th century, and that's what I gave them. Researchable happenings that actively had a negative effect on the language. The fact that you interpreted the way you did, is very sad. You made a very foolish presumption about me. I only listed the events. You projecting your beliefs and interpretations on what you think my intent was...which was simply to state some of the events that happened before the 1800's.

Look...if a person really wants to debate my opinions, I am more than happy to debate with them in another thread. But if people would spend half the time producing counter arguments rather than attacking the statements made, we could go a lot farther with them.

The spirit of this thread is a good one. I think it hits on a very important issue with the Irish language. Their are ideas floating around out there about ways of overcoming dialect differences that are worth serious consideration. I apologize to the original post for my tangent, but I have very strong feelings about the decline of the language. And I more than enough room to go toe to toe with anyone who thinks that the 19th century was the start of a downslide for the language. If you do not agree, good lets discuss it, but in another thread please.

(Message edited by do_chinniúint on September 23, 2009)

quote:

This is just a fancy way of saying that the Church is only going to allow the word to be spread by their means and no other.

That is dodgy theology, and dodgy history.

Má tá do mhothúcháin chomh láidir sin, céard faoi níos lú sleachta fada Sacs-Bhéarla uait, agus níos mó Gaeilge?

Cleachtadh a níos máistreacht.

That is my interpretation of the decree, nothing more. We are still free to interpret things are we not?

In reality it is "dodgable" decree.

(Message edited by do_chinniúint on September 23, 2009)

Ah. The Humpty Dumpty tactic.

Arís.

LOL,

I will agree, but you have to admit one that works ;-)

The reason I refrain from somethings is that I am often asked to justify my remarks, which to a degree I am willing to do. But when people only attack with "you're wrong" "that's not right" "prove it" and they fail to present a counter or provide reasons for their counter I have no interest in debate.

Is my argument strong here...well, I am wiling to say it could be stonger on this point about the decree. The hard part is tying in the notion that it could be used as a justification to the negation of Irish in some form. It alone has nothing to do with the language. But if a mind is crafty enough to start projecting what it could mean, then it becomes a means for justification.

Shortly after this decree, it become prohibited, and even illegal to teach the language in any language other than Latin, barring the those who used Greek before the decree. All congregations from that point had no choice in the matter, so it was the Latin way or no way at all, and no way at all wasn't an option for the Irish who were being converted.

(Message edited by do_chinniúint on September 23, 2009)

quote:

They preached that the Irish way was wrong. They preached that the Irish way was inferior. They preached that the only way to salvation was to abandon their Irish culture and embrace the Christian way, which at the time was the Roman way. There is little you can say to refute this is what they were doing at the time.

I think you don't realize how much the opposite occurred. Irish culture permeated the other cultures and spread for a while. The Irish were so unforced to abandon a lot of their native culture and beliefs that you have people still talking about fairies and little people and what-not!

quote:

"It is not permitted to produce, speak, write or compose any other creed except the one which was defined by the holy fathers who were gathered together in the Holy Spirit at Nicaea." This is just a fancy way of saying that the Church is only going to allow the word to be spread by their means and no other. In other words, religion is going to have to be carried out in Latin, and no other means. If you followers don't know it, you're going to teach it and make damn certain they know it.

That's strange because the Council of Nicea was conducted in Greek. That's quite an extrapolation from the quoted statement to "subject the Irish and extinguish their language".

quote:

Do the French use English for the majority of the commerce? Do the Germans, Russian, and Japanese? No. They do on the small scale with English speaking partners...but that's it.

I would say that most of those peoples use English for international commerce when speaking with people outside their culture.

Really? My turn. Prove it.

Prove:

I think you don't realize how much the opposite occurred. Irish culture permeated the other cultures and spread for a while.

Prove:

I would say that most of those peoples use English for international commerce when speaking with people outside their culture.

I ask this for two reasons. It is frustrating when people do this to others, and no matter what you say (no matter how true it is) I can still say, well that's "your interpretation." Which I will only do if I do not agree with what you are saying.

And don't worry, I am not honestly asking for proof because I know you are not incorrect when you say the Irish did have an affect on the outside world, but I will ask you to ask yourself this question, "Was it Irish, or was it an echo of the Irish by the time the other nations really started looking at them."

Because in the high and late middle ages, there was a serious influence that Irish spread not only in England, but the continent as well. I know where you were going with that. But it wasn't the language. Europe wanted to enjoy certain aspects of Irish culture, but the language wasn't really one of them.

(Message edited by do_chinniúint on September 23, 2009)

And you are correct the session of Niceae were in both Greek and Latin, but we are not talking about the council. We are talking about the results that stimulated out of the Council and what they meant for people practicing across the world.

Do Chinniúint,

I worked in Germany for 10 years. For five of those years, I was on an international project involving Germany, German Speaking Switzerland and Sweden. All business was conducted in English. All technical documents were written in English.

I have been working on European space Agency projects for the last seven years. All business is conducted in English.

This is the rule, not the exception.

Latin was the lingua franca of the educated West in the middle ages and later. For a while, French took over. Now, English. Tomorrow - Mandarin.

The liturgical language of Islam is Arabic. But Muslims speak plenty of other languages.

Your arguments are red herrings. The 2000 years figure just does not stack up.

Agus fós tá tú ag léachtóireacht leat as Béarla, ag cuir am agus fuinneamh amú orainn.

I have given you my examples that says it does, now please give me examples that it does not.

You say they are red herrings, why? Why can these not be accepted now?

What refutes them?

And Germany is not a very good example to have used because Germans have had a very negative opinion of their language for a very long time.

You worked for the German space program, OK.

Everything was in English, OK.

Why? Why English?

Was it because the Germans felt the English was the supieror language of the two, when German has historically been held as the language of the sciences?

Or, could it be that it was in English because their primary usage would be in a specialized field that catered to English speaking participants?

This is one field of many which hardly qualifies it as a rule for all fields.

My cousin used to work for a travel agency that had an office in Berlin. She had to learn German for the job. Most of her work was conducted in German when she did business with them.

Your rule does not hold in this case, and it is only one example.

Aonghus, and all that do not agree with me. I am not trying to be an ass here, and I hope you don't take me too personally here because I have no negative feelings. I just want to know why people feel I am off the mark. And frankly, no one has yet even tried to offer reason for it other than "they don't agree, or they think I am wrong."

I can respect this, really I can. If anything I encourage it because it gives me a reason to dig deeper into things, but I need to have something more than an opinion.

A person cannot say "you are wrong," and then not give a valid reason why. I would be happy to hear "you are wrong because I believe..." While that gives minimum credibility, at least I can understand where they are coming from. If they do, then are they really any more correct that those they accuse of being incorrect?

Anyway I have said what I believe, take it or leave it. This is my last post on the matter, although something tails me we will go down this path again in another thread...LOL

(Message edited by do_chinniúint on September 23, 2009)

Sorry, along with my horrible grammar tonight, I skipped a whole area of thought above.

I meant to say:

A person cannot say "you are wrong," and then not give a valid reason why. I would be happy to hear "you are wrong because I believe..." While that gives minimum credibility, at least I can understand where they are coming from. If a person does not at least give a reason for their contra statement, then are they really any more correct that those they accuse of being incorrect?

Bed time for me...LOL

quote:

plusors Engleis de la dit terre guepissant la lang gis monture leys & usages Engleis vivent et se governement as maniers guise et lang des Irrois enemies

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/F300001-001/index.html

http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/T300001-001/index.html

One of the ways to answer a question is with a flat yes or no. "You are wrong" is a no. It is meant to incite you to clarify your arguments and come back. It may be for you to figure out what the other person thinks is wrong. The burden is on you because you broached the 2000 year topic with the long litany of history that didn't pan out the way you said it did.

quote:

Prove: I think you don't realize how much the opposite occurred. Irish culture permeated the other cultures and spread for a while.

Just a cursory search produces this information:

Charters, cartularies and archives : the preservation and transmission of documents in the medieval West
By Anders Winroth & Adam J Kosto
Pg. 46

"Saint-Fursy of Péronne, the burial site of the Irish monk and missionary Fursa (d. ca. 650), had housed a community of monks since the seventh century. The monastery survived the Northmen's invasion of 880 and played an important role as a center from which the insular Irish culture spread to continential Europe."



Le bilinguisme précoce en Bretagne, en pays celtiques et en Europe Atlantique
By Frañses Favereau
Pg. 61

".. the Irish language spread northwards into Scotland and the Isle of Man, reaching its greatest expansion in the 10th century ..."

(It displaced the Pictish language.)

I also think the 2000 year figure is way off base, although I understand the point that Do_chinniúint is trying to make.

It's true that Latin was the dominant language of Irish manuscripts for some time, however Irish overtakes it from around the 9th century, IIRC. Before Irish was mostly confined to the margins of manuscripts. The use of vernacular languages was discouraged by Rome. See The Cambridge History of Irish Literature for more information. Focusing on the chapters: 'The literature of medieval Ireland to c. 800: St Patrick to the Vikings' by Tomás Ó Cathasaigh and 'The literature of medieval Ireland, 800–1200: from the Vikings to the Normans' by Máire Ní Mhaonaigh.
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?ISBN=0521822246

Sure, the English crown passed all sorts of laws 'banning' the speaking of Irish from the 14th century onwards, but the reality is that it was rarely enforced and rarely followed. Indeed, the Statutes of Kilkenny were revised and updated some years later and there was no mention of the language issue. There are records from c. 1515 which complain about how English is on the verge of being wiped out in Ireland. How commoners in 'The English Pale' (centred of course, on Dublin) speak Irish amongst themselves. There are many examples.

Those with an interest in the subject should read 'The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366-1922: A Sourcebook' by Tony Crowley. Crowley is also the author of 'Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537-2004'.
http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Language-Ireland-1366-1922-Sourcebook/dp/04151571 88

We don't even know with any certainty what language was spoken on the island of Ireland 2000 years ago. Some scholars have suggested that a Brythonic language was spoken when the Goidels arrived and that 'Irish' wasn't the dominant lingua franca until the 6th century. That an earlier Celtic language survived in parts of Munster until the 8th century. There are numerous theories.

Anyway, Irish was not seriously threatened until the Tudor conquest, in my opinion. It had already become a minority language in certain parts of the country by the 17th century. For example, in parts of south Wexford. The Baronies of Forth and Bargy. Google 'Yola language'. Fingal in county Dublin. Google 'Fingallian'. Perhaps in Wicklow as well English was stronger. But on the whole, the majority of inhabitants in Ireland spoke Irish only.

After the Gaelic 'aristocracy' was defeated at Kinsale, after the Flight of the Earls, things changed forever. Irish was not the language of power and prestige.

Some say the turning point was around 1820. I would argue it was around 1600 or so. Irish hasn't been the language of power and influence in over four centuries. On the eve of the famine, Irish was already largely confined to the barren, rocky, overcrowded areas up and down the western seaboard. Galway, Mayo, Clare, Sligo, west Donegal etc. A mostly poverty-stricken, illiterate mass of people who were often on the verge of starvation. Not that literacy levels were sky high amongst the more anglicised east and midlands. Not at all.

In the early 1900s, a member of the Gaelic League claimed that there were barely 50 native speakers in the entire country who could both read and write in the Irish script. Surely an exagerration, but it showed the challenge that they faced as they tried to resurrect a native Irish literature which had almost died out.

A compelling argument is that if the Great Famine hadn't occurred, the % of the population with Irish would have been much higher, thereby making the work of the Gaelic Leaguers easier. As it happened, by the time partial Irish independence was granted in 1921 and the Free State reated, approximately 12% of the population were Irish speakers.

To me, the Statute of Kilkenny is evidence of the vigour of Gaelic culture at that time, since English settlers were being absorbed, as the Norse were before.

English was a parochial, limited language with little status even in England until the Tudors. (The Statute of Kilkenny itself was in French, as most laws were at that time!)

Do_chinniúint,the Statutes of Kilkenny were enacted by the English authorities to try to stop the Gaelicisation of Anglo-Norman culture,not vice versa.As Aonghus has pointed out it was written in French,as were most English laws up til the 17th century - at least.Lots of your dates seem to be wrong: Ruairi O Conner (sic) signed a treaty with Henry II in 1157 but Strongbow didnt invade til 1169.And I must have been i mo codladh when Bill the Conqueror's invasion of Ireland was being hammered into the other lads.He never conquered Wales or Scotland.

The Church;I'm not a big fan but....St Colmcill was taught by a druid.No burning of witches or heretics then.Don't forget the entire corpus of Irish learning,filíocht,dindsenchas etc was saved for posterity by the monks and scribes.
The number of Irish speakers probably peaked in the immediate pre famine era.Ok - they were nearly all illiterate landless peasants,ach sin scéal eile.Not 2000 years though is it? Fear bocht shimpli mise agus gan talamh,freisin! I know me history but.

Danny, Macdara...and to all who can't seem to read the entirety of the thread...

I said in several posts back that I am willing to go from 2000 to 1500 years. So Danny, when you say you feel the 1600's...are you really disagreeing with me? LOL

Aonghus/Macdara, you seem to be saying that the language it was written in has anything to do with the affect it had? How does it being in French matter? I never said the language of choice was important, nor did I deny it was. However, since you bring it up, the statues were written by English in control of the region who were trying hold on to their power by claiming the right of tenure. They were English, claiming an Irish/English heritage as the means of establishing that they were their first and the rightful authority. So to the English they were Irish, to the Irish they were English...take your pick.

Macdara, if the topic doesn't put you back to sleep, read about some of his early fortification strategies, campaigns, and failures. See who he was fighting, who he was afraid of, and who he was always calling the foreign threat. But you are correct about the date 1157, I was probably a little tired at that point...it should be 1175 ;-)

And Seánw, I am sorry but you are wrong. If you do not agree with a person on something, you cannot just say "no" and then the burden of proof falls on that person. This is a serious fallacy of thought. Why? Because "you" the person disagreeing have to clarify what it is you disagree with in order for that person to be able to prove to you their point. It does not fall on the other person to have to "read your mind" to figure out what it is you do not agree with. That is impossible, and goes far beyond reasonable.

Never in your arguments did you say "my choices didn't pan out." And now that you have, this is still not a valid argument. How do they not pan out? Which ones do not? Don't say all them. Which and why? For some reason you keep forgetting to mention this to me. Either you cannot except that they do, or you cannot understand how they do. Both are fine, but you have to help me here. The things that I mentioned above all had a negative effect on the Irish language. Now if your problem is that I didn't leave a bread crumb trail for you to follow to the event and it cause in a decrease in speakers...I am willing to accept that as an argument. The problem is that I was not asked to, nor was it my intention to do so.

People said that Irish was not in serious decline until the 19th century. That is just not true because events as far back as the 5th century have been happening that have been working against the language. That is what I was asked to provide, events that took place prior to the 19th century, and that's what I did.

Now let's examine your counterpoint. It is a good one.

""...the Irish language spread northwards into Scotland and the Isle of Man, reaching its greatest expansion in the 10th century ..."

If you accept this, then fine. But let’s look at what this sentence is saying.

1) The height of the Irish language expansion was in the 900s. This to me suggests that the languages expansion either halted, or declined from this point forward. Why? Because it was the "height" of the expansion.

2) The 900's! Roughly 900 years before the 1800 mark that everyone here, including you, said I was completely off the mark when I said before the 19th century.

3) The height of the expansion was into Scotland, and the Isle of Man. We'll get to this in a second here.

4) And finally, what you are suggesting is that from this sentence, the Irish language was on a steady rise until the 900s. So therefore, my statement that it was in decline must be false because this suggests that it was still on the rise until the 10th century.

Now this is the first honest counter point you have made in all your remarks so far, and I will admit it is a very good one.

And while I understand how some might see things this way, however, it is possible that at least in the case of Scotland, it was not Irish on the rise but Scottish and our inability to recognize the emergence of a new language?

Your point of view is consistent with a school of thought that was challenged in the mid to late 90s with serious evidence that it might not be correct. There is more and more evidence coming to light that says Irish, never really took off in Scotland, but rather began to diverge into something different as soon as the colonization began to take place.

Now this is a new debate entirely. First you have to decide how you view the Scottish language. Is it a separate language, or just a dialect of. And in fairness, people are still trying to sort through some of the new analysis and data, but most are in agreement. While a common literary language, and I say this loosely because there was never a standard written form used by people, may have been used as a medium for the two countries until the 13th century...the spoken language was already different.

"In spite of the conclusion in Jackson’s (1951) famous paper the spoken Gaelic of Scotland did not diverge noticeably from that of Ireland until about AD 1200, it is now accepted by scholars that the language probably started to diverge, to some degree, shortly after it reached Scotland, perhaps about the fourth century. MacAulay’s review (1975: 86) of Jackson’s (1972) edition of the The Gaelic Notes in the Book of Deer seriously questions the suggestion there that the language of the Notes, written in Aberdeenshire in the 1130s, is indistinguishable from the Middle Irish being spoken at the same time in Ireland. Some of the features which distinguish modern Scottish Gaelic from modern Irish were already in place in the twelfth century. One example is the occurrence of “hiatus’, between two vowels, in certain words in the early language and in Scottish Gaelic, while Irish has dispensed with the hiatus since the twelfth century: thus in “Old Irish” the word for raven is fiäch, a disyllable maintained as such in Scottish Gaelic, where the spelling is fitheach; in Irish the hiatus between two vowels has been lost, and fiach ‘a raven’ is monosyllabic."

Jones, Charles. Edinburgh History of the Scots Language. Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. Print. (p. 551)

So what I am saying, from my point of view on the matter, is that it can be debated as to if the Irish language was on the rise in Scotland. If it was Scottish and not Irish on the rise in the country, then we have to exclude this as growth for Irish because it isn't Irish growing here.

Now I will stalemate with Mann. While the spelling is coming from another source, this was influenced more by Irish. And I say influenced because like Scotland, a separate spoken language/dialect develops fairly quick there too. However, Irish has a much stronger hold and influence than it did in Scotland.

But I still stand on Scotland. I think we may have to question, if not remove Scotland, as a stable increase for Irish. If this was a major part of the rise you are thinking of, then at least be willing to question this. There is no harm in that.



(Message edited by do_chinniúint on September 24, 2009)

You have a habit of moving the goalposts which make discussion with you somewhat wearisome.

That and redefining smeantics to suit your argument.

I fail to see how this thread advances the learning or enjoyment of Irish.

Mar sin, bíodh agat.

quote:

If you do not agree with a person on something, you cannot just say "no" and then the burden of proof falls on that person. This is a serious fallacy of thought.

You are the one trying to convince others of an argument. I did pose data to counter your assertion that Irish has been "slowly bleeding to death for 2000 years now". It is simply not true. You acknowledge this partially by changing your statement to 1500. A more accurate statement could be that Irish's fortunes waxed and waned from circa AD 400 to 1500. There is more room in a statement like this for the myriad political and social developments in Ireland and Europe than "bleeding to death". She's been on the ER table this long?!

quote:

The 900's! Roughly 900 years before the 1800 mark that everyone here, including you, said I was completely off the mark when I said before the 19th century. ... And finally, what you are suggesting is that from this sentence, the Irish language was on a steady rise until the 900s. So therefore, my statement that it was in decline must be false because this suggests that it was still on the rise until the 10th century.

All I ever suggested was a) the Irish language has not been bleeding to death for 2000 years; and b) the real decline in the language began in the 19th century. (We can use your analogy. In this period she received a potentially fatal wound.) In my view this was the "ripening" of the period starting in the 16th century. The British finally broke the back of the Irish language by wittingly or unwittingly, or both, creating the conditions for people to drop the language. The value of the conversation was perhaps to learn what those conditions were to avoid them in our own lives.

quote:

I fail to see how this thread advances the learning or enjoyment of Irish.

I agree. Especially the enjoyment. I'll be moving on now. Hopefully we all move on in good spirits. I'll allow anyone to have the last word if they disagree with anything I've said. Go mbeannaí Dia daoibh!

Aonghus a chara, what goal posts are being moved.

This is an honest question, I don't know which point I changed to make it difficult for you.

SeánW was correct, I did change my statement from 2000 to 1500. At the very beginning I did. I said 2000, someone said no, and I said OK, I will trim it back to 1500 because that's when I started listing from the point that I think the Irish language started to have it's control over Ireland threatened.

Is this what you meant?

Because every single person kept coming at me, saying "2000 years" which means they skimmed the thread, but didn't take a second to actually read it becasue I had to keep reminding them "1500."

Outside of that I don't think I changed anything. If I was doing somthing please tell me because this is how I am. And this is how I am going to approach you evertime you question me.

If you mean that I refuse to respond to people in Irish. Well, yes I do. The people like to come at other people here with Irish as if it were weapon to hurt. I am just not going to do that. One, if it is an English chat, keep it English. Being able to speak the language doesn't give you any more of an understanding of the history of the language than an English speaker. It might broaden your knowledge, as Irish is a language whose language and history constantly intertwine, but that doesn't give any secret knowledge.

If you are talking about the Statutes, well no actually I didn't change anything. I used them as an example. Of English gaining control over Irish. The counter arguments made were a) they were in French b) it was not the English trying to keep the Irish down, but the English trying to keep other English down. I did not "not agree" with this. The fact that it was in French was in my opinion was not worth mentioning. And call them what you will, we were talking about the same people, so yes semantics, but they were English, using a grass roots campaign by claiming Irish tenure. We were still in agreement, as to the result. It allowed for those Irish/English autorities to keep their power. With which they kept the Irish language down by their use of a language other than Irish.

If you were referring to my bit about Scottish, no...that card was always in my hand. I just didn't get around to playing it. And yes, I do believe that it cannot be counted in the numbers, and there are other like me who feel the same.

Please help me be a better debater on this forum because I seem to be doing something wrong with some people here. But be certain of this, one thing I will never back down from, is a chance to have my opinion known. And if you are going to correct me, you better be able to do it with something solid, logical, or reasonable because I am going to keep at it and demand an explanation.

This type of bickering back in forth is not a waste of time, nor does it take away from the learning of Irish. If anything it can be used an eye opener for all those getting into the language what they could be in for.

Who would have associated the Niceae with Irish? No one, but it can and was. From this council the platform that the first bishop of Ireland would use was created. And it was this platform that he, and Patricius who replaced him used when dealing with the people, their culture, and yes...their language.

It was here that they may have encountered it for the first time. Love it or hate it, it came out. Maybe someone will take it and run with it, and maybe someone will take it and disprove it. Either way the furthering of Irish can come from it.

(Message edited by do_chinniúint on September 24, 2009)

quote:

I said in several posts back that I am willing to go from 2000 to 1500 years. So Danny, when you say you feel the 1600's...are you really disagreeing with me? LOL

Huh? I'd say it's been 'bleeding' for four or five hundred years. Not two thousand. Irish was the only game in town for the vast majority of the population for at least thirteen hundred years. It wasn't seriously challenged before the 16th century. I stand by that statement. Edicts from Rome in the 5th century don't change that. Even Latin gave way to Irish amongst the scribes and scholars.

Anyway, Irish was once more widely spoken (geographically) than English. It once had more speakers than Danish, Norwegian, Lithuanian and Finnish, for example. All languages which had the good fortune of not being next door to the English. And all languages which were once under threat but are now thriving and widely spoken by most people in their respective countries. I guess the Russians and Germans just didn't have the same knack for engineering language shift as the English??

(Message edited by Danny2007 on September 24, 2009)

A Danny,

Well, I could have phrased my response to you better; I didn't mean to imply you were saying 1500 years with me.

The problem that I have proving my point, as well as those trying to prove me wrong, is 1600 is a good year to go with because good sources of information on the population, let alone the number of speakers versus non-speakers is rather hard to come by. It is possible to find sources that say there are x number of people in village y, but they are scattered across the literature and often in passing comments rather than stated as facts. Even if you try to add up all there references for a given time period, and some have tried, there is never a good enough figure that we can come out and say...in 1000 there were this many people. Most of what I come cross says things like, "The numbers are not known, but..." This tells you that it is a guess at best.

The best sources for information from 1600 on are going to come from England, and to put it mildly they are a little "dodgy" I believe is the word used in this thread.

Most of the works that I have read that bother to comment on the numbers tend to speak in generalities. So I have to question, when the experts are scratching their heads, what are the rest of us going to scratch?

And if you start with 1600, just for kicks, and you graph the proposed populations, with the proposed percentages that spoke the language, you start to see an ever increasing gap between the population and number of speakers. There is only going to be two times on your graph that this is not true, between two famines during the population explosion transition, and after the 1950s when Ireland says the numbers are going up, and others are saying they are really going down.

So I guess you can say that we are in agreement to a point, you just choose to get off the train a little earlier than I do. And until someone proves me wrong, I am going to maintain the belief that the decline of Irish began as early as the 5th century, the moment the first major influence (Latin) started taking away its influence.

And again, I challenge anyone here to prove that Irish and Scottish were not as dialectally different in...and I will be generous...here the 6th century giving time for the Irish to unpack the boxes but not start a family yet. Because there is evidence, which indicates that while they were mutually intelligible, they were as dialectally different then as they are today. If you consider them to be truly different languages today, then what made them the same then? A system of writing that was hardly standardized because it could vary from town to town in a small region?

And the reason this is important Danny, is that if the geographical area you were talking about included Scotland, and Scottish could in theory be considered a different language, can you really count it as part of this Irish region?

Take it or leave it, those are my thoughts on the matter.

(Message edited by do_chinniúint on September 24, 2009)

The earliest language survey that I'm aware of is that which was carried out by Whitley Stokes in the year 1799. Anything before that will be completely bereft of hard data. It would be unreasonable to expect anything more.

As far as Scottish Gaelic v Irish, it's significant that most English sources from the period 1400-1600 refer to the language in Scotland as 'Yrish/Irishe' or 'Erse'. Or the sources from the 17th-to-mid 19th century which comment upon the striking similarities between Glens Irish and the language spoken in Argyll and the western Isles of Scotland.

Slán

I once looked at a map of the Irish speaking areas of Ireland in 1700, most of the country was covered in black apart from the odd eastern county in Leinster near Dublin and some parts of the north.

Was it online? In a book? The earliest one I've seen is from 1800.

For the one from 1700, I imagine the only areas which weren't black would have been the so-called English Pale (parts of counties Dublin, Kildare, Louth, Meath) and parts of Wicklow and south Wexford. In east Ulster, probably the Ards Peninsula in northeast Down, maybe a few other areas with a high concentration of settlers. Some towns.

But of course in those days there were gaeltachtaí in every single county.

(Message edited by Danny2007 on September 25, 2009)

jesus christ

that takes the biscuit - that is the most outrightly wrong piece of history i have ever seen

completely fiction - outright.

"The number of bilinguals in different periods cannot be estimated very exactly, but Hindley (1990), relying on the account given by Dr Whitley Stokes in 1799, arrives at the figure of 1,600,000 bilinguals at that date out of an estimated population of 5.4 million, i.e. some 30 per cent (Hindley 1990: 15, see also Ó Cuív 1951: 19, who uses the same source but estimates the total population to have been only 4.75 million at this period) [that is, 34%].

The grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian style
By Markku Filppula
Page 8


Page 7 indicates that in circa 1700, the Island spoke mostly Irish except for the planted parts of Ulster. In 1731 roughly 66%. In 1791 about half the Country.

Indeed the % of the population that spoke Irish may have INCREASED after 1790 due to the population explosion in the west. Of course this quickly dwindled after 1844...

Yeah SeanW, those are about the numbers I have seen for the periods also.

"While there are few reliable population figures for Ireland before 1841, however estimates (often based on Hearth Money Returns) have been carried as far back as 1700. These figures show that Ireland's population rose slowly from around 3 million in 1700 until the last half of the 18th century when it had reached 4 million."

KH Connell, "The Population of Ireland 1750-1845", Greenwood Press, Connetiuct.

When you get to 1600 hundred and beyond the estimates are not based so much on records, but rather the population support capabilities like agriculture, fishing, heathcare...

Most of the sources I have seen estimate that before 1600, Ireland's population couldn't have been over 2 million.

And Danny, I used to feel that they were the same, or at least so similar they could easily be the same. Then I really started getting into the history and the development of Scottish, and modern research makes a very convincing case.

Now I will give you that they were probably more similar then than they are today. Especially in terms of vocabulary. But as for the similarities between Glens Irish and Argyle, are they similar because the languages were the same, or could it been a result of the Scottish coming to the north during the Plantaion period and having an effect on the local Irish?

If you are interested in learning a little more about the differences, I highly recommend the Edinburgh History of the Scots Language. And by Scots, they mean the Scottish people, not the Scots language. Now there are more modern books on the topic to support the conclusions in this book, but this was the first book that really got me interested in the topic.