Talk:Irish language/Archive 1

message: From the article:
:All sides, irrespective of their view on the methodology used by independent Ireland in its efforts to preserve the language, agree that such a loss would be a cultural tragedy of monumental scale. 
This might be the politically correct thing to say, but is it actually true?  Do people really care enough that they are prepared to do anything about it?--Robert Merkel 00:44 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
From what I can see, yes. Opinions polls have asked people about their attitudes towards Irish. Many admit to hating it because of the way it was taught, but would be horrified if it was lost. Kids in the tens of thousands are sent to all Irish-speaking schools and to the Gaeltacht to learn the language, while almost on principle because of their experience of it, the parents sending the kids don't speak the language even if they actually have a degree of fluency. And most people want the Irish language TV station, TG4 to survive through they don't actually watch it. So people don't want the language to go, but themselves don't want to use it, usually as a reaction to the bullying "by God I'm going to make you speak it" style of teaching they experienced at the hands of the language fanatics. FearÉIREANN 01:48 19 Jul 2003 (UTC)
:Yeah, that rings true to me. From what I remember of school though, most people hated Irish for the same reasons that people of my father's generation hated Latin - being forced to learn a "dead language". I didn't mind personally, but I really took exception to being forced to use an Irish-ised version of my name - if my parents wanted me to be called "Séamas" they would have named me that. As for the Gaeltacht summer courses; they were great, and for most people they were just a great way of making new friends - the classes were just a necessary evil. And I think TG4 will probably survive, simply because it has a better selection of films (in English) than the other three channels, and because for teenage guys, the female presenters tend to have more visual appeal :) -- Jim Regan 01:31, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Peig was before my time :) The Séamas thing really got to me, especially at the Gaeltacht. It quickly got exaggerated into "Haaaaymwish" and then, inexplicably, into "Haybob". Which caught on. Grr. I actually joined the Irish Society in college, though mainly because a friend started it, and needed support. The only meeting I attended featured about 4 students, all friends of mine, and about 10 members of staff, including the director of the college, who was trying to get us to take part in a céilidh - the last time I'd been at one was in the Gaeltacht, where we spent most of the time trying to hide, to avoid dancing, apart from the 5 facing 5 thing (not Walls of Limerick... umm... dammit!) - there's a part where the couple at the bottom end go through the other couple's arched arms, and we took the opportunity to kick seven shades of shite out of each other. Ah, the memories. Makes me wish I'd written to the people I met there. Oh well. At least I've learned from it, and figured out how to keep in touch with people - so the Gaeltacht taught me something! (apart from the Irish word for sex) -- Jim Regan 00:55, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Concern for the language among Irish 

message: Question: "A Chara" is defined as "A friend" (used as salutation to a letter).
          "Is Mise le Meas" is the ending of a letter but not defined.  What
          mean?
          User: Mikehill55@AOL.Com 26 Sep 2003
:Basically "Yours faithfully". "Is mise" means "It's me" or "I am", "le meas" means "with thought", it's implied that the person writing is thinking about the recipient. I hope that was too much information :) -- Jim Regan 00:55, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: "Le meas" here means "with respect". Meabhar 21:37, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)

text: Actually, "A Chara" does not mean "A friend" but simply "Friend" - the "A" puts it in the vocative case, which is what you use when calling someone.
re Is mise le meas - a humourous anecdote. In the Dublin-West by-election in 1982, the odds on favourite, Eileen Lemass, dramatically failed to win the seat. Part of the reason was a remarkable campaign run by the opposition Fine Gael party's campaign manager, Jim Mitchell. But she also lost hundreds of crucial votes because hundreds of letters had been sent out to social welfare recipients reducing their social welfare entitlements and signed by the writer Is Mise le Meas. Many of those who received the letters thought they read Mrs. Lemass and blamed her personally for the cutbacks which had nothing to do with her, though they were the work of her party of government, just disastrously timed in the run-up to a sudden by-election that the government had to win. So poor Eileen was faced with irate voters all over the gaelic version of 'yours sincerely'! FearÉIREANN 19:21, 1 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Translation of greeting 

message: Why is ther not a section on where the Irish language came from? The only mention that I saw, was about it being a slavic language.
:What??? Where on Earth does it say that Irish is a Slavic language? I'll give you the decendance here: Indo-European family, Celto-Italic branch; Celtic languages; Goidelic family; Irish.
::I was making reference to this from the page "In Irish, as in many Slavonic languages such as Russian, all consonants are either palatalised, soft..." which seems to imply that Irish Gaelic is Slavonic (?Different from slavic?). You seem to be knowledgeable about etymology. Could you possibly write a section about this, and correct the error if it is one ?
::-catskul 
:::Here's a passage from "The Glories of Ireland", "Irish Language and Letters", by Douglas Hyde (this text is public domain in the US, but it isn't here in Ireland) :
::::"For centuries the Irish and their language were regarded by the English as something strange and foreign to Europe. It was not recognized that they had any relationship with the Greeks or Romans, the French, the Germans, or the English. The once well-known statesman, Lord Lyndhurst, in the British parliament denounced the Irish as aliens in religion, in blood, and in language. Bopp, in his great Comparative Grammar, refused them recognition as Indo-Europeans, and Pott in 1856 also denied their European connection. It was left for the great Bavarian scholar, John Caspar Zeuss, to prove to the world in his epoch-making "Grammatica Celtica" (published in Latin in 1853) that the Celts were really Indo-Europeans, and that their language was of the highest possible value and interest. From that day to the present it is safe to say that the value set upon the Irish language and literature has been steadily growing amongst the scholars of the world, and that in the domain of philology Old Irish now ranks close to Sanscrit for its truly marvellous and complicated scheme of word-forms and inflections, and its whole verbal system.
::::"The exact place which the Celtic languages (of which Irish is philologically far the most important) hold in the Indo-European group has often been discussed. It is now generally agreed upon that, although both the Celtic and Teutonic languages may claim a certain kinship with each other as being both of them Indo-European, still the Celtic is much more nearly related to the Greek and the Latin groups, especially to the Latin.
::::"All the Indo-European languages are more or less related to one another. We Irish must acknowledge a relationship, or rather a very distant connecting tie, with English. But, to trace this home, Irish must be followed back to the very oldest form of its words, and English must be followed back to Anglo-Saxon and when possible to Gothic. The hard mutes (p, t, c) of Celtic (and, for that matter, of Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Lithuanian) will be represented in Gothic by the corresponding soft mutes (b, d, g), and the soft mutes in Celtic by the corresponding, hard mutes in Gothic. Thus we find the Irish dia (god) in the Anglo-Saxon tiw, the god of war, whose name is perpetuated for all time in Tiwes-däg, now "Tuesday", and we find the Irish déad in the Anglo-Saxon "toth", now "tooth", and so on. But of all the Indo-European languages Old Irish possesses by far the nearest affinity to Latin, and this is shown in a great many ways, not in the vocabulary merely, but in the grammar, which for philologists is of far more importance,-as, for example, the b-future, the passive in-r, the genitive singular and nominative plural of "o stems", etc. Thus the Old Irish for "man", nom. fer, gen. fir, dat. fiur, acc. fer n-, plur. nom. fir, gen. fer n-, is derived from the older forms viros, viri, viro, viron, nom. plur. viri, gen. plur. viron, which everyone who knows Latin can see at a glance correspond very closely to the Latin inflections, vir, viri, viro, virum, nom. plur. viri, etc."
:::HTH -- Jim Regan 20:51, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems obvious to me that this passage doesn't mean Irish is Slavonic - it is just comparing Irish with the Slavonic languages, of which Russian is an example. Although I don't really see why Russian needs to be mentioned as an example.Matve 21:32, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This lesson in comparative linguistics is truly fascinating. But I think Douglas Hyde might be overstating the position when he claims that "of all the Indo-European languages Old Irish possesses by far the nearest affinity to Latin". It seems plain that Spanish, Italian, French etc. are far closer, even though their grammar has simplified itself over the centuries. TobyJ 19:49, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irish as a Slavic language? 

message: "Connacht Irish is in many respects the most standard kind of Irish"
Is that true? I always thought that the standardised form of Irish was most like Munster Irish. Markcollinsx 16:13, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: That's the thing about standards - you normally get a few to choose from :) -- Jim Regan 20:51, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Modern Irish tends to refer to the decisions and the results of a standardisation from the mid-20th Century, known as "an Chaighdeán Oifigiúil", or "the Official Standard." It is mostly based on Connacht Irish, with a smattering of Munster, and the random murder of dative cases, old spellings and forms, as well as a simplification of verbs. It is associated in the Irish-speaking areas (or should I say former Irish speaking areas, and the minuscule pockets of extant Gaeltachtaí), with "Dublin Irish", something that no native really 'dug.' Also, around the same time the script was changed from a Gaelic script, based on latin letters, to a simple Latin script. Which led to some ill-feeling in the occasional reader, but now most of us accept the script, and much but certainly not all the grammatical changes. Meabhar 21:37, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Connacht Irish as standard 

message: Does anyone agree that the historical revival of the language shoul be put in the article Gaelic Revival rather than the main article Irish language? and keep the article purely about the languages non-historic characterstics? Djegan 10:37, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gaelic Revival 

message: What is the status of Irish in the EU? Is Irish interpretation or translition provided by the European institutions?
:Irish is a Treaty language, which means that high level legislation has to be provided; I think Irish has no other status in the EU, though this is only because no Irish government has insisted upon it. Evertype 17:27, 2004 Jul 4 (UTC)
::It also means that one can write to EU institutions in Irish and expect a response in the same language. And Eamon Ó Cuiv, the minister with responsibility for Irish, has seen a request submitted to the EU that Irish be made a full working language. The treaty language concept was more or less created for the case of Irish because the government didn't insist upon it bein made fully official when Ireland joined the EEC. --Kwekubo 23:56, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Status in the European Union 

message: It would be nice if all the Irish was italic and the English translations of the examples was in quotes.  It's a bit of both at the moment.  Some IPA/SAMPA would be good too.
I might even do some of this. :)
Moilleadóir 00:44, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Consistent Style 

message: I've reverted the Irish name for the Gaeltacht back to English.   People can go to Gaeltacht to see what the Irish name is.  ℬastique▼talk 00:55, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Correction.  In my ignorance, I reverted the plural to singular.  Now it's simply Gaeltacht regions.  I hate putting accents in English words and will avoid it at all costs.  Call me naïve, but I have a resumé to uphold.  ℬastique▼talk 00:57, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It is, of course, résumé. Evertype 22:28, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
NO problem. Gaeltachtaí is used in English so is perfectly OK. I inadventently hit the wrong page for reversion. But I could revert my reversion because you had done so ahead of me. Mea Culpa. FearÉIREANN(talk) 05:10, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: I think we're okay keeping Gaeltachtaí, though Gaeltachts is also acceptable as a plural. --Angr/ 05:32, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gaeltachtaí?  No...