Congratulations to Mick and the crew at Slugger O’Toole for being named best political blog. No word on the other awards yet.
WWPD? What would Patrick do?
“It’s a quiet January afternoon in O’Hooligan’s Irish pub in Heaven. There’s a rambunctious character sitting at a table surrounded by cronies doling out free pints to him. He’s singing and yelling and generally holding court. Quietly, a small, wizened old geezer wearing a leather biker jacket and a faded Iggy Pop T-shirt walks into the pub and ambles over to the table. The place falls silent. ‘Patrick?’ ‘Oh, flip.’ (He’s been waiting for this. Fixes best smile and turns around, expecting the worst.) ‘Yes, God?’” Click on the link above for the rest of the adventure.
Ulster Irish study group at Yahoo Groups.
Go raibh míle maith agat a Chionaodh! While I’ve been working through Learning Irish with the gang on the Cois Fhairrge group, I didn’t realize that a similar group had just started working on Ulster Irish. As it seems that Queen’s University-Belfast is my most likely destination for Ph.d. work if I do indeed make it to Ireland next year, working on the Ulster dialect makes sense. Someone in the group located this great resource on the Cumman na Gaeilge site. The audio there sounds much more like the Donegal Irish I heard at Oideas Gael, though there still seem…
Edge Case – thoughts in two languages, from the author of An tImeall.
Conn at an tImeall and I seem to have a competition going to see who can juggle the most blogs and podcasts. You win, Conn; I surrender. His new site, Edge Case is predominantly in English (at least so far), though covers a lot of the same ground as An tImeall. All of this and a two year-old to boot. Amazing.
The kind of comment that can make your day.
Or year. ‘Analu is a student in our online Hawaiian language class, and I can relate to his feelings. Since returning from Ireland some 3 and a half years ago, I’ve tried to make some progress with learning Gaeilge, only to give it up after a few weeks, and then starting from scratch again months later. Here’s the best part: “I do have a cassette for studying the language, but your podcast was the first time ever that I was able to hear Hawaiian as a true living language!” I know exactly how ‘Analu feels, as An tImeall and Cumann…
Nahenahe.net Podcasts going native.
I posted an announcement and a brief podcast on Nahenahe.net announcing my decision to cease the use of English in my podcasts. I’m sure some people will be unhappy with this decision, but I spent the better part of a week pondering. English is my native language, and Hawaiian my language of choice. I couldn’t justify starting another podcast just to do one in Hawaiian, and I didn’t want to do a Hawaiian language podcast and simply talk about Hawaiian language in it. As Conn does with his An tImeall podcast, I didn’t want Hawaiian to be simply the vehicle,…
Measuring Linguistic Diversity on the Internet.
Coincidences (or signs) seem to abound this week. Following Conn’s post and my reply on his upcoming decision on whether or not to begin posting in English as well as Irish, I recieved this link from a totally different source… “UNESCO has been emphasizing the concept of ‘knowledge societies’, which stresses plurality and diversity instead of a global uniformity in order to bridge the digital divide and to form an inclusive information society. An important theme of this concept is that of multilingualism for cultural diversity and participation for all the languages in cyberspace.” I should also note that Bernie…
To Gaeilge or not to Gaeilge, that is the question.
Conn at an tImeall posted about a topic that I’ve been agonizing over as well – weblog and podcast language choice. His blog is, of course, done in Irish. I was a bit surprised to see that the bulk of hist post today in English, though the accompanying podcast was still predominantly in Irish. His quandary – should he continue to blog and podcast in Irish exclusively (BTW, I like the term “GaelBlogs”), or to begin to also produce them in English as well. Is it better to have separate blogs for each language, or produce a dual language blog.…
Signs pointing to Belfast?
I don’t consider myself a particularly superstitious person, but I do look for signs in my life that sometimes help guide me in one direction or another when making decisions. Of course I don’t feel compelled to take a particular path, but I have noticed that when I see these signs and ignore them, I later wish that I had paid them more attention. I’m faced with the decision of choosing the school that I will attend to pursue a Ph.d., and have made a commitment make a choice by the end of this semester. As I have mentioned (more…
NUIG Irish language requirement removed.
[ From the Galway Independent ] A Bill was passed last week removing an obligation on NUI Galway to appoint people competent in the Irish language to offices or positions in the University. NUI Galway has welcomed the new legislation. Under the new legislation the University will still be required to ensure its strategic development plan contains a provision for the delivery of education through the Irish language.