Guinness bubbles really do float down. Slainte!
Slugger points to an interesting essay from the Luxemburgish European Commissioner responsible for education and culture.
It essentially states that the Irish shoud be using the language more and be less concered about giving it official status in the EU. Why not both?
More interesting Irish language discussion on Slugger.
Is the intent of the EU’s policies on language simply to facilitate communication between members, or to foster cultural identity? Of all of the new countries joining the EU, are there any that are largely monolingual in their own language? If the majority can also speak English, German, French, Spanish or whatever, what is the justification of designating their languages as officially recognized EU languages? We go through a bit of this in Hawai’i as well. Hawaiian is an official language of the state, however, while election ballots can be found in many other languages, they are not available in…
Adams urges official status for Irish Language.
Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams MP has written to the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern urging him to seek and secure official status for the Irish language during the Irish Presidency of the European Union.
‘Irish Language Champions Fail the Talk Test’ is a poorly worded headline for this story from scotsman.com.
Can you fault these Irish language advocates for their inability to speak the language? Better to fault the education in the language provided to them and the political environment they grew up in. Same here in Hawai’i. A generation of native speakers here decided not to pass the language to their children, mostly to the atmosphere and politics of their era. The EU should still recognize the language. If they can accept new countries and their languages, they need to accept Irish. A opinion from the middle of the Pacific.
I never realized that Irish was not one of the EU’s recognized languages.
There a bunch of new countries joining the EU this year, along with their languages. Since the EU Presidency is in Ireland for the next six months, maybe this will get fixed. Did you know that Hawai’i is the only state in the US that officially recognizes two languages, English and Hawaiian?
Another interesting Irish language discussion on Slugger O’Toole.
This one involves a proposal to make instruction in Irish language mandatory in all Northern Ireland schools. Some interesting perspectives, but none of the participants seem to support the idea nor believe it will happen. I don’t think I would even support such a proposal for Hawaiian language, at least at this point it time. To make it available to every student who wanted it – absolutely. The opportunity to learn it must be there, but forcing upon those who don’t want it, I don’t think so. It would generate more bad will than it would positive results.
This website has a nice breakdown of the Irish Gaelic dialects.
I won’t vouch for its accuracy but it looks impressive.
The current Irish course I’m using is Pimsleur’s Irish I audio CD set.
The current Irish course I’m using is Pimsleur’s Irish I audio CD set. It contains 4 audio CDs and no textbook at all. This method also discourages the student from writing down notes as you learn. I’m up to lesson 4 (there are 8 lessons on the 4 CDs). It’s convenient as you can listen and learn while driving, as I tend to do each morning and afternoon. There is a narrator that provides introduction and instructions, you listen to a native speaker, mimic their pronuciation, and later participate in mock conversations with them. So far so good. The first…
‘Learning Irish’ by Michael O’Siadhail was one of the first Irish language texts I picked up before my wife and I travelled to Ireland
, and I have to admit I didn’t get very far with it. It comes with a number of cassette tapes that I recorded on my computer for easier listening. It includes a decent amount of information on the grammatical structure of the language, which I like, but I found the recorded examples incredibly difficult to follow. After three weeks at Oideas Gael, it made much more sense, but because of the different dialects used at OG and in ‘Learning Irish,’ it was still a bit of a challenge. Fortunately the spelling seems to be fairly well standardized (so far).…