Irish: A Waste of Time?

omnicorp

Is Irish a Waste of Time?

Well, Yes and No.

Yes,
It has absoloutedly no use in our daily lives.
It is using up school time that could be used for other subjects.
It adds to the pressure at Junior/Leaving Cert.
We have to spend money on Irish Textbooks.

No,
It preserves our culture.
It excersizes our minds.
It is a stepping stone to other languages.
We can confuse foreigners.


Do you think it is a waste of time?

JasonRoberts

is maith liom an teanga! cheapann me go bhfuil an gaeilge go hàlainn!

elivsvonchiaing

No. I think its good to preserve our heritage. But the department of education need a rocket up the arse. In my case they got it all wrong - and I see no evidence of improvement.

It should be an optional language when you're 12, and not drummed into you when you're six years old. It should use the old alphabet and there should be no Árd-Gaeilge which has been arbitrarily decided by the DOE. It should be made to appeal to at least 20% of students. Maybe they will have to add points value to the course to encourage uptake - but the current fascist approach is wrong. I was 13 years old when I realised I had no other option than to go to Trinity or overseas.

Gael

You know, there's a nearly a dozen threads about this topic in this forum already(Look in the archive)
But for some reason someone always feels the need to start the same hackneyed arguments all over again in a new thread that is almost identical to all that went before. Do we really need a new thread every few months about the exact same topic, that throws up the same old seesaw arguments of "Irish is crap/No it's not" over and over and over? A bit of originality wouldn't go astray here.

Johnny_the_fox

omnicorp wrote:

Yes,
It has absoloutedly no use in our daily lives.
It is using up school time that could be used for other subjects.
It adds to the pressure at Junior/Leaving Cert.
We have to spend money on Irish Textbooks.

No,
It preserves our culture.
It excersizes our minds.
It is a stepping stone to other languages.
We can confuse foreigners.

No offence, omnicorp - but that has to be the worst reasons, I have ever seen in my life (here on boards) for reasons For and Against concerning Irish. If you believe that Irish language preserves our culture, then how can you say that the language has no use in our daily lives. For thousands of years Irish language had a daily use for the people of Ireland as it still does today for many.In declaring that it has no use in OUR daily lives you are insulting those who speak Irish in their daily lives.Also if Irish is such a waste of time then why is there such a growth in gaelscoileanna throughout the north and south of this country??If a new attitude was taken towards the compulsary learning of Irish for leaving cert then we would not even have this post! Labhair í agus Mharifidh sí

luckat

This is usually a question that reveals the asker's politics.

To find out why you think the way you do about Irish ask yourself a couple of questions:

1) If you were a native Irish speaker would you teach your kids Irish?

2) Would you like to learn Japanese/ Irish Sign Language/ Swahili/ tap dancing/ rock climbing/ SCUBA?

The answers to these questions may tell you more about your reasons for wanting or not wanting to learn Irish than any direct "interrogation", as the academics say, of the topic. (Scary people, those academics: "Cá raibh tú ag a h-ocht a chlog ar an 18ú?"

Lennoxschips

I think the future of Irish lies in promoting the use of more Irish words in everyday spoken English. There are Irish words like gardai, which everyone knows, and there should be more like these. Irish becoming revived to the level it was at 200 years ago is a pipe dream that is never going to happen, so we may as well try to integrate as much Irish as possible into everyday English speech before the language dies out completely, so that we develop a unique dialect that distinguishes us from the rest of the English speaking world.

A good beginning would be for the government to make a English dictionary for use in Ireland, so that we are no longer tied to the Oxford English dictionary. This would allow us to expand and modify the English spoken in Ireland to suit indigenous needs.

But one thing is for sure, the approach that has been taken over the last 80 years has served only to kill off Irish completely rather than stimulate it.

luckat

Agree absolutely, Lennox

Míshásta

Is cur amú ama, i ndáiríre, an síor-shíor-phlé seo fé cheist na teangan, go mórmhór nuair is trí mheán an sac-Bhéarla a bhíonn an argóint ar siúl i gcónaí.

Táim tinn-tuirseach dubh-dóite fedupálta pistoffálta leis an ábhar seo. Táim ag dul don phub anois le cúpla pionta a chaitheamh siar chun na néaróga a cheansú beagáinín.

Slááán Tamall

omnicorp

Johnny_the_fox wrote:

No offence, omnicorp - but that has to be the worst reasons, I have ever seen in my life (here on boards) for reasons For and Against concerning Irish. If you believe that Irish language preserves our culture, then how can you say that the language has no use in our daily lives. For thousands of years Irish language had a daily use for the people of Ireland as it still does today for many.In declaring that it has no use in OUR daily lives you are insulting those who speak Irish in their daily lives.Also if Irish is such a waste of time then why is there such a growth in gaelscoileanna throughout the north and south of this country??If a new attitude was taken towards the compulsary learning of Irish for leaving cert then we would not even have this post! Labhair í agus Mharifidh sí

So maybe Old English, Middle English, French and Latin should be compulsary in Britain. They were spoken for years there.
And how about Latin for all the Mediteranean countries?
The Roman Empire ruled that area for hundred's of years.
Or maybe all the languages that native americans spoke should be compulsary in the US?

Johnny_the_fox

Mísh&#225 wrote: »

Táim tinn-tuirseach dubh-dóite fedupálta pistoffálta leis an ábhar seo.

Aointaim leat go hiomlán!!

omnicorp wrote:

So maybe Old English, Middle English, French and Latin should be compulsary in Britain. They were spoken for years there.
And how about Latin for all the Mediteranean countries?
The Roman Empire ruled that area for hundred's of years.
Or maybe all the languages that native americans spoke should be compulsary in the US?

Caithfidh mé a rá go bhfuil an cheart ag Míshásta bain triall as an abhar seo a phlé trí mheán na Gaeilge!Bheadh sin tús maith

Dun

omnicorp wrote:

So maybe Old English, Middle English, French and Latin should be compulsary in Britain. They were spoken for years there.
And how about Latin for all the Mediteranean countries?
The Roman Empire ruled that area for hundred's of years.
Or maybe all the languages that native americans spoke should be compulsary in the US?

That's a ridiculous point. Irish is still a living language, whereas most of those languages you're talking about are dead or have evolved. Nobody would suggest that we should teach Old or Middle Irish in School. Also, neither French nor Latin were spoken in Britain as a common language. You could argue that Latin never died - it just evolved, so the people of the Mediterranean countries are speaking a bastardised form of the language - French Latin, Spanish Latin, Italian Latin etc.

elivsvonchiaing

Dun wrote:

That's a ridiculous point. Irish is still a living language, whereas most of those languages you're talking about are dead or have evolved. Nobody would suggest that we should teach Old or Middle Irish in School. Also, neither French nor Latin were spoken in Britain as a common language. You could argue that Latin never died - it just evolved, so the people of the Mediterranean countries are speaking a bastardised form of the language - French Latin, Spanish Latin, Italian Latin etc.

Likewise. Just thought you might go as far as Israeli Latin You might as well argue we are speaking a bastardised version of Greek -which we partially are.

I do agree with the rest of your post, however, just not keen on how modern Irish has been arbitrarily decided by a bunch of fascists. (DOE)

Dun

Israeli Latin? What's that when it's at home? Ah, I guess it's that I said Mediterranean countries - I should have been less vague (France, Portugal, Spain, Italy etc. taking in Galician, Romanian, Sardinian, Catalan, etc.) Greek is related to Irish, as it comes from the same language waaaaaay back, but it's been *quite* a while since they shared a common root.

l3rian

Míshásta and Johnny_the_fox, hi i really think like most things, learning irish should be a personal choice, and thats why i believe that irish should be an option in schools

good idea Lennoxschips

elivsvonchiaing

Impressive site Dún! I was about to slag it off because it didn't appear to have an obscure language I was thinking of - was sure it was Indo-European - searched the site and sure enough it showed up

damntheman

Maybe it's different for me because I'm not from Ireland, but I would love to be able to speak and understand the Irish language. I think it's cool.