The Status Of Irish.

deise go deo wrote: »

Firstly, there are far more than a small hand ful of jobs available In Irish.

Irish state is bankrupt.
30k jobs on the guillotine block, that's just for starters.

Non-necessities will get it in the neck first.
Which is a luxury and which is a necessity?
A) Cervical cancer vaccines,
Cancer screening facilites
C) Money for the ILL (Irish language lobby)

Secondly, I think you are overestimating how many jobs require someone to make deals with other countrys. Secondly, How many people do you think learn a forrighn language and then use it to work in that country? It just dosent happen to any significant degree.

You know our immigration rate.....remember it exploded from 2004?
Well, English is not the native language of the vast majority of those immigrants.

Have you ever travelled outside the British Isles?

Well thats the problem with personal experience. It rarely gives an accurate reflection of the wider situation.

This is the point that numerous posters have been trying to communicate to you.
I know that you understand, but you are of course pretending not to.

Difficult, Not Impossible. Many universitys around the World offer courses either in or that have a moduel in Irish, There is Even a Gaelthacht in Canada.

An optional module, right?

That is not hard to follow at all, I can clearly see where you are coming from, I just happen to disagree with you.

Luckily Brian Hayes doesn't;)

Three,(English Being One)
The Reason I think Irish should remain Compulsory as well as English is that A) It has benifits beyond other (European)languages in Educational terms,

In that case, why not teach Lithuanian?
Oldest Indo-European language, root language of many.
Or Latin, by far the most beneficial language in Europe - open the door to Slavic, Romance, Germanic, etc. etc.

and People want The Emphsis on learning Irish to Stay at its current level, or Be Increased.

And optional, according to the same survey you are referencing.

Irish people are open to Irish
People open to Irish are open to making Irish optional
Therefore, Irish people are open to making Irish optional

The Reason I say that people are open to it is that People not being open to it has been cited as a reason to make it Optional.

But the states prove that people are open to making it optional, according to that same survery you are referencing.

The reasons to keep it Compulsory in those two years are delt with in the article I linked to in the OP, Its to do with status, I think that it has been clearly shown that people want Irish to be preserved/promoted, When asked in a survey 93% were in favour of this, The vast majority in a secont survey want to Keep the same emphsis on or increase the Emphsis on Irish in the education system. I would like to know how you propose to achieve this if Irish is made optional.

Your point is a paradox.
Statement: 93% want Irish to be compulsory in order for Irish to be preserved promoted.
Condition: Irish cannot be made optional because, due to status reasons, less than 93% will comply

0+0=Fallacy
0+1=Fallacy
1+0=Fallacy
1+1=Tautology

That's a paradox Deise.

Gaelscoileanna are a seprate Issue, I did not cite them to support compulsion in Schools, though they do show that interest in Irish is growing rather than declining and would play an important role in promoting a bi-lingual nation if Irish was kept as a compulsory subject in schools(with the necessary curriculum reforms)

Your postulation is flawed in that the increase of NON-IRISH speaking people increased from 2.1 million in 2002 to 2.6 million in 2006.
In terms of bi-lingualism (that is fluent speakers of two languages), Irish is far from 1st place on the Island.

English/Polish, English/Mandarin, English/Russian, English/Hausa, English/Arabic,

p.s.
Are you aware that the native speaking population is declining?
i.e. emigration

The supports for making Ireland a Bi-Lingual nation do not exist in any other second language.

I'm going to reply to the meaning I think you intended to convey, rather than the actual meaning you conveyed.

That's incorrect.
Irish actually offers the least flexibility of European languages, in that there is no external pool to draw on.

Furthermore, the structures which currently exist through Irish are
A) Artificial, state supported
Painstakingly Home grown

And since we are moving into the realm of fantasy anyway - why not ask Jacque Chirac for support to make French the second language of Ireland?

France would pay out of it's own exchequer to subsidize the language in Ireland, if we amend our constitution and simply put the structure in place.
Vive le Francophone.

Supports such as state services provided through Irish, Irish classes being provided across the country outside the Education system, Organisations like CnaG, Glor na nGeal, Comhludar, The Cultúrlanns in NI that work to devolop the language both in their own community and nationally.

These organisation have failed fantastically at developing bi-lingualism in the form or Irish over the last 90 years.

How many fluent speakers again?
100k at optimistic estimates?
After 90 years?

Not so much a support system as a suppression system.

This also ignores the fact that every pupil in the country can take a cheap ryanair flight 60mins across the water and be completely immersed in another language - impossible to achieve with Irish currently and for the forseeable future.

The vast majority of Irish people will not emigrate, not to mention emigrate to France. So it is their usefulness in this country that that is relevant, Now in this country, the safe money bet is not on French, Its on Irish.

A) Irish is of little use in this country and not even 1/100th of the 55,000 pupils sitting the leaving every year are guaranteed a job through Irish.
So that renders that argument impotent.

Are you seriously asserting that France is the only country where French is spoken?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organisation_internationale_de_la_Francophonie

C)
[cough]
http://www.insideireland.ie/index.cfm/section/News/ext/emmigration001/category/893
[/cough]

Dont get me wrong, I think it is very important that in addition to Irish and English that a forighn language should be learnt, But I think that Irish is justified as one of the Plus Two.

If it's optional, I agree.

Secondly, Irish is more benifical when it comes to learning further languages than French.

No, it isn't.
How did you come to this conclusion?

English shares a vast number of cognates with French dating back to 1066. Therefore, it's a natural progression for an English speaker to move to French as their next language.

Your are claiming that Irish is more beneficial than other languages because it's distinctly different from other languages.
If it doesn't apply to Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian - why does it apply to Irish?

Not at all, The main concern is that if language learning is made optional then language learning and Irish along with them colapse, If all was fair and a language had to be studied then I think Irish would do quite well, The biggest concern in that case is its curriculum,(Which is the biggest concern anyway) Which would drive people from the subject as it just dosent work.

Captain Contradiction.
Keep it up - Irish people are not imbeciles, they see right through this - you are empowering Brian Hayes with this stuff.:)

Care to show me somthing to back this up. Call centers are low paying jobs are they not, Hardly likely to attract people with several languages.

Oh lawd!
oh lawd Deise! Just OH LAWWWWD.

Where do I start with that statement?
Have you ever worked in a call centre? (I have)
You get a bonus for every extra European language you speak fluently, discluding Irish.

You know vast chunks of Europe are tri-lingual - many of them in low paying jobs?
(Srsly, you need to do a bit of travelling or try to meet more foreigners)

I dont see why you feel the need to point out that Irish is not very useful for getting a job in a call center, I never suggested it was.

Yup, in an industry where language is the skill, Irish is non-applicable.
It's a powerful methaphor.

Were it not for the fact that all centres would exit Ireland in a day, the ILL would request legislation to ensure private call centres must cater for Irish also.

deise go deo wrote: »

Simply put, I dont think there is a significant enough proportion of the population who are not open to learning Irish to justify changing the System, as changing the system to an optional one would have negative effects on education in Ireland.

You don't put much value on people's liberties then no?

"You were born in this country and a majority of people want to learn Irish so you're going to too"

Attitudes like that that have this country as socially backwards as it is.

Not that I even agree a majority want to learn it. Then again maybe my class was the only one with a group you could count on one hand that wanted to learn Irish.


Edit - about this:
"In a survey on peoples opinion of Irish 93% wanted Irish to be preserved or promoted"

I would love to know how many of those can't speak the language and are doing feck all to change it. Easy to claim you want some ideal preserved when it doesn't cost you day to day.

I'd like to see the environment preserved or improved but I'm not going to start cycling to work.

Teamshadowclan wrote: »

Oh, so it was a test? An exam rather than a poll? Why ask the question if you disregard the results? <_<

To be fair (and without having looked at the poll) I'm not sure what the point of asking that question was in the first place. There is a well-established definition of a dead language, and Irish does not fit it. 'Minority', certainly, and quite possibly 'endangered', but not 'dead'. I'm sure the poll gauges perceptions on the status of Irish of passers-by in whatever forum it was posted in, but neither deise go deo nor the boards.ie populace have the authority to decide whether Irish is actually dead or not. Whether that was the question that was intended to be asked, I don't know, but it wasn't an appropriate question for a poll.

I spent 13 years being taught Irish and only 5 years learning French and my French far surpasses my level of Irish.

Nobody in my family can speak a word of Irish, predominantly due to a mental block because of the hatred of being forced to learn it at school.

Now I live in the UK and of the 6 Irish people on my postgrad course none of us can converse in Irish, BUT most of us would like to be able to.

There is no need for anyone in this country to be taught Irish, because as a working language it is generally obsolete. I remember being given a statistic that all governmental publications must be published in both Irish and English, and that of the 29 county councils only in 2 of them were Irish translations requested and only by a handful of people.

That said, I believe the population do appreciate the language, and care that it continues to exist.

I would hope that if FG are elected, that they would change the Irish curriculum before making any decisions on whether it is compulsory or not.

We should be taught conversational basic Irish, so that we can talk to each other about day to day activities, order food, buy a drink, book a hotel room etc.
The idea that we should have to trawl through intricate stories and metaphorical tales and god help us Peig Sayers is completely unnecessary!

Teamshadowclan wrote: »

While I agree that Irish isn't dead as much as it is dying, the important thing was that Deise asked it.

Fair enough, I think I misunderstood what you were getting at above. That's an entirely reasonable line of questioning* - I'd just hate for the results of that poll to be used as some warped sort of 'evidence' that Irish is a dead language.


*you'll be glad to have my approval, I'm sure

It's a styupid leprechaun language loike, get rid of it and teach the goysh chinese or some other progressive language loike. we've already brought in the IMF and accepted money from da brits, why are we pretending we are not British loike?

Oasis_Dublin wrote: »

It's a styupid leprechaun language loike, get rid of it and teach the goysh chinese or some other progressive language loike. we've already brought in the IMF and accepted money from da brits, why are we pretending we are not British loike?

Petty nationalism aside, if you're so insecure about your Irishness, why not speak Hiberno Norman-French?
There is no more anti-British language in existence than French, and Hiberno Norman-French is also part of Irish history, undeniably an Irish language.
http://www.ucc.ie/celt/language.html

Irish is spoken fluently by a population group lesser in size than Tallaght - doesn't constitute part of mainstream Irish society/culture by any stretch of the imagination.
Plus French is a useful language, so you're getting some benefit from it:)

Besides, modern day Irish is so anglicized.
If you're insecure about being mistaken for a Brit, why not go back to a purer dialect? A non-anglicized dialect?

Papa Smut wrote: »

As bearla...


Mas é do thoile

Merci beaucoup