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The Irish language is failing.

1464749515294

Comments

  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,806 ✭✭✭An Ciarraioch


    boardise wrote: »
    All together now...

    Umam; Umat; Uime; Uimpi; Umainn ; Umaibh; Umpu.

    Faram; Farat; Fairis; Fairsti; Farainn; Faraibh; Farstu.

    Think you mean uaim, uait, uaidh, uaithi, uainn, uaibh, uathu there.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,806 ✭✭✭recipio


    boardise wrote: »
    All together now...

    Umam; Umat; Uime; Uimpi; Umainn ; Umaibh; Umpu.

    Faram; Farat; Fairis; Fairsti; Farainn; Faraibh; Farstu.

    Stop showing off.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,806 ✭✭✭An Ciarraioch


    boardise wrote: »
    Would that more attention was given to the fact that 20-25% of Irish people are functionally illiterate in English.

    That's all down to teaching methods and resources though, if Irish were scrapped tomorrow, that time wouldn't be allocated to English.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 12,169 ✭✭✭✭PopePalpatine


    I think I remember a scene from "In The Name of the Fáda" where Des Bishop encounters a man who could only speak Irish. I can't remember how old he was, though.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 3,676 ✭✭✭boardise


    Oh a Ciarraíoch (mallaithe ?) appears in our midst.

    No actually -'um' and 'ó' are different prepositions.

    I'm just having a bit of fun with some wry humour ...which I know is always dangerous and open to misinterpretation.
    e.g. my remarks about the Gaelic for parasite and the declension of Gaelic prepositions are intended to show hard it is for people to use Gaelic spontaneously ...for lack of vocabulary (they have always to be looking up dictionaries) and for having to grapple with difficult lists of verbal and prepositional paradigms and declensions.

    Good Lord ,I hope anything I write here that implies erudition doesn't lead to anyone feeling inadequate .


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 6,557 ✭✭✭the_monkey



    Quote:
    It has been argued that Gaeilgeoirí tend to be more highly educated than monolingual English speakers and enjoy the benefits of language-based networking, leading to better employment and higher social status.[9] Though this study has been criticised for certain assumptions,[10] the statistical evidence supports the view that such bilinguals enjoy certain educational advantages.
    Quote:
    Constitution:

    1. The Irish language as the national language is the first official language.
    2. The English language is recognised as a second official language.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_...Irish_language


    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_of_the_Irish_language



    Sure, I'm sure everyone who is fluent in Irish is a very educated person (all the people I know are anyway) and has no problem getting a good job.
    - Just like people fluent in Latin are most likely highly educated and skilled people.
    It doesn't change the fact that Latin and Irish are in practical terms dead languages.

    I'm not anti Irish, I wish I could know a bit more myself, but the system
    is flawed - make it optional after the junior cert - it will improve the level of those who choose to study it.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 8 Donalinger


    the way I see it they should make it optional after the Junior Cert.
    Too many people have no interest and it is hard to get people to embrace the language, I say this as a fluent speaker.

    The reality is we lost the battle many years ago.
    We have Primary School teachers who are not fluent teaching our children, and than those children go to secondary school with a poor level of Irish, where they meet more Irish teachers who are average.

    You cannot expect to have Irish as a LC compulsory subject but have poor quality teachers. Its not fair.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,806 ✭✭✭recipio


    Donalinger wrote: »
    the way I see it they should make it optional after the Junior Cert.
    Too many people have no interest and it is hard to get people to embrace the language, I say this as a fluent speaker.

    The reality is we lost the battle many years ago.
    We have Primary School teachers who are not fluent teaching our children, and than those children go to secondary school with a poor level of Irish, where they meet more Irish teachers who are average.

    You cannot expect to have Irish as a LC compulsory subject but have poor quality teachers. Its not fair.

    Well said.
    I think most students instinctively feel that Irish is utterly irrelevant to their post school lives. It is in fact part of a political agenda launched at the foundation of the State and perpetuated by people who happen to be good enough at it to get a college degree. I was taught by Christian Brothers who themselves were second and third sons off farms who had 'Republican ' sympathies. It is part of a pan nationalist agenda which is slowly receeding, but not fast enough.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 290 ✭✭The Dark Side


    As with most things in Ireland, we'll eventually move in the right direction and remove both the compulsory nature of it in schools and it's designation as one of our official languages.

    We'll then wonder why it ever took us so long to do it.

    Availability of contraception, Legalisation of homosexuality, Divorce, Same sex marriage....we will continue down the path to throw off the shackles of our ultra-conservative, ultra-religious and ultra-nationalistic past.
    The Irish Language will follow.
    We will be finally allowed to turn off the (eye-wateringly expensive) life-support machine that has kept this long dead language 'alive' these past few generations.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,806 ✭✭✭An Ciarraioch


    Interestingly, a Polish student in Tralee got an A1 in the Honours Leaving exam, which suggests personal aptitude towards languages is key to skill development.


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,069 ✭✭✭✭LordSutch


    It has been mentioned many times how well some of our newcomers have done in Irish!

    Poles, Chinese, Africans many of whom seem to excel in learning Irish, presumably because they and their families have no history of 'hang ups' regarding the force feeding in previous generations since the 1920s.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,806 ✭✭✭recipio


    Many leaving cert students are denied the right to do two or more continental languages due to 'scheduling' or 'resource ' issues - yet time and resources are available for Irish. As its just a metaphor for the DeValera-esque agenda forced on us by a gutless series of Governments no wonder resentment builds up ?


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,100 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore


    LordSutch wrote: »
    It has been mentioned many times how well some of our newcomers have done in Irish!

    Poles, Chinese, Africans many of whom seem to excel in learning Irish, presumably because they and their families have no history of 'hang ups' regarding the force feeding in previous generations since the 1920s.

    Fair enough, unless they start speaking it long after the exams are done and dusted, it does not equal a revival of any sort.

    There was a recent survey of the differing attitudes to Irish South vs North, the Northern people learnt the language for enjoyment and in the main their Southern counterparts learnt it to jump through hoops to pass exams.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 1,312 ✭✭✭Paramite Pie


    Fair enough, unless they start speaking it long after the exams are done and dusted, it does not equal a revival of any sort.

    Well a few years ago I often encountered people saying immigrants(/children) would be alienated by their lack of Irish (many don't have to learn it) by those who heavily equate the language with nationality. It seems some people will try anything to drop the subject in schools altogether, so it's nice to see so many do well in it.
    There was a recent survey of the differing attitudes to Irish South vs North, the Northern people learnt the language for enjoyment and in the main their Southern counterparts learnt it to jump through hoops to pass exams.

    Irish shouldn't be a mandatory "academic" subject, but should be spoken in Primary School with many games and school activities conducted in Irish. TEFL teachers teach English with many props and it's easier to remember words when you can both see and hold an object in your hand.

    Irish Students would become so much more proficient & confident with these methods. Teach a language, not a subject. Leave the 16th century poetry as a separate Advanced Irish subject.


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 10,087 ✭✭✭✭Dan_Solo


    Irish shouldn't be a mandatory "academic" subject, but should be spoken in Primary School with many games and school activities conducted in Irish. TEFL teachers teach English with many props and it's easier to remember words when you can both see and hold an object in your hand.

    Irish Students would become so much more proficient & confident with these methods. Teach a language, not a subject. Leave the 16th century poetry as a separate Advanced Irish subject.
    But that's still a so what?
    The problem isn't the way it's taught. Plenty of people come out of the Irish education system with a decent standard of Irish.
    They just don't want to ever use it again. And why would they when they have another language that works 100% of the time, to a higher level and with almost all foreigners?


  • Posts: 5,094 ✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    the_monkey wrote: »
    I'm not anti Irish...

    That's good to know. Curiously, somebody using your pseudonym here a mere four months ago had this to say about Irish: "IRish language will soon be dead anyway - thank Christ!!" :rolleyes:


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 15,318 ✭✭✭✭briany


    Dan_Solo wrote: »
    But that's still a so what?
    The problem isn't the way it's taught. Plenty of people come out of the Irish education system with a decent standard of Irish.
    They just don't want to ever use it again. And why would they when they have another language that works 100% of the time, to a higher level and with almost all foreigners?

    Yeah, the problem of Irish is never been how important it is in the education system, it's always been its declining importance outside the education system. Fix that, and you will see Irish LC results go up a letter or two on average. How someone would fix that, though, I have never seen a good answer for.


  • Posts: 5,094 ✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    recipio wrote: »
    It is in fact part of a political agenda launched at the foundation of the State and perpetuated by people who happen to be good enough at it to get a college degree. I was taught by Christian Brothers who themselves were second and third sons off farms who had 'Republican ' sympathies. It is part of a pan nationalist agenda which is slowly receeding, but not fast enough.

    So many worn, cliched, trite scapegoating anti-Irish prejudices wrapped up in a single post - I'm surprised you never mentioned Dev signing the condolences.

    So, just how small were these farms with "republican sympathies"? Let us guess: the big farmers like John Bruton with Redmondite and British imperialist sympathies are culturally and politically perfectly acceptable? The pro-British shopkeepers and their greasy tills in Dublin were culturally and politically OK? The Home Rule politicians in Dublin who personally owned enormous slums across the city were culturally and politically fine? It's the poor and radical, the republicans from Liam Mellows in Dublin to Peadar O'Donnell in Donegal, who are to be hated when you rant about the supposed evils of Irish nationalists and republicans? Bingo.

    Give me any of the radical Irish socialist republicans of the 20th century to the snivelling, wannabe English counter-revolutionaries of the Home Rule/Cumann na nGaedhael/Fine Gael party - "I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first" of the Costello/Bruton types - and their equally anti-Irish and pro-British conservatives in the Roman Catholic church. The outstanding impression from the latter two is that intellectually they have never been committed to the idea of an independent Ireland. That tradition continues in the utterances of John Bruton and Brian Hayes.

    Without the actual republicans pushing things, the anti-Irish culture crowd you prefer (who are very, very much nationalist - just of the British variety known as Redmondite/unionist/imperialist) would still be following the John Redmond tradition of going to Westminster and fattening themselves on a diet of arselicking, sycophancy, corruption, cheering on supremacist warmongering and class hatred. It's no coincidence that big Meath farmer and apologist for empire John Bruton idolises John Redmond, a man whose "democratic mandate" and commitment to ending the abject poverty in Irish cities was very threadbare indeed.

    Lastly, it's also news to know your Irish-hating, republican-hating friends have no "political agendas", from glorifying British imperialist warmongering with your obsessive "commemorations" to demonising anything that is culturally Irish about Ireland. As for "pan-nationalist agendas", your beloved British political culture in 2015 is one massive pan-imperialist agenda still, with its incessant war glorification orgies, topped off with a medieval cult of royalism saturating an ineffably horrendous tabloid culture and a seventeenth-century anti-Catholicism permeating the institutions of power.

    For all its faults, I'd rather live in this Ireland any day than the acquiescent, Irish culture hating, British imperialist one you and your fellow travellers would have liked to keep us in back in 1916-1921.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 5,806 ✭✭✭An Ciarraioch


    That said, the language was ironically stronger in communities then precisely because the culture was hated, it's as if there was an instinctive relaxation after, with the assumption that freedom automatically meant preservation.


  • Posts: 5,094 ✭✭✭ [Deleted User]


    That said, the language was ironically stronger in communities then precisely because the culture was hated, it's as if there was an instinctive relaxation after, with the assumption that freedom automatically meant preservation.

    I wouldn't agree with this at all, although I accept it is a fashionable interpretation. The 19th century was, above all else, the century of cultural/intellectual colonisation of the Irish. No century was worse than it. The language was indeed stronger, but that was because the cultural colonisation really got into mode only following the Act of Union, specifically following the deal that was Catholic Emancipation in 1828/29 where anglicisation was the prerequisite for the native, increasingly Romanised Catholics to attain power in the British imperialist state in Ireland. The hatred, abject poverty and discrimination led to an exodus from the Irish cultural world to that of the English. It did not lead to a strengthening of that world, unfortunately. In imperial stereotypes, the Irish were the apes, the English the civilised Teutons - even Irish people tend to forget how deeply hated the culturally Irish were. For Irish people in the 19th century, the Roman Catholic church was the sole evidence they had that they were civilised Europeans, so they Romanised their church via ultramontanism to show their "civilisation". Anglicisation and Romanisation: the two major symptoms of the Irish self-hatred.

    In a state absolutely dominated by the British (who badly needed cannonfodder for their military), Irish was poverty because now the natives were told that if they became culturally more like the English, they'd get some of the breadcrumbs of Empire. As Daniel O'Connell infamously, but felicitously, put it in 1832: "The people of Ireland are ready to become a portion of the Empire, provided they be made so in reality and not in name alone; they are ready to become a kind of West Briton if made so in benefits and justice; but if not, we are Irishmen again."


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  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 7,555 ✭✭✭Ave Sodalis


    I've always thought, and still stand by it, that the best way to bring back Irish is by firstly, concentrating on speaking it for primary school with an introduction to writing and reading it in the later years (4th, 5th, and 6th class). However keeping the focus on learning to speak it in primary school. The first 3 years of secondary school should be a high focus on learning the more nitty, gritty bit of reading and writing it. Then for Leaving Cert, have it optional but do similar as with maths and have extra points awarded to those who take it on.

    I think it can still be saved, but it will take work and will involve the correct and enjoyable introduction of it in primary school. I mean, when you learn to speak your primary language as a child, you learn to speak it first. I think the learning of the Irish language should be based on a model. Leave the poetry and stuff out of it for school and concentrate on the practical side of the language.

    It is taught terribly. Now I love Irish and would love to speak it fluently. I think it's a stunning language but when you only learn a month before the Leaving Cert that Irish can be masculine and feminine like French (something you learn the first day of French class), there isn't really much hope of the current education system being successfully.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 505 ✭✭✭inocybe


    sup_dude wrote: »
    I've always thought, and still stand by it, that the best way to bring back Irish is by firstly, concentrating on speaking it for primary school with an introduction to writing and reading it in the later years (4th, 5th, and 6th class). However keeping the focus on learning to speak it in primary school. The first 3 years of secondary school should be a high focus on learning the more nitty, gritty bit of reading and writing it. Then for Leaving Cert, have it optional but do similar as with maths and have extra points awarded to those who take it on.

    I think it can still be saved, but it will take work and will involve the correct and enjoyable introduction of it in primary school. I mean, when you learn to speak your primary language as a child, you learn to speak it first. I think the learning of the Irish language should be based on a model. Leave the poetry and stuff out of it for school and concentrate on the practical side of the language.

    It is taught terribly. Now I love Irish and would love to speak it fluently. I think it's a stunning language but when you only learn a month before the Leaving Cert that Irish can be masculine and feminine like French (something you learn the first day of French class), there isn't really much hope of the current education system being successfully.

    Problem there is that you'd need primary school teachers that can actually speak the language - it's much easier to teach kids to fill in workbooks. Best of all would be to relieve teachers of Irish altogether and bring in enthusiastic people to have a bit of fun with the kids while they speak it.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,069 ✭✭✭✭LordSutch


    I say Furaranach old bean, you really are on fire tonight, smoke rising from your Gaelic keyboard, is it?

    I never thought such temperatures could be raised by defending and just discussing the failing Irish language. You really should loosen up my man or you'll have a seizure . . . . .

    It's like you're getting it all out, you're excising a giant boil with loads of puss coming out!

    Those bloody British/English/Unionist swine, Grrrrrrrrrr


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 33,779 ✭✭✭✭Princess Consuela Bananahammock


    So many worn, cliched, trite scapegoating anti-Irish prejudices wrapped up in a single post - I'm surprised you never mentioned Dev signing the condolences.

    So, just how small were these farms with "republican sympathies"? Let us guess: the big farmers like John Bruton with Redmondite and British imperialist sympathies are culturally and politically perfectly acceptable? The pro-British shopkeepers and their greasy tills in Dublin were culturally and politically OK? The Home Rule politicians in Dublin who personally owned enormous slums across the city were culturally and politically fine? It's the poor and radical, the republicans from Liam Mellows in Dublin to Peadar O'Donnell in Donegal, who are to be hated when you rant about the supposed evils of Irish nationalists and republicans? Bingo.

    Give me any of the radical Irish socialist republicans of the 20th century to the snivelling, wannabe English counter-revolutionaries of the Home Rule/Cumann na nGaedhael/Fine Gael party - "I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first" of the Costello/Bruton types - and their equally anti-Irish and pro-British conservatives in the Roman Catholic church. The outstanding impression from the latter two is that intellectually they have never been committed to the idea of an independent Ireland. That tradition continues in the utterances of John Bruton and Brian Hayes.

    Ta for the history lesson, but what does this have to do with the falling of the Irish language in 21st century Ireland?
    Without the actual republicans pushing things, the anti-Irish culture crowd you prefer (who are very, very much nationalist - just of the British variety known as Redmondite/unionist/imperialist) would still be following the John Redmond tradition of going to Westminster and fattening themselves on a diet of arselicking, sycophancy, corruption, cheering on supremacist warmongering and class hatred. It's no coincidence that big Meath farmer and apologist for empire John Bruton idolises John Redmond, a man whose "democratic mandate" and commitment to ending the abject poverty in Irish cities was very threadbare indeed.

    He said Christian Brothers - how did we get from that to some kind of veiled Jackeen labeling?
    Lastly, it's also news to know your Irish-hating, republican-hating friends have no "political agendas", from glorifying British imperialist warmongering with your obsessive "commemorations" to demonising anything that is culturally Irish about Ireland. As for "pan-nationalist agendas", your beloved British political culture in 2015 is one massive pan-imperialist agenda still, with its incessant war glorification orgies, topped off with a medieval cult of royalism saturating an ineffably horrendous tabloid culture and a seventeenth-century anti-Catholicism permeating the institutions of power.

    For all its faults, I'd rather live in this Ireland any day than the acquiescent, Irish culture hating, British imperialist one you and your fellow travellers would have liked to keep us in back in 1916-1921.

    Irish mean Republican hating now does it?

    We're talkign about a lanaguage. We learn it at school and form an opinion far earlier than we learn about political history.

    I was five or six years old when I relaised I didn't like the Irish language, partially because everyone already spoke a lanaguge I understood partly because of an overly-physical head-teacher who hated the fact that I dislike Irish but was quite good at every other subjects. I knew nothing about republicanism or CnaG or whatevefr at this point. Was I an Irish-hater (as in Irish the langauge)? Yes. Irish-hater (as in the attribute)? Not possible to answer. A repblican hater? At six? Come on!


    This is a very common experience and opinion amonst people who would have been a child in the late 70s/early 80s like it or not. School was sometimes a brutal place if you didn't like Irish, like it or not, and it wasn't the pupil's fault.

    Everything I don't like is either woke or fascist - possibly both - pick one.



  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,100 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore


    Wow, just.... wow.

    The outrage is strong in this one.


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 13,812 ✭✭✭✭kowloon


    ...
    Irish shouldn't be a mandatory "academic" subject, but should be spoken in Primary School with many games and school activities conducted in Irish. TEFL teachers teach English with many props and it's easier to remember words when you can both see and hold an object in your hand.

    Irish Students would become so much more proficient & confident with these methods. Teach a language, not a subject. Leave the 16th century poetry as a separate Advanced Irish subject.

    This is the ideal solution. I also think English, as it is now, should be an optional subject.


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 10,087 ✭✭✭✭Dan_Solo


    sup_dude wrote: »
    I've always thought, and still stand by it, that the best way to bring back Irish is by firstly, concentrating on speaking it for primary school with an introduction to writing and reading it in the later years (4th, 5th, and 6th class). However keeping the focus on learning to speak it in primary school. The first 3 years of secondary school should be a high focus on learning the more nitty, gritty bit of reading and writing it. Then for Leaving Cert, have it optional but do similar as with maths and have extra points awarded to those who take it on.
    I hate to break this to you but that's exactly how Gaelscoils work and nobody from those schools wants to speak Irish when they grow up. Why would they? English is more widely understood and to a more advanced level by pretty much 100% of the population of Ireland, not to mention Irish has 0% utility with foreigners, unlike English.
    Why would even fluent Irish speakers want to speak Irish after school? Are you assuming they hate their more useful English for some reason?


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 10,087 ✭✭✭✭Dan_Solo


    inocybe wrote: »
    Problem there is that you'd need primary school teachers that can actually speak the language - it's much easier to teach kids to fill in workbooks. Best of all would be to relieve teachers of Irish altogether and bring in enthusiastic people to have a bit of fun with the kids while they speak it.
    No. Just no.
    Are you denying that at the time of leaving school nearly everybody has a least a basic level of Irish? And then roughly 0% of them use it.
    Why is that?


  • Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 17,100 ✭✭✭✭whisky_galore



    Irish shouldn't be a mandatory "academic" subject

    Making it optional? Not going to happen. Ever. Too much of a political football. Special interest and lobby groups; C Na G and similar quangoes/agencies, teachers, Gaeltacht dwellers esp those lodging kids learning the language, would scream blue murder.


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  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 10,087 ✭✭✭✭Dan_Solo


    Making it optional? Not going to happen. Ever. Too much of a political football. Special interest and lobby groups; C Na G and similar quangoes/agencies, teachers, Gaeltacht dwellers esp those lodging kids learning the language, would scream blue murder.
    Irish is like a lot of other stuff isn't it, a great idea as long as somebody else is doing the spadework.


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