Why do you hate Irish?

gormdubhgorm wrote: »

There are definitely distinct camps on this subject:

1) people who are embarrassed by Irish and see it as useless the Anti-Irish Zealot.

2) people who are proud of their language and cannot understand why others do not speak it fluently.

3) people like myself ( the silent majority) who liked Irish is proud of it but lost it through lack of use. Maybe this is the category that should try and speak Irish every day and avoid the extremists on both sides?

Where on earth do you come up with this from? Anything to back it up or is it just wishful thinking.

English is our first language. I resent the mandarins who impose Luas, Tacsai and Iarnrod Eireann on us because they bought into DeValera's nationalist agenda. Time for a bit more honesty in this country.

Paramite Pie wrote: »

In most of those it's only the 'h' that's over the top.

In Meadhbh the 'ea' sound doesn't make quite the same 'ae' sound in English which automatically ends in a 'y' sound. It's similar but not the same, it's actually almost but not quite 2 syllables. One and a half syllables maybe.

The letter 'dh' makes a 'y' sound, so 'Meadh' sounds like 'May'. And then to end it we need the 'bh' letter (yes letter, singular not 'combination' of letters).

The Romans invented the 'h' thing but monks had limited parchment-so they squeezed the 'h' (or sometimes other vowels) over the letters to save space, eventually becoming the various accents we see across Europe.:)



When I speak French I speak in a French accent to be understood. Irish has very nuance pronunciation that I can't quite grasp myself but even in English i have a heavier accent when talking to other country people vs urban people. If pronounced properly the musicality of the vowels offsets the guttural element of the language.

The standard vowels are like half-tones and the full-vowels are like full tones. Combination vowels can represent a shift in inflection (or tone if you will). I'm only getting this now. Great schooling here.:rolleyes:

Learners tend to sound either very guttural (if they can't get the vowels) or more simple (even very childlike) if they speak in their Hiberno-Irish accent. Some gaeilgoirs are worse than the french, they won't speak Irish back to you if you can't pronounce it!! Some genuinely may not even understand.

I believe they call it "blas" when you get the auld accent right.

gormdubhgorm wrote: »

In fairness is tacsai and luas that hard to say? Or are you one of these people who deliberately say "tg four" because you don't want to be associated with one word of the language?
Believe it or not De Valera was an Anglophile he went to black rock college and his favourite sport was rugby! He only went to Irish late in life because he fancied his teacher!

Oh please.............this is more about an arrogant mindset that Dev fostered including compulsory Irish for the Leaving cert introduced in 1934.
As for ridiculous Irish names I suppose our tourists can be kept guessing at terms like MNA :eek:

kingchess wrote: »

MY pals Dimitre and zsófi agree it is hard to pronounce Irish names.:o

Join the club, I'm living here more than 50 years and I still can't get my tongue around names like Seán and Saoirse.

i dont see anything moral about speaking irish, every day.
if i,m a drug dealer but speak irish every day ,does that make it ok to sell drugs
or rob a bank.
its ok, im fluent in irish , i must be a good person.

I,ts a dead language,in that 95 per cent of people do not speak it in everyday life .
The sooner we realise this and work out is it a good thing to force every student to
learn it for 5 years plus the better.
WE need to grow up about this ,
as in the government eventually grew up ,and brought in divorce, gay marriage etc
WE have empty wards, because of a shortage of nurses being employed
Is it smart to spend 100 ,s of millions of euros on the irish language .
We need to start building more social housing.
This country has limited resources .
We should a least spend the money we have wisely.

The_Captain wrote: »

Conchobhair
Meadhbh
Samhain
Phríomhfheidhmeannaigh
Comhaltas

None of those have extraneous letters, except Conchobhair which is a Classical Irish spelling. The modern spelling is Crothúir. What do you think the extraneous letters are?

Ferris_Bueller wrote: »

I agree, but that's why I said I find it difficult to understand them.



Yeah you are right in what you are saying, it usually is about the "blas" as someone else pointed out and I'm sure if two people from the heart of Kerry were to speak to each other like that they could understand each other perfectly. However I don't think it's very helpful to people who aren't very good at Irish or who are trying to pick it up, it makes it more difficult to understand for them when really we should be trying to encourage them to use it.

Agreed you get sneered at by some if you use "school Irish". But in fairness most are delighted if you make some sort of effort at speaking it. I remember when I heard claregalway was a Gaeltacht, I ordered my pint in Irish to see if it tasted the same.

It did and it was good craic.

For many of us, it's not "the way it's taught", it's the very fact that it's compulsory. I wouldn't have had any more interest in Irish had I been taught so well I ended up fluent. It's a skill I see no value in (though I suppose those suckling from the teat of government spending on Irish might disagree - oblivious, or even proud of, the parasitic nature of that employment).

Sure, I was able to drop to pass and focus on my other 6 subjects in my Leaving Cert, to play tetris in Irish class and rely on what I'd picked up in primary school to get me through the exam but it was a pretty poor use of my time, meant I had no room for error in my other six subjects (i.e. my CSO points could only come from those six, rather than my best of seven subjects) and was a total waste of the state resources (teacher's salary) when I could have spent instead 8 years of primary school and five years of secondary, or 1,651 hours* learning something that might benefit me in life or that even held some interest to me.

When you consider that most undergraduate degrees are delivered over three years with 24 teaching weeks with timetables of 20 hours or so of lectures, or 1,440 hours# that's a fairly shocking amount of time to spend on a subject that many find of little or no value.

Sure, you might say that primary / secondary and third level teaching hours can't be compared and you'd be right but I just thought it a good indication of what can be achieved in that level of hours. It's not quite the oft-touted 10,000 hours practice to master a skill but it's far from an insignificant amount of time and one that really should be used more effectively.

* 8 years of 183 days Primary with Irish taking 3.5 hrs per week of the primary school curriculum + 5 years of 167 days secondary schooling studying Irish for 45 minutes 5 times a week

3.5 hours per week primary taken from: https://www.into.ie/ROI/InformationforMedia/InformationforJournalists/TimeSpentonEachSubject.pdf

Secondary hours based on my own experience as I couldn't find "hours per subject" figures for secondary, YMMV

# Teaching weeks per year taken from http://www.tcd.ie/calendar/1415-2/academic-year-structure-2014-14/, hours an average based on my own experience of a Commerce Degree and friends experiences of IT degrees. Yes, you could effectively double those hours for an engineering or medical degree but you could almost half them for most years of Commerce or Arts.

Stheno wrote: »

One word - Peig

Second, third and fourth word - An Modh Coinníollach

I'd be more or less ambivalent about it apart from the fundamentalist gaelgoree who manage to be more self-righteous and entitled than most religionist extremists...