Shurimgreat wrote: » Are you for real? Why not just teach them the language of their ancestors?
Shurimgreat wrote: » Is there anything else of our ancestry and culture you'd like to do away with? St. Patricks day maybe?
Shep_Dog wrote: » Why teach them a dead people's language?
Shep_Dog wrote: » Irish can never be 'fun' or 'attractive', it's a language of misery and oppression. If you make it 'fun' and 'attractive' it wouldn't be Irish any more.
Shep_Dog wrote: » Why teach them a dead people's language? You mean our annual celebration of the civilisation or Ireland by an English missionary?
Caoimhgh1n wrote: » Why does everybody call Irish a dead language? Have they not educated themselves on the numbers who speak it daily and weekly outside of the education system?
Shurimgreat wrote: » Oh so now you want to drop St. Patricks Day.
Shep_Dog wrote: » Beacuse it's spoken natively as a working langauge by a relatively tiny number of people and is incapable of independently sustaining its own culture, media or newspapers. It's not a living language in the way English, Spanish, Russian are. These are languages in which people can live their lives within their own culture and without speaking any other language.
Shep_Dog wrote: » And where exactly did I say that? You do know that St Patrick was English: right? I'll ignore the other straw men.
Shurimgreat wrote: » Are you for real? Why not just teach them the language of their ancestors? Is there anything else of our ancestry and culture you'd like to do away with? St. Patricks day maybe?
thattequilagirl wrote: » Assuming you're right and the language is dying, is that not all the more reason to encourage its development and use. The Sapir-Wharf hypothesis (I studied this stuff in college) suggests that it's impossible to translate one language completely into another. That means that if Irish dies, we do lose a major part of our culture, history, our collective soul. You might find this article interesting: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140606-why-we-must-save-dying-languages From it: "What’s more, languages are conduits of human heritage. Writing is a relatively recent development in our history (written systems currently exist for only about one-third of the world’s languages), so language itself is often the only way to convey a community’s songs, stories and poems. The Iliad was an oral story before it was written, as was The Odyssey. “How many other traditions are out there in the world that we’ll never know about because no-one recorded them before the language disappeared?” Austin says."
thattequilagirl wrote: » our collective soul.
deepesthole wrote: » LOL. Are potato famines and sending girls off to slavery if they get pregnant also part of our collective soul? Shouldn't we keep these vital parts of our culture alive?
Caoimhgh1n wrote: » He was Welsh actually, some accounts claim him to have been French.
Caoimhgh1n wrote: » So you're laughing at the 2 million people who died during An Gorta Mór?
Shep_Dog wrote: » He may also have come from Cumbria. No doubt, claiming he was Welsh avoids the embarrassment of admiiting he was an Englishman. Odd, that we celebrate the beginning of the end of aboriginal Irish culture. You, know the culture of our ancestors, the one where Irish originated?
Shurimgreat wrote: » Its hard to take anything he says seriously at this stage. He certainly seems to have a pathological hatred of Irish. I can only put it down to having a bad teacher as often happens. Clearly he doesn't think Irish is "sexy" enough for him. I have two words to say to that: "Sharon ni Bheolain".
deepesthole wrote: » I'm laughing at that lame strawman. Has all that Irish pushed the English out of your head? Just answer the question: should we have more famine and Catholic church enforced misery here as it's part of our "collective soul"?
Dughorm wrote: » Wow, by trying to come up with extreme examples and call them "culture" you damage your own credibility here imho. Culture is often linked to the answer to the question "What do we take pride in?"
Caoimhgh1n wrote: » Collective soul was used with regards culture. Famines have nothing to do with culture, and Catholics weren't only in Ireland.
Shurimgreat wrote: » Irish equals famine. Ah right gotcha. You're not the brightest are you?
deepesthole wrote: » Are you going to pretend the famine had no effect on Irish cutlure? Or Catholicism? Laughable. Not even worth discussing.
deepesthole wrote: » Oh, so now you've forgotten your own argument, that Irish is part of "our" culture? But so are loads of crap things so why don't we re-enact all of those too eh? Any other lame strawmen or deflections there?
Shurimgreat wrote: » You're not the brightest are you?
Caoimhgh1n wrote: » Please define "strawmen".
