Scottish Gaelic, Scots an aw

At a company where I used to work we had to hire a Gaelic translator and the only guy we could find was an Irish-born poet who lives on Skye and works with both Irish and Scottish Gaelic, I think he added the latter easily when he moved to Scotland. It was so hard to find someone that before we turned him up I was encouraged as the token Scot to try and tap into my personal network (cue panicked FB posts).

We had a Gaelic unit at our high school where kids from Gaelic primary school would study Gaelic literature, geography and history and join everyone else for other subjects. A fair few of those kids ended up on TV and radio and doing the odd bit of translation or weird side gig due to demand. Interestingly the school only briefly offered Gaelic for beginners so you were witnessing the thrill of bilingualism with no real way to access it, slightly controversial as the unit was seen as an enclave of brighter and better-behaved pupils from more well-to-do backgrounds.

Can you get access to BBC Alba programming where you are James? On iPlayer or TV? It repeats classic shows from the '90s such as the aforementioned Speaking Our Language and a strikingly low-budget soap opera called Machair, among newer material.

Can’t access BBC Alba directly here, no, but thanks for reminding me.

Some of these things seem to be on Dailymotion though.

Spent so much time working on this today I think I broke my brain. We’ll see how much I retain when I wake up tomorrow and get on the subway.

In addition to Duolingo, there is also Glossika. I have thus far only dabbled in it. It’s just a big dumb sentence bank, very repetitive and tedious, but it’s apparently very effective if you keep at it. I have noticed some positive results as well if I use it in conjunction with other stuff. Free for endangered languages, which this one is.

They even have a Manx course! Although I don’t know what else you would use to study.

Manx is supposedly way more phonetic because I guess there was some kind of reform or rationalization relatively recently. This ends up looking more out there, like seeing French-looking words on subway announcements in some English-looking spelling and realizing it’s Haitian Creole.

So the Manx for I’m tired is:

Ta mee skee.

As opposed to the (now) more familiar SG:

Tha mi sgìth.

Sunset Song the film was amazing, if mostly in English. Looking forward to the book.

The Duolingo forum, which is now locked and frozen forever, contains a mixed bag of complaints along with stale, warmed-over, very low level excelsior bait joeks, but also does have some extremely useful usage explanations, usually by the same few people.

For instance, this guy posts a lot of great stuff, such as here:
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/39310770/I-am-in-Stirling-again

Ann an is the preposition meaning in. Historically it used to be just an (an Sruighlea = in Stirling, am bàta = in a boat), but that was confusing in certain contexts so people started doubling the preposition (ann an Sruighlea there, in Stirling; in in Stirling; ann am bàta there, in a boat; in in a boat) and that became the standard way of saying in (so ann an Sruighlea, ann an Glaschu in Glasgow, ann am bàta in a boat, ann am pàirc in a park).

Feel like I should just call it Gaelic as that is its preferred name in English although some people here use that word to refer to Irish.

Some visual differences between Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the accent marks go the other way (although maybe at one point they went the same way). Also there was a spelling reform in Irish to trim off some of the unpronounced consonant clusters.

Link to the Scottish Gaelic Dictionary Am Faclair Beag: https://www.faclair.com/index.aspx

Link to Ollie Benson's extensive Duolingo notes: https://olliebenson.fandom.com/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic

Useful but less helpful link to (some of the) vocabulary for the prior version of the Duolingo tree: https://duolingo.fandom.com/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic

Link to the saved tips and notes for (prior version of) the Duolingo tree: https://duome.eu/tips/en/gd

Which contains everything you ever wanted to know about guga, haggis and yes, Runrig.

Tatoeba sentences in Scottish Gaelic with all translations turned on: https://tatoeba.org/en/sentences/show_all_in/gla/und

Some people like this course:
https://speakgaelic.scot/

Which has an accompanying YouTube series
http://www.youtube.com/@SpeakGaelic
as well as a podcast.

SpeakGaelic seems really good.

The vocative case with masculine names: https://duome.eu/tips/en/gd#Names-2

I'm talking to you, Fhearghais.

Further explanation: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/36574749/Madainn-mhath-Fhearghais

This is a great list of resources!

Have just started my Duolingo journey with Scottish Gaelic inspired by this thread, having avoided both for stubbornly long. Lot of salted gannet and Irn Bru so far.

:)

Just occurred to me that IRN BRU and Runrig are near anagrams.

But what I really came to post is:

Some visual differences between Irish and Scottish Gaelic, the accent marks go the other way (although maybe at one point they went the same way). Also there was a spelling reform in Irish to trim off some of the unpronounced consonant clusters.

That being The Gaelic-English Dictionary, by Colin Mark, who also wrote Gaelic Verbs: Systemized and Simplified.

Apparently Colin B. D. Mark didn’t start learning Gaelic until he was turning forty. Sometime afterwards he wrote the verb book and then spent twenty-five odd years on the dictionary.

Guy who wrote another, century-old dictionary people still use also learned the language as an adult, Edward Dwelly.

Should have responded to your post by saying
Is math sin.

Also I did the first four sections of the first topic of SpeakGaelic and can attest that it really well-done.

late seeing this thread so apologies if somebody's already mentioned this brilliant story

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia

Wow, thanks

Feel like maybe the word “Scots” should be added to the thread title as well.

Even this Mango course I can get free through the library seems to have some good intro stuff.

(xp) "An aw" as used in the famous phrase, "Aw naw, no Annoni oan an aw noo".

...and indeed, "Twa pehs an an ingin ane an aw".

So would it be correct to add “Scots an aw” to the thread title? I don’t quite get the subtleties.

Yes.

I don't really know what they're talking about in the Guardian article re the use of 'an aw'.

Even if the new thread title is incorrect:
a) we can fix it again if needed, assuming mods don’t take offense
b) we may end up learning more from the error
c) it’s all good, after all it’s not like it’s Wikipedia an awor something

One of the useful things about Scots which English no longer has is that the word 'no' exists in two different forms.

"Is there an equivalent in English?"
"Naw, there's nae equivalent in English"

Or better still..

"Naw, there's nae equivalent in English, at least I'm no sure there is".

Now I am, um, mulling over whether to add “noo” at the end as well.

Nae noos is guid noos.

I think the Guardian article is trying to say "an aw" technically can't be used the same way as "also" because it can't appear *before* the extra thing. Instead of saying it's the same as "and all", they could've used "too".

Never thought of that about "nae" as well as "naw" before. Bit like the French "aucun" or German "kein". Fun!

Kein' Angst, Baby!

Really came to say that people love love love this guy: https://gaelicwithjason.thinkific.com/

I don't think he is taking any one-on-one students anymore but you can still look at some of his materials, get a regular email and sign up for group classes.

Video courses. One of them is free.

https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/snotter

Much as I like bogey it's just not a patch on snotter.

Snotter is just a vastly superior word in every single way. Not least because I have an accent which thrives on words just made better with glottal stops.

Did a quiz on zoom with some Americans last week which required me to say skittles and I absolutely glottal stopped the hell out of it and had to repeat myself.

Some Doric.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7BxH6aTzc8