[ROCKTOBER 4] darraghmac Appreciation Day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF9gSyku-fc

Not much good to me atm

darragh i am loving all your contributions today

"today" hey

yes today

best not bump this again for a while id say

ok fine every day

nah for other reasons. which i predict to become apparent at next admin log bump

dmac how should I pronounce "taoiseach"?

t-shock

i mean i guess theres a tiny aieee in the hyphen but youd nearly need to know about sean nós to get it

http://politicalstrangenames.blogspot.com/2019/07/deems-hardy-clifton-1910-1998.html

ive never learned to love it tbh

When these Irish habits are strong, as in the speech of first-generation bilinguals, they produce such violations of idiom as "If it is a thing that he do come." This means "If he should come," and the word "thing" is trying to anchor it to the aspective. But under pressure from English idiom more accurately sensed that kind of pidgin tends to vanish, "and only Gaelicisms inherently amenable to the recipient structure are retained in the mono-lingual Anglo-Irish." So an English comes to be spoken that has nothing grammatically wrong with it but with still something strange about it, a strangeness frequently obtained by the Irish habit of concentrating on states but supplementing the feeble English verb "to be" with verbs like "put," "leave," "have," which are used to indicate how a state of things has been effected: "She has him crying" (She has made him cry); "I put the fear of God on him" (I frightened him severely); "Have it off him" (take it from him).

― piqued (wins), Sunday, 19 April 2015 22:54 (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

knew that wins had posted relevant stuff somewhere

mcdonaghs irish dialogue has clearly been influenced overmuch by a study of the likes of this, and surely the likes of the stuff put on at the abbey early doors, but rly it was wrong, all wrong, and to write it in the nineties or whatever and lazily wave a hand at synge or whoever from 1920 is just not acceptable.

firstly, i could read synge in my down-home dialect and im pretty sure that while it would seem old-fashioned, it would nevertheless come clean enough out. from ascendancy stock, his time in aran (or his ear) seems to have served him better than whatever mcdonagh has picked up from having a lettermullen father.

im willing to allow a set of rotten vocal performances, tho twould seem a bit much of a coincidence that the gang entire playing islanders didnt know a kerry accent from a connemara- the lads playin nordies were ok, like. the lad from the young offenders was by some distance better than the other three lead islanders.

its a funny balance, theres many good reasons a fella doesnt want to go too sharply in on diaspora or their writing/depiction of jreland, but dammit the play was set in 1993 and between speaking an idiom that at kindest interpretation might have flown fifty years earlier in a very different region and having an o'casey lite grasp of/care for anything like a reasonable characterisation of the people and throwing in a quiet man level of ra (well inla but) men ive to say.....its bad stuff, insulting stuff, and ive no idea of its path from draft to fame but this tick paddy wouldve handed it back to him and told him to write english characters and nkt spoof irish ones.

telling perhaps that twas the RSC put it on first, idk? and that it did well in the states.

at least im happy to be able to report that his clumsy scattergun satire (its not satire its an inability to accurately nail) from three billboards is only him doing to murrica what he done to us first

special word for yerman from bachelors walk. gaeltacht english is imo a complex, precise, dry, expressive idiom and this guy to my mind played it for laughs out of ignorance or contempt.

he simply didnt say the stuff right, had no interest in saying it right. hee-hawing his way through lines for laughs in an accent nobody has ever heard outside of the gaiety and one that a bare minimum of effort, interest or talent wouldve informed him or anyone responsible was ridiculous.

twat.

tisnt *why* im awake, but seeings i *am* awake, its what im annoyed about rn

Which one from Bachelors Walk? Wycherley?

I absolutely loved Bachelors Walk but it is very much A Product Of Its Time and idk if I would today so I havent rewatched.

Feel diaspora, esp those who spent a lot of holidays in Ireland as a child, are uncomfortably trapped - no doubt McDonagh got it from both sides and therefore a lot of his tin ear stems from overcompensating? And he is Irish - he is undoubtedly one of those people who’d have been born and raised in Ireland if not for economic migration. Don’t know if this would have made him quite the same writer though.

I wonder also about if there was the thing you see (lol how articulate I am) where emigrants are sort of frozen in time after leaving and miss out on the nuances and developments you wouldn’t if you were still living there. I might be projecting because I sometimes feel this way, though.

just want to say I apreesh dmac 🙂

heh ty ums and rb@u but i really only took half-notice of what thread that crucial wins post was in when i bumped at 5am

gyac, absolutely i get the trap that an irish person abroad- i think anyone away, really, even me in dublin to a certain extent- can fall into without any blame attached of having a postcard relationship with place. experiencing it through parents and doing the summers back home, more so again, sure.

ive cousins in what i would think are a very similar type relationship, london to irish parents and its v clichéd how and where the stuff sticks, the importance to them of ritual and cultural points that....fell away from cousins this side as we lived through change. very understandable stuff.

but all that said, that this is a version of irish that seems acceptable- and look i guess we all have our sore points, this must be one of mine- to write and put on and tour around the world and slap "mid nineties western ireland" on it is something i take a strong allergy to tbh.

its cod ireland and whether the fault is in mcdonagh as a writer (frankly i suspect so) or whether this is a representation of ireland hed be happy to sit and talk to a journalist in nyc and insist is his truth is somewhat imo beside the point, rly

friel was writing a more modern rural ireland in the early 60s, like.

sure, mcdonagh is writing broad strokes, but my objection to the level of apery goes beyond "arah its doesnt have to be a documentary".

im overanalysing it, surely, but the question of why this, of anything, is what went superstar from the irish writing scene in the past two decades is one that goes beyond "he can write a decent quip" imo

I’m not disagreeing with you, I just understand where he’s coming from I guess. You see this to a much greater extent with Irish-Americans and the way they cling to things like corned beef and Irish dancing and stuff that died out in the late 19th century. Literally. (Why they insist on clinging to St Patty’s is another thing entirely).

You read old Flann and he was bang otm now, today, probably tomorrow. I mean, the “plain people of Ireland” still cuts! and even that is so beyond McDonagh. I do think he writes well though, when you strip this shite away? The issue is that there’s so much of it.

Anyway, Cruiskeen Lawn though! None of this sounds like anyone itt, ofc.

A LADY lecturing recently on the Irish language drew attention to the fact (I mentioned it myself as long ago as 1925) that, while the average English speaker gets along with a mere 400 words, the Irish-speaking peasant uses 4,000.

Considering what most English speakers can achieve with their tiny fund of noises, it is a nice speculation to what extremity one would be reduced if one were locked up for a day with an Irish-speaking bore and bereft of all means of committing murder or suicide.

My point, however, is this. The 400/4,000 ration is fallacious; 400/400,000 would be more like it. There is scarcely a single word in the Irish (barring, possibly, Sasanach) that is simple and explicit.

Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are many with so complete a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of them can be made to express two directly contrary meanings, as well as a plethora of intermediate concepts that have no bearing on either

...

But what is the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular.

Your paltry English speaker apprehends sea-going craft through the infantile cognition which merely distinguishes the small from the big.

If it’s small, it’s a boat, and if it’s big it’s a ship. In his great book An tOileánach,however, the uneducated Tomás Ó Criomhthain uses, perhaps, a dozen words to convey the concept of carrying super-marinity – árthrach long, soitheach, bád, naomhóg, bád raice, galbhád, púcán and whatever you are having yourself.

The plight of the English speaker with his wretched box of 400 vocal beads may be imagined when I say that a really good Irish speaker would blurt out the whole 400 in one cosmic grunt. In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time. Their life (not to say their language) becomes very complex at the century mark; but there you are.
.

i think nakh pbuh may have posted some very interesting stuff in the middle of some long forgotten thread about how and where irish-scotch culture in particular- actually iirc its in particular-particular ulster-schotchtch- travelled in packets and stuck in their new places with specifically traceable cultural touchstones but sprung thence as a new genus in its own new conditions, and i think thats what we're saying here

amerikay tends, at least imo, to veer btwn quiet man and sayyyyy roddy doyle

i think that-if i think of them as the kilburn irish i hope that doesnt come across as having any negative connotations, these are my people- the kilburn irish have a very definite idea of rural ireland that-

will we say mcgahern? we will, maybe-

strikes me, when i mix with them as i do in their own place (london irish is a fascinating culture to me) or as they return to my place as tantalisingly close to quantifiable, tho im sure wed have a fine row in nailing down the characteristics.

and beyant all that, i would still say that mcdonaghs innismore is worthy of a flann to tear it to pieces

right, breakfast

this is good stuff deems and while nothing to contribute at the time these posts are worthy of appreciation, have it off me imo