The Irish

UK looking for a new Defence Secretary.

I've begun reading last year's Man Booker winner Milkman, still at the very beginning but it already paints a stark and complicated picture of the people of a certain time and place

was lolling at someone reporting visiting the Museum of Irish Republicanism in Conway Mill and the guide says to him : “You’re very welcome. Just to remind you, we were at war with the British State, not the British people so have a good look around.”

Enjoyed this thread about the apartheid strikers.

35 years ago this month eleven workers in Dunnes Stores, one of Ireland’s corporate giants, refused to handle goods from apartheid South Africa and went on strike. They spent 3 years on the picket, just £21 per week. But in the end they forced the government to boycott apartheid. pic.twitter.com/QkbyL9PyGv

— Ronan Burtenshaw (@ronanburtenshaw) July 29, 2019

Someone points out downthread that such action would be illegal today under anti-union legislation passed in the UK and Ireland.

They'd be sending guys round to prise up the plaque and sending it to the scrappy in the UK.

fuck, that's some righteous struggling.

at least that horrible quote at the bottom reminds us of the evil and ever present threat of Marxism.

seeing the Henry Street bit reminds me of a defunct Henry Street in Hudds where a lot of the Irish immigrants lived in squalid old-school slum overcrowded terraced houses with outdoor crappers in the early 60's which i only know of through my mum talking about them. They demolished them to build at least the 2nd or 3rd ugliest bus station in Yorkshire.

makes it more fuckin cheeky that stephen mangan lad that time

Posted for pom & others curious about pronunciation of Taoiseach. I was listening & thinking “I don’t say that <sort of dragging sound at the end of the ch I don’t know the name for> but I just listened to myself say it and I totally do. Like hearing a recording of yourself & it not sounding anything like you.
https://youtu.be/-9qK_A8dRp4

Actually listening again she’s a bit more phlegmy than me, but probably more correct ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have no idea whether at my age I could restructure my vocal tract in such a way as to get that phlemigness right but I love it.

i think to keep in mind the fact (it may of course be no fact at all but in art the construct is designed to fall away or to be concealed by the end result nest pas) that the 'ch' is well and good but it could as easily have been described as a 'gh'

the aaaauwwuuugh that calvin does the odd time might give an indication as to where the breathing is, an open gullet almost catching at the end of the emphasised nnTOIEE before the sharp 'ish' withdrawal that is rather akin to a kyokushinkai punch count

i hope that clears it up, at least as far as upper achill formal pronunciation goes. its different in newport, theyd rush it into toieeshuh which is no service to the word at all.

I mean that’s the west for ye, the language is as soft as the weather

said it before, said it manys the time and i could say it in each dialect but ill tell you which of the seven mawschairs on achill taught your granda béarla by the time we'd finished a pint

we had a very good thread on it once someone had posted a good site tracking the various accents

steve coogans cashelbar farmer still fills me with wonder

a chara

Picking up fragments of Irish whilst browsing the UK politics thread is definitely one of the highlights of this place.

― pomenitul, Tuesday, 10 September 2019 10:07 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

the “ch” sound is pronounced like you’re coughing up phlegm although regional variations may apply

― gyac, Tuesday, 10 September 2019 10:08 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

anything from the c in carrot to the h in harry, really?

think i might learn irish (i say this every time)

Is it not C as in carrot if you’re saying “her friend/the friends” (a cara/an cairde) and the phlegm sound is anything starting (or ending?) with a ch, eg Chaith mé, le chéile, and is a softer sound in the middle/end of words? I’ve really only spoken Irish during Irish oral practice, so I’m very out of it and I had a massive fear of doing it in class so fuck knows there’s plenty who know more than me.

xp I mean same, I tried it on Duolingo for a while but life got in the way

in practice youd hear even chara pronounced along the full length of the range

go out as far as louisburgh (which yknow people totally should) and youll hear people say the 'rr' in my name as an 'L' so really ypu cant legislate you just have to enjoy the gaeilge running through everything and the gearshift in peoples nasal passages when it kicks in

Reminds me, there was a guy who used to come into my work, a Mr. McCulloch, who when he pronounced his name used to really work that the -ch sound because he was probably fed up with English people getting it wrong, I felt like saying to him, "It's OK you can stop that, I'm Scottish".

son of the rooster begod

or boar possible

but down home we have more roosters than boars so id guess rooster

Out of curiosity, are Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and/or Breton even remotely intelligible to a speaker of Irish?

Scottish Gaelic is just an offshoot of Old Irish? As is Manx. Welsh/Breton/Cornish are Q-Celtic.

Catching more than a few words of Portuguese at a time strains my ears but I can still vaguely read it despite the fact that my mother tongue is the Easternmost Romance language and Portuguese is the Westernmost. Hence my curiosity.

Welsh and Irish don't look or sound remotely similar to me.

yeah, scottish gaelic, irish gaelic and manx are similar - though not mutually intelligible and orthographically very different (especially manx).

i did a wee scottish gaelic class last year but haven't kept it up so i've forgotten everything, need to get back intae it

I will tell you as an English speaker the thing that really annoys me living over here is how often I have to spell my surname - and it’s not, like, Ní Bheoláin or anything, it’s very easy to read and say. My sister and I have a theory it’s the combination of the way the consonant and vowel sounds come together - perhaps “softer” sounding than people here are used to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am definitely recording “a cara, a chara, ha cairde” when I get home.

Interesting:

https://www.omniglot.com/language/celtic/connections/index.php

I can recognise maybe 70% of Scottish Gaelic words if I read them but the sounds are very different to me (like spits Ulster Irish).

Idk about Breton but interestingly (or not) enough Irish has some words of french origin because of the Normans.

I had to google Louisburgh. Deems, do you know Blacksod bay?

Interesting that this conversation about mutual intelligibility shoukd come up because I'm working with a woman from Norway and a woman from Sweden right now and they talk away to each other - one speaking in Swedish and one speaking in Norwegian.

Breton is just Cornish with a French accent, they say.

I recently stumbled across a TV show in Breton and was struck by how thick their French accent was. Kind of like if everyone in Ireland had (been) converted to Received Pronunciation and had no phonetic crutch to lean on when attempting to speak Irish.

Re: Norwegian and Swedish, I've heard that their mutual intelligibility is somewhat asymmetrical. Similarly, Italian is fairly easy to follow when you speak Romanian but the opposite is by no means true.

Re french and Irish - garçon and garsún are obvious. Supposedly seomra comes from chambre. I heard in school that the old word for church (eaglish?) is from église, though obvs we say séipéal now.

Btw deems - did ye learn it as gluasteain or carr?

Pom, you might find the Wikipedia page about Hiberno-English interesting.

I'll check it out, thanks.

The whole 'Hibernia' (land of winter) thing is kind of weird given the weather there. But it's North of Rome, so that was apparently good enough for the Empire.

The infamous man on the ice* winter we had a few years back, the pipes in my hometown froze & basically nobody had water (we did cos we were on a different supply, lol). But yeah, it’s a total joke.

Relevant*: https://youtu.be/h3vVDUuC0yw

Breton is just Cornish with a French accent, they say.

― The Inner Mounting Phlegm (Tom D.), Tuesday, September 10, 2019 6:19 PM (thirty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

That's a bit of an oversimplification. The two, at one time, were def closer to each other than they are now. But centuries of English influence on Kernowek and French influence on Breton means a Breton speaker wouldn't necessarily understand Cornish and vice versa.

I'll be at this congress next month.

Re: Norwegian and Swedish, I've heard that their mutual intelligibility is somewhat asymmetrical.

It doesn't seem like it in this particular case.

Can't do much with Welsh beyond lessons about P vs Q: pen ~ ceann, pedwar ~ ceathar, and so on.

iirc the French influence is greatest on Munster Irish

tee-zjokh

tee-zjokh

― Le Bateau Ivre, Tuesday, 10 September 2019 17:11 (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

The dialects of Irish: Munster, Connaught, Ulster, Gaelscoil and R'lyeh

t'shok. a vulcan from yon star trek

Is now the right time to tell LBI I know one (1) phrase in Dutch, and I would massacre it even worse than that?

If ever there was a time!

Did I do this right? https://www.speakpipe.com/voice-recorder/msg/aayp5yeqbjrzjxx8

If ever there was a time!

Did I do this right? https://www.speakpipe.com/voice-recorder/msg/aayp5yeqbjrzjxx8🕸