Scottish Gaelic, Scots an aw

Anyways, sorry for derail, James

No worries at all. That barely constituted a derail and was fun to hear about, even if I doubt that listening to Runrig will ultimately be that helpful in my studies.

Kind of amazing to me how close Irish and Scottish Gaelic are tbh. Was looking at the former last night and forgot and thought I was looking at the latter. Wonder if they are as close as, say, Danish and Norwegian, the written languages anyway.

It was brought to Scotland from Ireland, well that's the accepted opinion. I've heard that Donegal Irish is especially close to Scottish Gaelic, not that surprising.

Thanks. They seem to be different enough at this point as not to be mutually intelligible but still the resemblance is striking.

Today I learned that the English word “pibroch” is an anglicized version of “pìobaireachd.”

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".

Here’s the link for the film: https://www.filmlinc.org/films/memoirs-of-a-sinner/

Film was very trippy, as expected

Was up in Scotland last week and on the way back, the guard on the train made an announcement about carriage J - with the J pronounced the Scottish way, to rhyme with "high". I always forget that's how J is (still) pronounced in (the west of) Scotland (at least).

I was doing a quiz yesterday and the answer I had to give was the letter J and I pronounced it the Scottish way and was about get it marked wrong until I saw a brief look of panic on the (English) quiz master's face and had to explain that's how we say it up here. I am also the kind of dick who'll refer to Mr Beyonce as Jye Zed though.

Good name for Scottish rapper.

He’s the Dundee Jye, A’m the Rapper

Yeah I'd never heard of it - does 'itch' for H overlap?

Never heard of that tbh

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-51403324

Wikipedia sez:

Originally Thurso was known by the Celtic name of tarvodubron meaning "bull water" or "bull river"; similarly was tarvedunum standing for "bull fort" and the name of the town name may have its roots there. Norse influence translated its name to Thjorsá, then altered it to Thorsá, based on the deity of and translating as (the place on) Thor's River.

The local name, Thursa, derives from the Norse, as does the modern Inbhir Theòrsa. means a river mouth, and is generally found as Inver in many anglicised names