Things We Learned Today... | Page 42 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Annadog40 said
That the majority of people in ireland have red eyes and can turn into sheep because of a curse.

What baaaaastard told you that?

^ Wow….that’s amazing.

Ainnir literally means ‘girl’ same as girls who are called ‘Colleen’ or any other variant like that it comes from the word ‘cailín’ which means ‘girl’ in Irish as well.

^ She’s right you know, my best friend is fluent in Ronald Reagan, excellent one-liners.

unknown said
I thought people in Ireland spoke English. I didn’t know you guys had your very own language.

I promote it here a hell of a lot because the majority of people who aren’t Irish don’t know that we have our own language.

Unfortunately it’s a minority language* with a 1/4 of the population saying they can speak it and I’d say about 1/8 of those can speak it fluently.

Like many cultures and languages that are in decline or that have died, Irish’s decrease in use came from colonoalism- (DAMN YOU HENRY VIII!!!), where the language was more or less forced out of the majority of areas where it was either learn English or die and it became known as an unpopular, peasant language which is wonderfully ironic now because it is generally educated people who speak Irish nowadays. It was a real shame though because I would love Ireland to be like Sweden where everyone speaks Swedish amongst themselves but the second they hear an English-speaking person they can switch over to English and speak it as well as their Swedish (that’s one of my things if I ever become Prime Minister or Taoiseach as they’re called here, slowly make all primary education and after a number of years secondary education through Irish only, have all children’s programming dubbed in Irish or even better be Irish-produced and then have evening programmes be in the original language whether that be English, French, German whatever but with Irish subtitles. The news and weather would be in Irish as well, you’d have near fluency in about 10-20 years if it was implemented and children would be raised naturally bilingual).

But I don’t think it’ll die out anytime soon unlike what a lot of pessimists think (God how I hate them**), there are load of people who I solely speak Irish with and I’ve never heard them utter a word of English, this includes children who are 6, 7 years old so it’s great. If I have any children I plan on them being bilingual at least, with us solely speaking Irish at home just to keep it alive (I think in the last census there were only 7 people in my area who spoke Irish at home ).

*Irish, Scots Gaelic, Breton, Cornish, Manx and Welsh all come from the same language group which is ‘Celtic languages’. (I can understand Scots Gaelic and Manx but can’t make head nor tail of Welsh or Cornish, in case anyone is wondering. I can kind of understand Breton because I know French). Anyways the only language that isn’t classified as ‘endangered’ by UNESCO in the Celtic group is Welsh, isn’t that terrible?

** One of the things they always say is “why don’t the children learn a useful language like Mandarin?” First off where are we going to find all these teachers to teach the thousands of children Mandarin. Second Mandarin is extremely hard for anyone who doesn’t speak a tonal language to learn. Irish is achievable in that it has some very slight similarties to English at least whereas with Mandarin it’s completely new territory.  Thirdly, the vast majority of children will never visit China, at least Irish is their own national language and learning French, German, Spanish and Italian in secondary school is beneficial as the majority of people will visit at least one of those countries in their lifetime unlike China! Another one of their suggestions is to teach children computer science, while this is a wonderful idea we don’t have the money to invest in brand new computers, with the latest top-notch programmes for children to learn, that and IT changes so quickily what they would have learned when they were 7 would be out of date by the time they were 10 whereas languages never dramatically change in a couple of years, it takes hundreds or thousands of years to change a language. That and you can’t talk to a person in computer speak whereas real languages let you access the world!

The ‘Irish Language‘ is an interesting wiki page to look at if you’re ever bored, it’s amazing how quickly it vanished from the majority of the country once the English and Scottish moved in and after the potato famine. One of the oldest surviving examples of a manuscript written in a European language was written in Irish- Lebor na hUidre (Book of the Dun Cow) which dates to before the 1100s, isn’t that bloody impressive?

Anyways that’s a very long way of saying, “yes” we do have our own language. St. Patrick’s Day is coming up soon and I’ll be changing my username to Irish for the day. I also have always had a hidden urge to make a Youtube channel where my videos would be solely in Irish with optional English subtitles because there isn’t any which aren’t education-only channels but I don’t really have the time to properly sit down and make good content.

Beatha teanga í a labhairt!

Is fearr Gaeilge briste ná Béarla cliste!

Here is some Irish being spoken in the great Irish-language drama Ros na Rún which I don’t watch a quarter as much as I should do (I also used to be one of the extras that you would see walk into shops in the background and crap when I was like 12 ah good times). Stephen Fry is in it as well which was excellent because he really showed how Irish is still a living language if someone as big as him was interested in doing a little cameo in a small drama. That and his pronunciation isn’t bad either. The two other men in the pub are native speakers, they have that wonderfully thick accent which you have to adjust to for a couple of seconds because you think “what the hell are they saying?