Irish Language - Tumblr Posts
PSA for the raven cycle fandom or any other fandom with irish characters or characters of irish descent - irish people call the irish language irish or, in irish, gaeilge. the word gaelic is usually used to refer to gaelic football. no one says that they speak gaelic here.
there are gaelic languages - scots gaelic, for example, being the name of the gaelic language spoken in scotland - but, if you’re talking about irish people speaking the gaelic language of ireland, it’s called irish/gaeilge. thanks so much for tuning in.
big m00d - maybe it has something to do with the prevalence of "irish" culture globally? i mean the majority of that is some kind of contemporary Stage Irish-ness™ & harking back to an imagined ireland that doesn't really exist, largely for the benefit of the admittedly massive irish diaspora & their descendents to try to connect their roots to (9-10 million people born in ireland have emigrated since the 1700s and we have a minister of state appointed to our diaspora) (i could also talk about how appropriating faux irish culture is used as an excuse for a drunken good time and further adds to the general simulacrum and muddying of how people view ireland/irish people, but that sounds tiring to me so i’m not gonna). I mean even as far back as like 1910, Desmond FitzGerald recalled visiting the Blaskets to learn Irish and observed the linguistic landscape in writing: “There in that Irish-speaking district one could, as it were, watch the progressive death of the language. Not only was there a difference between the language of these old men from pre-Famine days to that of the middle-aged men, but also between that of the middle-aged men and the younger generation. The old men spoke Irish all of the time, even when they went into Dingle; the middle-aged spoke Irish at home in the village, but Englsih when they went to town. And often even in Ballyferriter one would hear the younger men [only] speaking English together.” In 1910. Like the area he visited is still one of the most active Irish-speaking regions in the country but the effects of british colonisation weren’t entirely ceased with irish independence and the celtic revival movements that were entwined with it. The Blaskets haven’t even had any permanent residents since 1953, there’s no one even there to speak that variation of the language anymore. The thing about living in a postcolonial country is that you’re still living in the detonation site of a cultural bomb, the effect of which “is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their untiy, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves... It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other people’s languages rather than their own.” [Ngûgî wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (Oxford: James Currey, 1986), 3] We were colonised by the English for 800 years and live in a post-colonial world in which English is the third most spoken language. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Ludwig Wittgenstein) - and as Irish has been strangled and smothered progressively over centuries, as barely anyone in the country learns it as a first language, as it’s dying and misrepresented and misunderstood, there’s understandably a sense that there are more practical languages to learn to expand the limits of the world. Even Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator himself, viewed “the old language [as] a barrier to modern progress.” I mean, in an ideal world, reviving our language, which has shaped the hiberno-english we speak and is a part of our heritage, would be more of a priority for us as deconstruction of the limits imposed within our identities by colonialism. But like I’m saying this as an Irish person who has barely any Irish, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(woops i wrote a lot)
tl;dr Irish is Irish, not Gaelic, and also very few of us can even speak it, so having Irish characters start philosophising romantically as Gaelige to impress the people around them usually comes across as completely and utterly ridiculous and drenched in cringe
PSA for the raven cycle fandom or any other fandom with irish characters or characters of irish descent - irish people call the irish language irish or, in irish, gaeilge. the word gaelic is usually used to refer to gaelic football. no one says that they speak gaelic here.
there are gaelic languages - scots gaelic, for example, being the name of the gaelic language spoken in scotland - but, if you’re talking about irish people speaking the gaelic language of ireland, it’s called irish/gaeilge. thanks so much for tuning in.
Also big rec to check out Manchán Magan’s Instagram which has a tonne of definitions on it as well as his book Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape which this has just prompted me to take back off the shelf.
You can find a bunch more on his website here.
Sitting amid the bric-a-brac of generations of seafarers before him, fisherman and museum curator John Bhaba Jeaic Ó Confhaola of Galway, Ireland, tried to describe a word to interviewer Manchán Magan. The word, in the Irish language, was for a three-bladed knife on a long pole, used by generations of Galway fishermen to harvest kelp. Ó Confhaola dredged it from his memory: a scian coirlí. “I don’t think I’ve said that word out loud for 50 years,” he told Magan. It was a sentiment that Magan would hear again and again along Ireland’s west coast. This is a place shaped by proximity to the ocean: nothing stands between the sea and the country’s craggy, cliff-lined shores for roughly 3,000 kilometers, leaving it open to the raw breath of the North Atlantic. […] Early last year [2020], Magan […] began collecting coastal words from towns along the west coast, in an effort to preserve them. […] The recordings make up the Foclóir Farraige, or Sea Dictionary: an online database of recordings and definitions sorted by their regional origin. Magan also recently published a selection of words in an illustrated book. […]
Yet the words are often much more than utilitarian. They carry a sense of poetry, and a perspective on nature. There is the town of Donegal’s mada doininne, a particular type of dark cloud lining the horizon that foretells bad weather. The word, literally translated, means “hounds of the storm.”
Or bláth bán ar gharraí an iascaire, a description of choppy sea from the county of Galway that means “white flowers on the fisherman’s garden.” […]
A coastal Irish speaker, walking the beach at night, might have equally expected to hear stranach (the murmuring of water rushing from shore), or the whisper of caibleadh (distant spirit voices drifting in over the waves).
They knew the ceist an taibhse (the question for the ghost) – a riddle used to determine if someone they met along the way was human or supernatural.
Many words describe ways of predicting the weather, or fishing fortunes, by paying attention to birds or wind direction; to the sea’s sounds; or to the colors in a fire. […]
Ó Baoill and Magan both point out that preserving Ireland’s traditional coastal vocabulary is especially important in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss. Take a word like borráite, from Carraroe village, which describes a rocky offshore reef found in the area. Kelp once grew on these reefs in abundance, tangling with other seaweed species and providing refuge for fish. Due to climate change and overfishing, however, Magan says that a borráite today would host neither kelp nor many fish.
“Contained within that word is the entire ecosystem that was in that area,” Magan says. Words like this, he hopes, can both remind us of what we have lost and reconnect us to what we might still preserve.
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Headline, captions, and text published by: Claudia Geib. “To Speak of the Sea in Irish.” Hakai Magazine. 17 March 2021. Published alongside illustrations and animations by Aurelie Beatley.
from the wikipedia page for James Stephens (1880-1950), also: it me
Táim ag scríobh le Google Aistritheoir.
Is Úcráinis mé. Scrios na Rúisigh teanga, cultúr agus náisiún mo thíre leis na céadta bliain.
Nuair a fheicim Éireannaigh ag labhairt Béarla, tá sé cosúil le Úcráinis ag labhairt Rúisis.
Tá mé i bpian an oiread sin. Tá a leithéid de theanga láidir, álainn gann. Teastaíonn uaim go bhfaigheadh na hÉireannaigh, cosúil linne, neamhspleáchas iomlán arís. Ba mhaith liom iad a fháil ar ais ar a dteanga.
Táim ag foghlaim Gaeilge faoi láthair. Tá teangacha deacair dom, ach ní chuirfidh sé sin bac orm.
Ná bíodh náire ort as do chuid fréamhacha, ná bíodh náire ort as do bhotúin, ná bíodh náire ort as do theanga! Beo leis an teanga, tá sí láidir, sáróidh sé aon trioblóidí!
Ná lig don teanga bás, ná lig don teanga imithe. Ná lig anam do náisiún imithe. Go maire an teanga. De réir mar a chosain na hÚcránaigh an Úcráinis, is amhlaidh a chosnaíonn tú an Ghaeilge.
Troid - buaigh!
Boritsia - poborete!
Taras Shevchenko.
мда, дивнувато на мене вечірня пора впливає. певно зеро лайків буде. або срач. хоча, гадаю, саме зеро лайків. кому я треба зі своїми балачками крізь перекладач.
respectfully, póg mo thoin 🔥