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| The purple area represents Gaelic speakers If you look closely at the island where I live, you will see a tiny, singular dot - that's me and my cassette :-) |
As a result, I too loathe the Gaelic. It's not a useful language. No other country on earth uses it (unless there are massive grants from the government of course) and so there are about 7,000 souls that can speak it.
And we're friends with quite a large number of them, it would seem.
Oh it's through Tartarus and the Merchant Navy - The Hebridean island boys go off to sea and usually end up in a pub with Tartarus somewhere suitably mosquito-infested.
We sometimes end up in pubs in Glasgow with them too and there are a clutch of pubs that if you don't know how to order three pints of lager and six packets of cheese and onion crisps in the Gaelic, you are utterly fucked for snax and drinx for the evening.
I have been challenging my entrenched beliefs, dear reader. Beliefs like: I don't like green cars. Or I only watch the BBC. It's healthy to challenge them.
So I went to the library and asked for some Teach Yourself Gaelic materials.
Beneath the Polish reading books and Improve Your English (written in Polish) we unearthed a big box that contained a small book and a CASSETTE.
Sonshine was bemused by the cassette. As was I as we don't have anything to play them on any more.
However, Tartarus never throws any bit of machinery out and after a rootle around in yet another Drawer of Shame (this one containing cassette players, personal CD players and possibly morse code flags), I uncovered Tartarus's state of the art Walkman. It weighs about the same as a house brick and is actually about the same size.
The Drawer of Shame also yielded an adapter that allowed me to plug it all into the wall. And the wonders of technology ensured that even after not spinning a spindle for the best part of 20 years, the Walkman worked.
And so I set to - learning the alphabet and pronunciations.
So far, the words on the page have NO natural correlation to the sounds that your mouth wants to make.
f's for example are silent. 'Th' is pronounced 'h' and the various vowel combinations offer no obvious manner of pronunciation at all. A 'd' at the beginning of a word is pronounced 'j' so words like 'deargh' are actually pronounced 'jerah' Honestly, it's like someone threw a bag of scrabble letters in the air and randomly assigned the letters to make words.
Frankly, I can see why it's a dying language.
It has taken me a week to get to page 10. And the writing only started on page 7
But now I can ask people how they are. I can tell people that I'm feeling fine thank you. I can say that it's a lovely day.
But I couldn't write any of it down.
In Gaelic, when you are addressing someone - the spelling of their name changes! You add in an 'h' and an i (at the beginning and end of the word), so this means that the name Tormod (pronounced Tormot) becomes Thormoid (pronounced Horramodge).
'Jane' is spelled 'Sine' but I have to keep flicking back a few pages to work out that it's pronounced 'Shona'. Or maybe it's not pronounced Shona. The little cassette, rather annoyingly, only has the conversations, not any of the other ancillary grammar stuff that litters the book.
On the BBC website. Of course.
Have you done anything ridiculous like try to learn swahili or arabic, on your own?
It is still spoken widely in the Maritimes here - particularly Cape Breton.
ReplyDeleteReally? Scottish Gaelic is spoken somewhere WARM?! :-)
DeleteAli x
Just wait until you try and learn Māori.
ReplyDeleteBTW I think Cape Breton is actually COLDER than Bonny f*cking Scotland
I confess, no idea where the Maritimes are. Presumed that the Gaels had sailed somewhere warm. Reassuring to know that they actually sailed somewhere colder lol!
Deleteali, i would hardly call the canadian maritimes "warm" but that's just me.
ReplyDeleteas for the wonders of illogical languages, as far as i'm concerned, the only thing polish (my mother tongue) has going for it is that it is phonetic. thereafter end any nods to logic. in polish you conjugate the crap out of everything. if i tell you my name (agnieszka) it is said one way, if you're talking about me, it changes (o agnieszce), if you you're addressing an ode to me, it changes (agnieszko!), if you're giving me something, it changes (dla agnieszki) and so on and so forth. even i, a native speaker, cannot keep this straight.
however, it is a language that is fun and creative: you can make a diminutive out of anything, much in the way that the spanish can make a cervesa into a cervesita but you can take it further and further, without actually losing the sense of the original word that has thus been cutified.
it is a language that is far more confusing than english, spanish or french (although the whole subjunctive thing in french still beats the hell out of me, as do the two "to be's" in spanish, but that's about it).
so there you have it. i had some patients with gaelic names here in western canada and it was always fun trying to figure out how to pronounce their names - i usually opted for going for something that sounded nothing like what it looked like, and once in a while i managed to hit it, if not on target, then in the general vicinity. gaelic names are very popular in canada, just so you know.
The links between Scotland and Canada date back to at least when people were thrown off their land in favour of sheep. Because landlords could make more money from sheep. The Highland Clearances.
ReplyDeleteEven here, we have Canada Hill - where relatives would go to wave their final goodbyes to those bound for distant shores.
The Gaels were particularly affected by this, hence the predominance in Canadian culture of what, in fact is a small corner of Scottish cultural life. Mind you, who would want a predominance of Glaswegianness or Edinburgherness or - worst of all Aberdonianness - in their country's neritage?! Better the romance of the Gaels!
Once I've mastered the Gaelic, I may aim for the Polish. At the moment I am limited to: Gwiazda and Glupiec. And Sliwka (plums in chocolate - utterly divine!)
There are PLENTY of Polish books in the library these days.
Actually, Scotland's romance with the Polish goes back to WWII - I think - when we seemed to have lots of Poles moving over here. There seemed to be lots of Polish nobility with marvellous manners. They were a big hit with the ladies :-) Whether they actually WERE nobility, who cared? Men with manners in Scotland?! We snapped them up and kept them :-)
Ali x
Komdu Saell!
ReplyDeleteI've been told I should learn gaelic by the man who taught me Old Norse. He felt that as half Scottish, with an Irish gaelic name I should know some gaelic of some sort. I don't.
I do know a little Old Norse though and some Icelandic. I think Icelandic is spoken even less than gaelic.
Godan Blessud (all the 'd's are not meant to be ds by the way)
Now you're talking - Old Norse!!!!! I fancy THAT! I think that there's a story there how you came to know an old man who could teach you Old Norse!
DeleteAli x
Learn Polish - all the unpopular letters of the alphabet (according to my DH), including 3 types of "z", but in its favour, it is pronounced how it is spelt :D
ReplyDeleteI might learn Polish because it is spoken more places worldwide (certainly these days!) than Gaelic. Possibly even English!
DeleteAli x
my comp came over all cultural and got a bunch of us to do Latin for O level ... you learn how to conjugate love which is rather lovely and now if ever I meet a centurian I can say I love you come and walk in the wood .....!!x
ReplyDeleteI would rather like to be able to say I love you and come walk in the wood in any language. How romantic!
DeleteBoth my Grandparent were fluent due to family circumstances I spent my early years with them and listened well .
ReplyDeleteGood that you got a good grounding in Gaelic, I guess. Have you ever used it?
DeleteAli x
I've tried to learn Irish Gaelic, but it is a very tricky language. My great-grandparents spoke Irish, and my grandfather grew up listening to his father singing in Irish in the shower. In one of the last conversations I had with my grandfather before he died, I asked him if he remembered any Irish and he sang one of the songs he remembered from his childhood.
ReplyDeleteThe spelling system isn't as bad as it first looks. It's more logical and consistent than English spelling and doesn't take much getting used to.
ReplyDeleteTry learngaelic: http://learngaelic.net/ the one-stop shop for Gaelic learning.
I learned Gaelic fluently as an adult so it is possible!
BTW - Sìne is pronounced Sheena.
It's only been the bog standard comprehensive school French and German for me. German was amusing because I got to go home and call my Father, der Vater and I could make it sound like farter. Which was sort of snigger worthy from an annoying teenager point of view. My brother and I would have random German phrase competitions but the only ones I can remember are, es ist kalt (it is cold) and gott im himmel (god in heaven). I was truly blown away by the word geschwindigkeitsbeschränkung. It's the longest word I've ever seen :O Think it means speed limit...
ReplyDeleteI never realised that Gaelic was so common in Lewis. 75% can speak it! So my friend who's just got a job in Stornoway had better get learning fast.
ReplyDeleteI had a bash at Gaelic many years ago, when I was more into Scottish folk music than I am now, and was taken with my romantic notions of the landscape and ginger haired lasses on windswept beaches and a mixture of other nostalgic ideas. It was too hard.
When I went to Anglesey a couple of years ago to do some research, I was gently but seriously advised that if I were to come back again, I must come armed with at least basic Welsh. That's a bugger as well - the nouns change according to case so it makes looking words up in a dictionary very hard. Really though, living where I do, Welsh would be the most logical next language to learn because I can find native speakers within 70 miles of me.
If you fancy a challenge though, try Finnish. My God... the grammar is like something that a group of cunning linguists put together in their spare time as a massive practical joke, in order to invent a system of language impossible for anyone to learn. Fourteen cases!
My vote for ridiculousness goes to German, which has 16 different ways of saying "the"! :D
ReplyDeleteI'm learning Spanish.Getting to grips with the important phrases:
ReplyDelete'Dos San Miguel por favor'