h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

(Title translation: Fine Gael and the Irish language; Fine Gael are an Irish political party).

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny recently announced that he would like to see Irish no longer be a compulsory subject after Junior Cert*. So what does everyone, particularly the Irish, think?

I say bravo, Mr. Kenny! It's about time something was done. After all, this is clearly the way to preserve the language (and no, I am not being sarcastic). Someone should learn a language because they want to, not because they are forced to - I was forced to, and that's why I can't speak a word of it today after about 13 years. If Irish is dropped as a compulsory subject, then naturally there will be far less people taking it (unless the universities make Irish an entrance requirement...), but those who do will like it more and hence speak it more.

Then, of course, those who didn't take it might consider later in life that there is in fact a point to learning the language, and take a class out of their opwn free will. This will increase the number of people who speak Irish, as they will have learned it out of pride in their country's traditions. Before you start questioning this paragraph, a friend of mine is doing a voluntary Irish course for precisely this reason.

Any other thoughts?

*Junior Cert: An Irish state exam analogous to the GCSE.

I think you are right. A few years ago, languages like Irish or Welsh might have been in danger of dying out if efforts weren't made to preserve them.

Today, there are ample enthusiasts, with the time and inclination to keep these languages going indefinitely. And forcing people to learn it will only make them less enthusiastic.

TG4 has probably done more for the Irish language than the previous 40 years of school policy. I agree it should be part of the primary curriculum at least, but for secondary, particularly for the Leaving Cert years, I would have my doubts. In normal discourse it is almost completely devoid of utility, and now that the country is developing a more multinational character I can't really see how the insisting on Irish Language could be seen as anything other than discriminatory.

The worry of course is that *no-one* will do senior cert Irish. And you know, if it comes to a choice between Irish and something truly useful like Physics, Chemistry, Maths, Commerce or Biology, they may well be right. The numbers doing Irish will drop like a stone, but at least you will be left with a small number of people who will be committed to it and to it's progress.

Irish will live on in other ways. Just because it is not compulsory doesn't mean we have to stop An Nuacht or TG4 or Irish Colleges in the Gaeltacht.

On a side point, I speak fairly good Irish as I went to an Irish College for a year when I was young, and I became semi-fluent in the language at the time. It is a marvellously descriptive language, and it would be a pity to see it disappear completely. Making it compulsory for Leaving Cert students is not the answer however.

Sláinte

You may be right... this link is the opinion of one who has to do compulsory Welsh at school and as a result has been put right off it...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/U2271731

Having said this (and comparisons are insidious) this schoolperson comes from the Anglicised coastal belt of North-East Wales where you hardly hear a Welsh accent, let alone anyone speaking Welsh (you have to go further inland in Flintshire and Denbighshire for that. Although there are native Welsh-speakers inland in Flintshire right up to the English border, which is heartening)

Further West in Wales you might talk to somebody currently at school who has a different opinion about the worth of the language - I understand it's broadly similar in Ireland in that the native-speaking districts are in the west?

But I do wonder if lacklustre and unimaginative teaching methods in ANY language are a negative thing and can really put the kids off - French and Spanish at my school were an "ugggh" experience because the teaching, frankly, sucked.

It's a mess, frankly.

I did French in school. It's taught as a language. You learn the grammar first, then you're taught comprehension, and then how to write. You're expected, if you do Higher Level Leaving Cert, to produce one sensible, coherent essay in the exam, but you're marked mainly for your use of grammatically correct language, not for the structure of your writing.

I did English in school. It's taught as a literature subject. You study a novel, a play, a film, and a body of poetry. You learn how to write about these, how to express your feelings on paper, how to analyse characters. You learn to write an essay or a short story. In the exam, your writing is marked for fluency and literary ability.

I did Irish in school. It's taught as an uneasy compromise. Technically, it's a literature subject, like English. But, as a literature course, it's ridiculously easy: have you ever heard of a native Irish speaker doing Foundation or Ordinary Level Irish? And the marking scheme for the papers is weighted towards good grammar and spelling, as for a language paper, not good expression, as for a literature paper.

The Irish exam should be split into two seperate courses. There should be an Irish literature course for fluent speakers (and there are more of these as Gaelscoileanna* become more popular), available at Foundation, Ordinary, and Higher levels, as for English, and an Irish language course, teaching it as a foreign language, available at Ordinary and Higher levels, as for French, German, Spanish, or any other foreign language.

(And yes, the Department of Education should face up to the fact that, for a large proportion of the population, Irish *is* a foreign language. The educational system should be designed to deal with the world that exists, not the one in the politician's heads.)

TRiG.

*Schools in which all subjects are taught through Irish. They're now very common at primary level. I think there are only two in the country at second level.

I absolutely agree with everything Trig just said. I mean, there are more native Polish speakers in Ireland right now than there are native Irish speakers, so why not teach some Polish in schools?

So yeah, it would be a good idea to have Irish thought as either a literature or a foreign language.

I did French as well. Put me right off the country. What I really hated was that the Frecnh curriculum kept throwing around words like 'conjugate' and 'subjunctive' without ever explaining what they meant (or maybe that was just me teacher...)

AgProv - you're right, most native Irish speakers are indeed in the west.

"I absolutely agree with everything Trig just said."

Sorry, I just felt the need to quote that. It's not something that gets said very often.

I think there is some move to get Polish added to the curriculum. Both my parents are trying to learn Polish at the moment, but my mother's given up for a bit as she concentrates on ISL. She's gone to college.

I must say that I quite enjoyed French in school, and found that when I was in France for a month a lot of it came back to me. I imagine more would, if I had been there alone. I intend to do that one day, whenever I can afford it.

TRiG.

Not a bad idea!

This is probably a Utopian concept, but most of us (outside Ireland, Wales and the edges of Scotland) are brought up monolingual.

When you first encounter French - which for the vast majority of English people is their first exposure to a foreign language - there can be a real sense of shock and even outrage that this stupid language doesn't assemble as English does.

ASs one of my school peers memorably put it;

"Just how many words does a language NEED for a nice simple word like "the" ?"

Which sums it up richly: English has only one definite article, other languages, depending on case and circumstance, have five or six or more, and this is the sort of thing that leads the Brits to think of other people's languages as overcomplicated and over-fussy.

I'd love to see a sort of general linguistics course going alongside language-learning, something which takes that "grrrr..." and culture shock out of it. Something that might explain in simple words why virtually all other languages are "gendered" and English isn't; why Welsh and Irish do the initial letter mutation thing, so that a simple noun like "cariad" can reappear as Ghariad, Chariad, Nghariad, according to context, case and agreement. (or bach/fach, beog/bheog, et c)

A general introduction to language that might explain the idea of language families: Welsh and Irish in one box, English, German, Dutch in another, the Scandiwegians in a "related but different" box, all the Latin languages here, and the Slavonics here.

A History of Languages course explaining the oddities, like Polish and Russian being related languages, but why one uses the Latin alphabet and the other doesn't; why Latin and Greek have a special importance, but nothing like the exaggerated degree of respect scholars of the past put on them; and the history of English (briefly) from Anglo-Saxon to today.

What you might call general linguistic literacy, really, and an idea of what to expect from specific language learning.

It'll never happen, but you can dream!

All the languages you've mentioned are Indo-European, and all except the Celtic languages fall within the European sprachsbund (which I'm probably spelling incorrectly).

The manual for your suggested linguistics course could be The Power of Babel : A Natural History of Language, by John McWhorter. Excellent book, that.

TRiG.

I believe Irish has just one word for the - an.

Yeah, it probably would be a good idea to teahc people basic linguistics alongside actual languages. Alternatively, teach only linguistics for the first year of secondary school, and then specific languages after that.

English is actually one of the hardest langauges in the world to learn if one is not a native speaker due to the insane irregularity of the rules of grammar. Teachers occasionally tried to use this fact to argue that we should be able to learn Irish easily since we all spoke English fluently. What they forgot was that we were raised speaking English every day, whereas Irish was pretty new to us.

Irish is thought alongside English from the beginning of primary school. My primary teachers were actually really doo at it, and when I left, I'd say I had enough to get by in I ever landed in a Gaeltacht*. Then I got to secondary school, and thanks to an unbelievably bad teacher (not the same as thought me French), I unlearned a lot of the cool stuff I knew that he didn't.

I suppose the main difference is that in primary school, Irish was thought as sort of a spoken language. There was a great emphasis on everyday communication, such as asking a shopkeeper for groceries or inviting a friend to a party.

Then in secondary school, it became all formal discussion of plays and poetry and stuff, which was frankly boring. I saw no possible reason this could ever be useful in real life, which is why I hated it.

(Though my secondary Irish teachers also has a few strange notions about the panguage. For example, the English expression 'He gave out to me.' The correct translation is 'Thóg sé íde béal dom,' though said teachers insisted on translating it literally as 'Thóg sé amach dom.' Doesn't look too bad for a non-Irish person, but for one who has studied the language, it can be quite a big deal. On several other occasions, these teachers read us the riot act for trying to translate other English phrases directly.)

(Oh, and they also said that the present tense of 'abair' ('say') was 'deireann', when in fact it is simply 'deir.')

*Gaeltacht: Are where Irish is the main spoken language. Interestingly, I live in an area whihc is officially a Gaeltacht, but hardly anyone around here speaks much of the language.

"English is actually one of the hardest langauges in the world to learn if one is not a native speaker due to the insane irregularity of the rules of grammar."

I disagree. Like most European languages, English conjugates its verbs, which Irish doesn't. But once you've got your head around that it's not a very hard language to attain competency in. Attaining fluency is a different matter entierly.

There are all those idioms, and the really peculiar prepositional verbs.

to put
to put someone down
to put someone up
to put up with someone

How is the non-native meant to make sense of that lot?

Irish has far more complex rules of grammar, though you may be right in saying that there are fewer exceptions. Generally, a language spoken by a smaller population for a longer time will be more complex.

TRiG.

Well yes, English does have an enviably simple conjugation system; for example, the verb 'kill.'

Basic: kill

Present:
I kill
You kill
He kills
She kills
We kill
Ye kill
They kill

Past:
I killed
You killed
He killed
She killed
We killed
Ye killed
They killed

Future:
I will kill
You will kill
He will kill
She will kill
We will kill
Ye will kill
They will kill

However, there are a bunch of exceptions, such as run, eat, be, etc.

On the othger hand, the fact that the word 'ye' is used almost entirely in Ireland (and possibly Scotland) may cause trouble, as most English speakers use 'you' as both singular and plural.

Though as you say, idioms are the real killer. The French, apparently, have great difficulty with the word 'up':

Get up
Put up with
Wake up
Uppity
Fed up
Shut up
etc

Where you get more than one version of a phrase, or an "official" and an "idiomatic" version of the same phrase: the same kind of thing happens in Welsh, where the way people talk in real life doesn't becessarily meet with the approval of the ivory-tower types who write the grammatical rule book.

In France, you have the "Acadamie Francaise" types who insist on the purest possible version of the language, and who, like Canute holding back the tide, are trying to resist the Anglicisation/Americanisation of the language.

Blowed as to what you'd call the equivalent - Eisteiddfod druidiau? - but Welsh has similar purists who can't see that you need to start where the people are, not where you'd like them to be. I'm sure people like this exist in Irish Gaelic too?

Anyway,Welsh has a phenomemon called "wenglish" - as everyone speaks some degree of Welsh, an intermediate version has evolved which is a pidgin of Welsh and English vocabulary and grammar. This is particularly prevelant in the border counties such as Flintshire - you can even hear it spoken on the other side of the border, in the shopping centres of Chester and Cheshire Oaks!

I also find it heartening that native Welsh-speakers can slip up and down the continuum between Wenglish and pure Welsh as needed and depending on who they're speaking to and the other person's degree of facility in Welsh - this is versatility!

In the attached website, btw, I quote the Flintshire Welsh word "sglods" as an example, this needs explaining: "Sglodion" is the Weklsh for potato chips. You go into a Flintshire chippie and ask for "sglods", you will get a steaming bag of chips!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/walesnortheast/2006/10/reclaiming_welsh_un_word_at_a.html

Well, native Irish speakers do often drop random English phrases into their speach, such as 'you know' or 'cop on.'

There's an Irish word called 'Béargle' or something which means an English word that was made to sound Irish to be included in the langauge, such as 'vóta,' meaning 'vote.'

Beargle - I like that word!

There's a phenomena in Welsh, which I suppose is our equivalent of the beargle, where if a speaker with partial fluency cannot think of the correct Welsh verb, it's acceptible to take the corresponding English verb and make it into a Welsh one by adding the suffix "-io", then treating the hybrid word according to the principles of Welsh grammar.

And yes, as just about every English comedian has noticed, spoken Welsh is peppered with loan-words from English... well, you try generating a Celtic lexicon for things to do with computing...

Let's see, 'computer' in Irish is 'ríomhaire', which literally means 'thing that counts'. Although, that's what 'computer' really means as well.

Béargle, f you're interested, it a contraction on 'Béarla-Gaeilge,' which is Irish for -English-Irish.' 'Gaeilge' apparently is a corruption of a Welsh word...