Ade wrote:
djwebb2021 wrote:
In fact, my stand-out top option would be for Diarmuid Ó Sé's Gaeilge Chorca Dhuibhne to be declared the new CO.
The title of the book always seemed strange to me, given "Gaeilge" isn't Corca Dhuibhne Irish.
Yes, I agree. But the author is a promoter of the made-up standard, made up by learners in Dublin and asserted by them to be "the only correct Irish". The whole book is written in this made-up standard - I mean! Who would do that? Who would write a book about the Irish of 40 speakers of good traditional Irish (they are listed on pp7-8 therein) in a made-up form of Irish with the strong implication that Diarmuid Ó Sé's written Irish is superior to the "rubbish" spoken by the 40 speakers? Why even produce the book at all? Do native speakers in Corca Dhuibhne kneel by the side of the road to greet Ó Sé's cavalcade when he sweeps into the Gaeltacht?
I regard myself as within the top handful of people in the world interested in a detailed account of Munster Irish, but I have refused to read this book precisely because it is in poor Irish throughout (poor Irish = the CO). [Let me make clear that there are lots of well-phrased sentences in this book and it could be adjusted to Munster Irish without changing everything. But it is all the "tá siad, bhí siad" nonsense that Peadar Ua Laoghaire condemned, and "a" as an indirect relative pronoun, and "ina" instead of "'na" and things like that. I wouldn't mind if I never read "tá siad" "and "bhí siad" again.] I have read around 3 pages of it in one section, but I mainly have used it to look up pronunciations and just look at the IPA and not the text. I can still get a lot out of it without reading it in a connected way but I don't wish my Irish to be undermined and infected by exposure to the CO. Ó Sé claims - and has claimed for a decade that he is working on an English-language version of the book (the book should be in English or Munster Irish), but this is continually delayed. It is listed on his university website as due to come out in 2019, and now it seems it is several years away still.
We should be grateful to him for the best book ever written on Munster Irish - but Institute Teangeólaíochta Éireann should never have published the book in the form it was published in in 2000. The book has a dedication "do m'athair" -er, what? Was Diarmuid Ó Sé's father a vituperative opponent of Munster Irish?