I think Donchadh Ó Céileachair, in his MA thesis on his father's Scéal mo Bheatha, commented that his father's generation, while speaking good Irish, said the years in English. They're very unwieldy in Irish, especially if you're sticking to the trí fichid/cheithre fichid type numbers. A lot of the month names were reintroduced in the modern period. The Gaeltacht word for July in the 19th century was ... July, and that for January was .... an chéad mhi den bhliain, etc.

As somebody learning on my own I can't tell how many times I've had a situation like this.

"That's a really interesting pronunciation that I have never heard before..."
"I can't tell if its really good or really bad"

The 'Byzantine general problem' of Gaelic perhaps. A situation whereby only those who are good enough not to need help with pronunciation can identity the sources of such help correctly.

Well, your initial reference would be to https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fuaim/ where you can hear many thousands of words pronounced in 3 different dialects. Basically, pick a dialect to focus on and then find the appropriate pronunciations there.

Thank you. I have actually been using that. It's a great resource.

I cannot believe these YouTube people. "Gaeilge le Eímear" is actually the worst I've ever heard. Dane from Learn Irish channel isn't the best either, no slender r anyway. You can learn Gaelic sure and welcome, but do not have the audacity to start a Youtube channel TEACHING OTHERS a language you barely speak, posing as an expert. also unworldly how people think they overrule native speakers with their "tá céim agam sa Ghaeilge." No one would dare do that for Spanish or French, nor would they make up a word in either of those and get mad when native speakers don't use it. It might be well intended these people, but personally I'd much rather Irish just died than a fragment of it living on in such a disrespectful fashion... but that's just me

I'd be fine with the existence and development of urban Irish, they can continue using it politically as a "we have our own language" if we didn't call it "Irish/Gaelic" or worse "teanga ár sínsear" because it just isn't. I open up a little Irish dictionary I bought a few months ago sometimes just for a laugh, a great lot of it looks like gibberish!

Sorry for my rant, but it is really getting ridiculous. It is however heartening to have found this forum when I thought there was no one left who cared about the real language; a lot of people here seem much more knowledgeable about it than I am.

Well "Eímear" - if such a name even exists with a fada on the i - has a degree in Irish (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDPpWSmy5Xg). I think the Irish government should fire professors of Irish who give degrees to people like this. She makes ZERO attempt at the pronunciation. The lack of "ch" is very noticeable.

Ceanntuigheoireacht, try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj45ma-qh2I

She's not the worst, but pronounced R Caol as "R Quail", and says (at 00:19) she didn't even know there was a slender R in Irish until she had been learning Irish for 18 years!!!!!

I notice under that video a comment by Loic Cheveau, who is the French speaker of Ulster Irish who is Lughaidh on this ILF forum. He says, rightly:



Her slender R is fine but she uses the English R for the broad R, which is not right.

I don't know why she pronounces the letter R as "or".

Excuse for homing in on the one part of your text that could potentially have Irish people denouncing you. I wish the Irish "movement" were not like this. I am described on Twitter by many as argumentative (by Dennis King and others), totally ignoring the barrage that I have gone through for supporting traditional Irish. There is even an Englishman, Dave at 123 (I think), a English pensioner who was relegated to password-protected part of ILF for supporting traditional Irish. It is the supporters of the Caighdeán who are the argumentative and obnoxious ones.

I wrote this in the preface to Mo Scéal Féin:



The full quote is:

Basically, Ua Laoghaire faced opposition from those who didn't want to base Irish on the Gaeltacht dialects (some of them back then wanted to return to Classical Irish of Keating's day). Ua Laoghaire wanted the cainnt na ndaoine of the Gaeltacht and didn't think it was worth having the Irish language otherwise.

This seems to be a common problem. The learners that bother with trying to learn good pronunciation in the first place think it is just the slender that are the "weird" consonants and the broad are just like English when really quite far from it.

Because that - in my experience anyway - is how Irish people pronounce it when spelling aloud.