http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iRN8iJDi_I

Mo cheol thú, a David Mitchell!

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賢いふくろぐま
Seans Eile - free software to help you practice your Irish
Scéala na Wombait - Muddle-headed Memes and Musings

And not at all sure that the 'OT' is necessary......

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Go hiontach!

(Agus aontaim le Saoirse )

Redwolf

I dont know about his not judging things http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvlQXPNwrqo

he fairly much passes judgement on Gáidhlig as being a personal code, a waste of time because they can all speak English and the number of speakers is less than say Hindi .

Its also a waste of money , presumably because all speakers can speak english, he gos on to say how he doesnt mind it surviving but not at huge public cost. i cant find the figure right now, but i think the huge public funding of Gáidhlig amounts to something like £58 million. Personally i find it hard to maintain its a waste of money when the same nation is prepared to spend £15 Billion on a fleet of nuclear submarines, which give nothing to the world except the threat of total extinction of all languages and cultures.


Basically he puts it down to natural selection (thus English being superior) , without any evidence to support the claims.
He seems woefully ignorant on the subject. Most of the factors were not due to its "natural" inferiority but down to the actions of man,
The joining of the English and Scottish crowns which cemented English as the language of governance,
The battle of culloden and highland clearances , the education act of 1872 which led to the removal and forbade the use of the language i the class rooms etc.

Id view his opinions of one culture being inherently superior to another as racist.

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Bíonn rudaí maithe mall

Hmm... I'd seen the video on Gaidhlig before, but I went back and watched it again, looking for any signs of the racism you mentioned. For the moment, let's put to one side the issue of just how much money should be spent on Gadhlig or Irish. It sounds like what you interpreted as racist was his comments about "natural selection" in regard to languages. But natural selection implies nothing about a species being superior or inferior. We don't think dinosaurs were inferior to mammals -- it's just that when the asteroid came, it was easier for small animals to survive. If it had been a different kind of catastrophe, the dinosaurs might have survived and there might not be any mammals left.

As far as I could tell, David Mitchell has respect for these endangered languages, he just doesn't want "loads of money" spent on them. I don't know what David would consider the right amount of money to spend. Perhaps it's significantly less than many of us on this forum would want, but that doesn't make him a bad person. Also, from this and another video he made, I know that he has no interest in learning Gaidhlig, although he is of Scottish descent. It's a shame, but he would probably be equally horrified at my relative lack of interest in history (David is a major history buff).

I didn't hear anything in the video that implied that one culture was superior to another. Unless you're referring to the line about how the sixty thousand (or whatever) Gaidhlig speakers would have to be "pretty fascinating" to be more worthwhile to talk to than the 600 million Hindi speakers. But that was just a tongue-in-cheek comment about the relative numbers. It didn't imply that one culture was superior.

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賢いふくろぐま
Seans Eile - free software to help you practice your Irish
Scéala na Wombait - Muddle-headed Memes and Musings

You could well be right wombat, its just how i would interpret his use of natural selection, one culture (in this case gadhlig) has quality's that are inherently inferior and thus makes it decline inevitable, which he seems to allude to.
The fact that he contrasts this to man made animal extinctions which are not necessarily natural, but due solely to the actions of man. His argument also seems to completely ignore the factors i mentioned which contributed to the languages decline which were all man made and there for not a natural inevitability.

Also by stating that one culture/languages decline is due to natural selection and its inherent inferiority which led to its decline it would suggest that those that thrive have the correct natural attributes which allows it to spread and therefor is superior to those that decline (in this case English) .

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Bíonn rudaí maithe mall

Bhuel b'shin scannán beag atá tar éis mo chur ar mo mharana mé - i nGaeilg ar ndó...

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Bí cinnte de go nglacfaidh triúr le gach aistriúchán a thabharfar.
Be sure to get three in agreement with a translation given.

Getting back to the original video, it's relevance to Irish might not be what some people seem to think it is.

Certainly, "valet" can be pronounced by native speakers as either /valɪt/ or /valeɪ/ - and as the video states you will find both, and there are clear cases for either pronunciation.

In relation to Irish, this would be equivalent to asking how do native speakers pronounce words like "bicycle" or "ham" when they are inserted into an Irish sentence (and should the spelling be adjusted accordingly?).

In contrast to that, I doubt that most native speakers of English would consider /bælei/ to be an acceptable pronunciation for "valet".

Anglicised pronunciation of Irish is more akin to the latter.

I'm sure if you had a Japanese friend who was having trouble distinguishing the pronunciation of b and v, or of l and r, you'd want to help them fix it and avoid future confusion.

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

Two great videos - both conveying a message I can agree with. The idea of Irish as a "nationalistic statement", which is the final sentence of his video on Scottish Gaelic, is what leaves me cold - precisely because the political campaign overrides the language itself and means that we have to "welcome and support everyone to use what Irish they have" (etc etc) and "do everything we can to create a positive image of the language" (etc etc) - when for me it is just an academic subject - something to learn. Which means that it is better to learn it well. Which means that Gaelainn bhriste is utterly worthless when compared with Béarla cliste or Gaelainn chliste. The whole learning process has been bedevilled for me by the political campaign which has led to an unnatural form of the language being promoted, reference works giving incorrect forms, TV programmes fronted by people who are not native speakers, books like the Hobbit translated into mush by people who aren't even Irish, and so, and so, and so on.

The problem is of longstanding. If you look at the dispute between Mícheál Ó Síothchán and Peadar Ua Laoghaire in the early 20th century, you can seen an example. MÓS, non-native speaker and self-appointed expert who wrote Sean-Chaint na nDéise, claimed in his books to "exercise a censorship" over the native speakers he drew material from, excluding English words and turns and phrases he viewed to be Béarlachas, and claiming phrases like "téann de" used impersonally were rubbish. Ua Laoghaire by contrast pointed out that MÓS's Irish was "rubbish", and that the genuine Waterford Irish was better, that that "téann de" was totally correct and natural in Irish, with two different but similar constructions meaning different things, something MÓS didn't even understand. As Ua Laoghare said about MÓS, he was sick of the "compulsory rubbish" and the "compulsory vileness" insisted on by people like MÓS. Aontaím go hiomlán leis an gCanónach, beannacht Dé len' anam!