Luke Ó Scolaidhe wrote:
The way I see it is of course it is my language. English is not 'My' language. It is the language of another nation that has been imposed on me by powers beyond my control.
Sorry, your English is demonstrably Hiberno-English. It is the English of Ireland, not the English of England. Non-Irish people sometimes even struggle with the subtitles on TG4 because they are often rendered incomprehensible by vocabulary, idiom and on occasion even grammar.
The reason it is different from the English of England, Scotland, Wales, the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand, Singapore, Kenya, etc etc etc is that it is the language of the Irish people, altered by them to suit their own purposes (and perhaps even influenced by Irish, although academics have never been able to agree on this).
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I did not ask to be born into a time where English had become the dominant language in this country.
You also did not ask to be born in Ireland. Does that mean that you have a right to declare yourself Uzbekhi?
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Some people are lucky to have been born into fluent Irish speaking families and they didn't even have to learn it. Bully for them! Congratulations and a pat on the back. That doesn't make them super human or in some way give them ownership of a language or a national identity. Am I to be told now that I am less Irish than they are now too?
No, but consider how they feel. They've been put upon for generations, and even now are often looked down on as "boggers" and "culchies". It's a real struggle taking pride in your self identity in a situation like that, and then... someone swoops in and nicks their identity. Cos that's what you do when you speak like that.
How do you feel when some overbearing American tourist steps in an says "I'm Irish, my great-great-grandpappy was from Dunniegawl." You don't like it. He's different from you, and he's trying to claim your identity. In doing so, he's suggesting you're like him, and hence someone you're not.
What you are doing is no different.
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It is also a minority language that is sadly in danger of obliteration with modern pressures mounting year on year. For right or wrong it can not survive cultural eliteism in any form
A nice sentiment, but I simply do not believe it's true. You can drown a cat in cream, after all. There is already an institutional lack of cultural elitism, to the point where you can switch on Ros na Rún and be subjected to the kak-ak-ak of a supposedly professional actor who isn't capable of pronouncing CH.
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Ireland needs to lose this nonsense attitude about the Irish language and cop itself on. We find ourselves in a very different position in Ireland learning Irish than we do in Ireland learning French for example. An Irish man can learn a bit of French, go to France and then walk into a shop, make a fool of himself, laugh and shrug it off with the knowledge that the locals expect him to not be able to speak the language properly and will cut him some slack. An Irishman speaking Irish in Ireland finds himself in a very differn't position because the moment he opens his mouth he is being judged or at least that is how he sees it. He is afraid prying ears will shoot him down. So what does he do? He refrains from using any Irish he has. Why? Because since the Irish revival and the formation of this state people have worn the language like a badge of honour and does nothing in modern Ireland other than push people out. Quite frankly it scares the shit out of people!
Two things here:
"We're different" is nothing more than an excuse. A language is a language. If there is a difference at all, it's precisely because learners are imposing on the native speakers' self-identities that they're put off. They're not judging, they're protecting themselves from attack.
But in general, there's no difference. For all the complaints I've heard about Irish, Gaelic or Welsh native speakers being unfriendly to learners, I've heard the same things about French, Spanish and Italian native speakers. And it all comes down to one thing: most learners are
extremely difficult to understand.
If you can't pronounce CH, then lots of your past tense sentences in Irish start out wrong, and they become confusing to the native. And if you replace the Spanish J (pronounced like CH) with a K sound, no Spanish person will ever understand a single word you say with a J.
For the first few years of learning a language --
any language, minority or majority -- you will almost certainly be pronouncing things wrong. You
cannot blame the listener for not understanding
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For quite a while of being corrected it made me afraid to say anything but that is precicely the mistake made in school because no amount of sticking your head in a book alone is going to teach you a language.
I would suggest that the mistake you made was to consider that Irish was "your" language, because in doing so, you took your perfectly normal learner errors and converted them in your head into intrinsic character flaws: "This is my language, so I must be really thick not to be able to speak it." It's
not your language, so errors are perfectly normal.
This is what I was trying to get at earlier: as soon as you claim ownership of a language, you put your ego at risk, and the ego can only be protected by blocking out criticism.
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I disagree respectfully when I say the Irish language does not belong to anyone. It belongs to Ireland.
Borders are man-made inventions, and the myths of cultural unity have led to some of the bloodiest conflicts in history.
It was the English kings claim of descent from King Arthur, King of all the Britons, that was used as justification for invading Wales, Scotland and Ireland to "reunite" the British Isles. (Yes, I know, the Britons weren't the people of the British Isles, but that was the thinking.)
And let's not forget what happened in the middle of last century when a group of shell-shocked WWI veterans decided that the Germanic peoples were the peak of human evolution and tried to "reunite" them.
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Things that do not intimidate people. Because that is what Irish does - it intimdates people for all the reasons stated above. That needs to change and the only way to do that is to get people to relax about it. IT IS OK NOT TO BE ABLE TO SPEAK IRISH NONE OF US CAN WE STILL LOVE YOU!
Wait... "NONE OF US CAN"...? Sorry,
the native speakers can.
This is the sort of problem that ego protection creates: in order to create a level playing field, you have to bring others down to your level.
That's why I say the best attitude is "It's OK not to be able to speak Irish... you're not an Irish speaker."
And you seem to think that my attitude is one of snobbish Irish native speakers... it's not. I do not speak Irish. I'm not even Irish.
I'm Scottish and my native language is English (and a little bit of Lowland Scots, but even that's heavily diluted by English). I've learned several "big" languages (French, Spanish, Italian) and a bit of a few minority ones (Scottish Gaelic, Catalan, Corsican, Welsh). In all of those languages I've treated native speakers with respect and deference, and I've had no problems except in Corsican and Scottish Gaelic. In Corsican, the problem was that my errors were always interpreted as being Italian, and Corsicans don't like Italians because they keep claiming Corsican as theirs: "it's a dialect of Italian". In Scottish Gaelic, it was the feeling that as a Scotsman, I was somehow claiming Gaelic as "mine", and I had to do a lot to gain speakers' trust and show them that I respected that it is really
theirs.
A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are like a guest in their homes. If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.
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I actually have trouble with that aspect of my verb book. Thanks for the help by the way 