Can I just rant about how much I hate the Caighdeán and people who say that you must use that and only that? I wrote Goidé mar atá tú on a chat I was in and people lost their shit, saying that no native speakers use goidé or caidé and that I should just stick the the 'standard'. Also, where do people get the idea that Caighdeán == Galway Irish? I mean, I can name several big differences (though at least sa eclipsing is now accepted)... why do people think the Caighdeán reflects any dialect at all?

Also, in other news... I need to take a step back from learner's stuff, I feel. I'm getting too into this and annoyed when people say "I speak Ulster Irish" (and try to claim that there is some other type of natively spoken 'Ulster Irish' that doesn't come from Donegal) yet say Conas atá tú...


But really, I just hate the Caighdeán and the way people seem to think that it's the only acceptable Irish.


Edit: there also really needs to be a distinction between Gaeltacht-tradition natives and 'new natives'... UUGH.

Right on all counts, galaxy!

Ironically, "Conas atá tú" is not said in any native dialect – none that I am aware of, anyway.

When someone says they speak X Irish, what they usually mean is that they went on holiday there...

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I count myself lucky, then, that I've never gotten much pushback for using Munster forms. I do try to be judicious with them since you can end up going down quite a rabbit hole trying to figure out how to represent local pronunciations in spelling, but it feels so wrong to write, say, rinne mé when that's not anything I would ever come out with (unless I was directly quoting someone).

Like Jay Bee said, "I speak X Irish" usually means either:

(a) I am from X
(b) When we were kids we went on holidays to the Gaeltacht in X

This stuff can get tiring, even among good learners people can have a very strong idea of what their dialect is like, e.g. saying the Munster form is X where in fact there are grammatical, pronunciation and syntax differences between east and west CD, Cork and Waterford. Or the amount of times people think Mayo forms don't even exist.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

Also I should say that people's sensitivity to dialect forms makes me wonder if they ever really read Irish, where you see dialectal forms all the time. I mean Goidé is extremely common even in local annuals or modern biographies.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

I'm not an expert on Munster Irish (An Lon Dubh?), but I believe that's right. Which just makes it even funnier.



I'm slowly getting there with my (what I hope is) South Connemara Irish. It's getting harder for me to use rachaidh for example, and I'm even starting to use uaidh in place of ó. I call that a good thing, though.



This is what it was, despite the person being from a county other than Donegal. They tried to make an argument that because speakers existed elsewhere in Ulster there was a true 'Ulster Irish' that wasn't exclusive to Donegal, despite the only native speakers being in Donegal.



I'm guilty of this myself, especially with some of the differences between South Connemara and Cois Fharraige. And that's not even talking about Mayo Irish.



The thing is they really don't. Or, if they do, they're reading mostly standard Irish stuff aimed at kids in school and whatnot. Though, that said, I'm currently reading Mise Raiftearaí, and Mac Dhonnagáin is using dialectal forms for some things -- sa eclipses, use of feilm and some other dialectal spellings at times. But, yeah. I'm not even that familiar with Donegal Irish, but I knew of goidé and caidé. Personally, I love to see dialects, because it helps me learn more about true spoken Irish, not "learner's Irish".


Overall, it was just a really frustrating conversation... That then further deteriorated by the person saying something along the lines of "Irish is my native language. My brain is hardwired for it, not English." and the whole claim about Irish being their native language because they're from Ireland.

I should also say that this isn't my first interaction like this with this person. We got into a heated debate over whether there should be an emphasis on translations or original content --- they prefer translations, of course, because there's apparently not enough speakers to use/create original content. I'm a fan of original Irish content. And then we got into a big debate of whether or not there was an Ulster Irish outside of Donegal Irish.

Fíor-ráiméis...

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Conas 'tá tú was supposedly used in Dublin before it died out.

It seems to have been used as the Manx form also (from a guess):

Kys t'ou? (sg) Cé+is(as)* 'tá t(h)ú
Kanys ta shiu? (pl) Cén is .../Conas 'tá ...

*Conas (Cion(n)as) itself, I would guess, originated from Cia (Cé) + n + relative copula as



before long you won't be able to realise your doing it and eventually you'll forget the standard form .



This argument is used a lot by urban speakers of Irish, a lot of people believe that their accent and the way they pronounce Hiberno-English is somehow reflective of the actual Irish spoken in the region before it died out. While they may have certain features in common, it is rarely the case. As many of the sounds that are essential to Irish don't exist in English.

I think everyone has experienced the "because I live in X then I speak the Irish of X". I've had conversations with "Munster Speakers" (who attended a Gaelscoil) where they believed the word Gaoluinn (Gaeluinn) didn't exist, and the Munster word for Irish was Gaeilge.



Its just pure ignorance really.

Also, I think there is this really fucked up judgement complex surrounding Irish, which fosters the belief in peoples' minds that if they have never heard some form or seen some form in a "authoritative" grammar/ CO learning book then it must be wrong. When in actual fact 'deviant' forms are often hundreds of years old and sometimes even older than the accepted form.

This is nothing new though, many native speakers 100-200 years ago, when they were compiling grammars etc..., would also automatically think that forms they were not accustomed to were incorrect or poor Irish. You can't bate a good aul' dose of tribalism .



The old non sequitur of I am a "native" of Ireland therefore Irish is my "native language" argument.



That's not surprising, a lot of people prefer to read translations. Not only because they are probably familiar with the material and they prefer the genre, but also because translations can often become highly corrupted by the syntax of the original language (usually English), especially if the translator's first language is also the original language of the piece of work (usually English). If your first language is English then it is obviously going to be easier to understand a translated piece than grappling with works by authors whose first language was Irish and may not have been able to speak English that well or at all.

People who believe they have "excellent" Irish will often get a shock when they are presented with the works of traditional native Irish speakers, and that's even after you account for the fact that a lot of the concepts and vocabulary discussed are alien to more contemporary audiences (even in English), e.g. cailíní/ buachaillí aimsire (which have been contorted to mean things like 'prostitute' today, when their original meaning was something more like 'boys/ girls who were sent away to do seasoned work', i.e. over the summer holidays/ harvest season), names for plants and wildlife, meitheal etc...

Cian

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While your right to say that the Caighdeán has a lot of differences than 'Galway Irish', it is true to say that most of the accepted forms - though this has been corrected somewhat by the Caighdeán Athbhreithnithe - have been adopted from Conamara Irish. This was intentional because Conaught Irish was thought of as the intermediary between Munster and Ulster Irish- a bridge of sorts.

Some constructions have been borrowed from Munster Irish, like ag dul, whereas ag goil (gabháil) is used everywhere else. Some speakers of Ulster and Connachta Irish will spell ag goil as ag dhul because they have never seen the actual form as they pronounce it in writing, and therefore, they just assume that it is ag dul with a lenited -d. Ag gabháil is also used in Munster Irish, but it is not as common and is pronounced as ag góilt (East Cork Irish/ Waterford). The last -t is known as an intrusive -t, although the intrusive -t occurs in every dialect, aríst etc..., it is particularly prevalent in Munster Irish; hence d(h)'fáilt, dh'fhéadfaidíst (confined mainly to East Munster), féachaint etc... . Vowel lengthening occurs on the initial vowel in góilt because of the devoicing/ loss of the medial -bh- (gabháil(t) > gaáilt), the coalescence of two vowels following the loss of a medial lenited consonant often causes lengthening (compensatory lengthening*) and/ or dyphthongisation, hence góilt.

*whoever came up with these terms must have been sexually frustrated or compensating himself .

And basically Ulster Irish was ignored .

The Caighdeán therefore is a kind of amalgam of mostly Connaught Irish, mixed in with some dead Old Irish forms (e.g. -amar etc...), with a good degree of Munster Irish features and a few token things from Ulster; which are so insignificant that I can't even think of an example. The Caighdeán also defeats its own purpose, in my opinion, as it was originally designed to make learning Irish 'easier'; but because it is so full of needless exceptions - like idir only leniting when its either 'with' or 'both', I can't even remember which one, which to my knowledge, no living dialect adheres to - utterly defeats its purpose.

Cian

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