“Don’t worry about this when you get started. Most Irish speakers won’t snap your head off for stumbling over a few intricacies as a learner”.
“No one speaks Irish anyway, what’s the point in learning it”. I also look at my encounters gender and I encounter the seemingly terrifying síneadh fada.
Many of the reactions to me saying that I’m trying to learn Irish have been on the spectrum of “Why bother?”. Not surprisingly this tends to come from the English position of monolingualism. However, I’ve also heard it from Irishmen and women along the way. The ‘fact’ that many of these people hang on to for dear, negative life is:
“Almost no one actually speaks Irish in Ireland”
Leaving aside that the weight of numbers should never be a bar to anybody learning anything, this argument is not even true.
The latest stats from the 2022 Irish census as reported by The Central Statistics Office (An Phríomh-Oifig Staidrimh) reveal that, “Almost 1.9 million people (aged three years and over) stated they could speak Irish, an increase of more than 112,500 people since Census 2016 (+6%).”
1.9million people seems to be a reasonable number to have a chat with over the garden fence with. As if this wasn’t enough there are also Irish language speakers worldwide. There are books, there are podcasts, entire TV channels, there are even get togethers.
Burgess Meredith from the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last. He is alone at last now everybody else in the world is gone. He can learn and read as much as he likes. Until he breaks his glasses that is.
Numbers aside, the statements and questions, and their cohorts, including, “There’s no point, it’s a dead language”, “It’s regressive, go forward not back” all avoid human elements such as curiosity and in my case respect for my newly gained citizenship, passport, history and culture.
In short, I’m learning the language because I want to learn the language. All the retarding niggles can be set aside like Séamus Ó Duilearga, (James Hamilton Delargy) might set aside a poorly derived folk hero’s tale.
Now, as promised, gender
The English language doesn’t bother with gender when it comes to nouns, verbs, grammar. This leads to generations of people, well me for sure, being confounded as teenagers in French and German classes.
Irish, on the other hand, enjoys getting down and dirty when it comes to gender. The Geeky Gaeilgeoir site has a decent summation. Take nouns for example.
“Masculine nouns with a consonant, the consonant is unaffected by the article:
Masculine nouns beginning with a vowel, “t-” is prefixed to the beginning of the word.
Feminine nouns beginning with a lenitable consonant other than “s,” it is lenited.
Feminine nouns beginning with a vowel, the vowel is unaffected by the article.
Feminine nouns beginning with an “s,” “t” (without a hyphen) are prefixed to the beginning of the word.
I received some excellent advice after I left aghast by these gendering confabulations. “Don’t worry about this when you get started. Most Irish speakers won’t snap your head off for stumbling over a few intricacies as a learner”.
Generally, I’ve found this to be a widespread opinion and a welcome one. This laid back attitude, however, doesn’t extend to the ‘Fada’.
Fada of the nation
Gaeilge has a diacritic (think é as in ‘cliché’) that makes the words that take it seem crazed to my English-language drenched mind and sense of ‘how language should work’ training.
You have to forget whatever language is your native one when contending with Gaeilge. This, I’ve found, can be a little stressful – after all that’s how your inner voice communicates with you. I’ve also found it to be immensely enjoyable. Just immersing myself in a language construction that is so different has opened my ways of seeing the world to wonderfully new perspectives.
The fada, or in this case the Síneadh fada, has a variation of examples that you’ll see used a lot. Try this one.
“Cáca makes a nice dessert, but you don’t want ‘caca’ icing!”
Cáca, you see, means ‘chocolate’. Whereas ‘caca’ means the end result of digesting chocolate or anything else really.
I’m not going to go into the intricacies of the fada here. There are language experts out there who are far more qualified than I am at my foetal stage of Gaeilge development. When it comes to the way you pronounce words blessed with a fada, rather than listen to me massacring the language, I’d highly recommend visiting the Teanglann site as a good starting place for you and your tongue.
