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Tag: Decolonization

  • Learning Irish – Part 3 – Fear & Bean

    I’ve been to Irish weddings before in Dublin, Borris and Athlone. Back then I had no Irish to speak of, let alone to speak with.

    Here’s a fun fact. In Irish the word ‘Fear’ means ‘Men’. ‘Bean’ means ‘Woman’. Now there’s a valuable lesson in not falling for false cognates. These are words in different languages that mean different things despite being spelled the same.

    Why do I point this out? Quite simply because the proximity between England and Ireland became conflated in my mind with a proximity in language structures and grammar. This, in hindsight, was a heavily retarding thought process akin to thinking Spanish and Portuguese share language structures. They don’t. Much.

    That proximity combined with the nearly 1,000 years of British colonisation means that there are loan words between the two languages. There’s no need to go into those because, well, they’re shared so you’ll recognise them.

    This Anglophile thinking extended and extends further than nouns though. Sentence structures are also wildly different between the two languages. You need to be prepared for this. I wasn’t. This is important because I will need to piece a few sentences together for The Wedding later this year in Dublin. More of that later.

    History theatre 2025

    What I won’t do here is a history of the Irish language. Many, many people have done and are continuing to do better work on this than I’m capable of. I’d suggest having a look at books including the priced A History of the Irish Language From the Norman Invasion to Independence by Aidan Doyle.

    Also worth a read for grounding yourself in how Gaeilge has become what it’s become. The Údarás na Gaeltachta site also has a decent backgrounder.

    As for video, there’s loads of resources out there including this fascinating talk:

    The wedding fear

    I’ve been to Irish weddings before in Dublin, Borris and Athlone. Back then I had no Irish to speak of, let alone to speak with. I sang along with Behan’s The Auld Triangle and Come Out Ye Black and Tans in the same way as I sang along with hymns and the English national anthem’s second verse; brokenly and half a second after the others sang them out.

    This next wedding will be different. I know at least two people who regularly converse in Gaeilge are going to be there. I know they’ll mock my ‘citizenship’ and passport. I guess they’ll do so in Irish.

    I want to be able to say more than “Dia duit, conas atá tú?” (“Hello, how are you?”) before looking more ignorant than a Reform Party member. I want to show willing in the same way as I do on buses in Paris or in German bars. I know they speak English, but I’m in their country. In Ireland, I’ll be in my country, sort of.

    What I don’t want to do is keep a note of useful phrases (the Duolingo theory) that I’ll learn by rote. This is because I’ll have no map for them to actually take up residence in the correct bits of my brain; to the inspired parts of my imagination, to be weaved in among my vocal chords.

    Object of desire

    I want to be able to construct sentences on the fly. This means understanding that English uses Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). Whereas Irish uses Verb-Subject-Object (VSO). To this extent Gaeilge (Irish) has more in common with Breton, Welsh, Biblical Hebrew and Tagalog.

    Think of this as follows, in English, “The women drank beer”. In Irish the structure would be, “Drank the women beer”.
    That’s just grammatical word order. That’s before I look at genders, possessive’s, and even word choices. For example, imagine how the sentence, “I’ve had an ok year, Brendan. I may be unemployed and old but I’ve still got my dignity and this beer. How’s yourself and Grace?” might be rendered in one of the three Irish dialects.

    The challenge is immense and that’s what’s so beautiful about encountering other languages.

    Next time: I’ll answer a few questions if you have any. I will definitely waffle about the latest Irish Revival and how it can make learning Gaeilge that much more fun.

  • Learning Irish – Part 2 – Why bother?

    “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.

    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.

    Next time: We’ll look at my fear of speaking Irish, and how I’m preparing to do so at a wedding in Ireland.

  • Learning Irish – Part 1 – Duolingo sucks

    In which DuoLingo gets short shrift. 

    Let me begin like a churl. The Irish language (Gaeilge) is far from the beautiful, lyrical, poetic encoding of deep emotions and profound contemplation that some non-Irish speakers might like to believe. It’s a right bastard of a tongue to get your mind around if, like me, you’re a native English speaker.

    However, once you’ve even the slightest inkling of what’s achievable with the grammar, the structure, the dialects, the aliveness of Gaeilge, even a sub-surface scratch of an inkling, the language is capable of rearranging the way you look at people, things, relationships, welcomes and goodbyes.

    Before we go on, I have an admission. My first attempt at learning the language was back in the late 1980s when I lived in a suburb of Dublin for a few months. This is a long and sad story of lost love and family secrets, which I won’t tell here despite my deep joy in tangential storytelling. 

    Long story short though. Back then I hung around with students and ex-students from University College and Trinity. Intelligent, curious people, only two of whom spoke Irish. That pair were from Donegal. 

    Irish was a curiosity at best or more commonly it was more a lament of ‘Man, I hated it at school’ a keening for what was then considered to be the lost hours of youth haunted by the ghost of Peig: A Scéal Féin, “Peig: Her Own Story.

    My latest effort to educate myself in Irish began after the debacle that is Brexit had begun to cast its foul shadow over us Brits because of the idiocy of us English and Welsh. Of course, I started with DuoLingo. 

    A caveat: if you really do feel that you need to know phrases of such utility as: 

    “D’ith mo thíogair an t-úll ar lá scamallach ach grianmhar i gCluain Aodha le mo dheirfiúr Pádraig”, which roughly translates to, ‘My tiger ate the apple on a cloudy but sunny day in Clonee with my sister Patrick’, then I take it all back, DuoLingo is for you.

    Máiréad “Peig” Sayers – her words evoked tears. We’ll talk about Peig in later installments.

    Soon I realised there are dual Irish/English language books, children’s books! Books that made far more sense than the A.I. infested Eire of DuoLingo’s hallucinating bullshit. Books available to me. 

    Dual language books are great for the sedentary learner. Also better than Duolingo or Rosetta stone are the growing arsenal of podcasts so rich and compelling that you might want to listen even if you’re just interested in languages. 

    I’d recommend kicking off with the chatty, informed, entertaining and now sadly discontinued, although you can still download it: Motherfoclóir and its accompany book (Motherfoclóir: Dispatches from a not so dead language) by the inestimable Darach O’Séaghdha.

    Less specifically, I found that podcasts by people who speak Gaeilge to each other on a regular basis helped immensely with pronunciation. Pronunciation that differs between the three main dialects, Connacht (Cúige Chonnacht), Munster (Cúige Mumhan) and Ulster (Cúige Uladh). One of which you’re going to have to choose from if you don’t want to lose your mind and give up within minutes. 

    Obviously, I know but I took and still take a huge joy in finding my way from one end of the word ‘Comhghairdeachas’ to the other before I gave myself any Congratulations.

    Next time in Part 2: I deal with the calumny, “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.

  • Learning Irish – An Introduction

    Before I begin, there’s one thing that I have learnt about myself from this whole thing – and it also explained something to my wife about me. I tell long, tortuous stories where the story itself is less important than the ending. 

    I always have, tá brón orm faoi sin (I’m sorry about this). Apparently this is an Irish take on storytelling, or so a chap in a pub in a place called Fethard-on-Sea in County Wexford told me before skinning me at pool.

    So, please bear with me.

I was born in the UK to English parents, one of whom was called ‘Murphy’. Brexit happened, much against my wishes. I loved travelling around Europe as if I actually belonged there. So, I started looking at the mythology-drenched Murphy side of the family. 

    This has been largely a lone hunt. My parents are dead. My grandfather and grandmothers on my mother’s (Irish) side are dead. My aunts are now dead. It was like the end of Hamlet there in terms of mortality. So, no oral history aside from one.

    All families have their myth makers, and Aunt (Patricia) was ours. Patsy was a hardcore ‘Roman’ Catholic who lived with her longtime companion, Charlotte. Patsy attended Mass three times a week. She smoked copious fags and sank gallons of scotch whisky. So, I started with the dear lady. 

    Over the phone what she told me about our heritage was explosive, stunning and changed my entire perception of my bloodline. It was deeply inserted into the history of the proclamation of the Irish Republic (Poblacht na hÉireann) and the 1916 Easter Rising in particular.

    She told me we were related to Count Joseph Mary Plunkett. A Count! Like Dracula or Fosco or Arthur Strong. Nope, none of that nonsense, he was a Papal Count no less. We were important.

    Aunt Patsy Murphy in a hat, drunk and smoking a fag.

    Aunt Patsy Murphy in a hat, drunk and smoking a fag.

    I wasn’t to know that Patsy was aggrandising our family history – although I should really have guessed. So, off I went down a false trail for my Irish nationality citizenship… for a year. 

    Patsy was wrong. Very wrong. Our Plunkett didn’t sign the proclamation on the steps of the Dublin General Post Office. He was probably doing his other job around that time.

    We are indeed related to the Plunketts. However, the branch who I shared DNA with was a coal merchant from one of the less salubrious parts of Dublin. Not only that, it was a part of Dublin that held both a major gaol and a British army barracks.

    Even worse from the perspective of my grand and glorious Irish heritage was that his daughter – my granny – had left Ireland with a British soldier. She’d only married him. 

    The history of Ireland has a special place for British soldiers who were in Dublin around 1920, but more of that later. Suffice to say that special place was not in heaven.

    Now, ever let it be said that a year researching something entirely based on a mostly drunk aunty’s ramblings can’t be useful though.

    I discovered that many of the records that I would have expected to find; births, marriages, deaths, basic stuff, were not available via a central office. Not even the many pay-for-your ancestral records sites had all the records. Why? 

    Well, the Public Records Office in Dublin was destroyed by fire in 1922, during the Irish Civil War. So, this meant finding alternative routes. It was time to hunt down the Parish registers. At this point in the story, everything becomes a laborious and labyrinthine series of hunts and phone calls. I won’t bore you here. 

    I managed to discover my coal merchant background and also about my Granny Murphy née Plunkett. It was time to consult the English records and to follow her life in, as it turned out, Camberwell in London.

    What I learnt was that my ‘dear old gran’ had died at the age of 35 in 1940. Her death was caused by something terrible called mitral stenosis and atrial fibrillation. She had only two children, my mother Teresa and another aunt, my beloved and departed Aunt Grace.

    Granny Plunkett and Grandad Murphy. He's in his British army uniform. She looks stern.

    My Grandad ‘Auld Bastard’ Murphy and his mother. He’s in his British army uniform. She looks stern.

    It was time to head back to Irish records. Along the way, well the side ways (as it were), it became clear to me that the Irish language (Gaeilge) was fascinating. It called to me. Not for anything particularly mystical. No, it’s fascinating to a curious mind brought up in English. The two languages bear next to no similarities to each other. It was when I discovered that there are different numbering systems for ‘things’ and for people. 

    I had to find out more. That’s what this series is about. Please be warned though, I don’t have nice things to say about Duolingo. I do have very good things to say about the Irish national broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ)  and its Gaeilge offshoot TG4. 

    Next time: DuoLingo sucks, and some good stuff.