Category: Irish (Gaeilge)

Custard sandwiches and pancakes

By Simon

Sniglet - any word that doesn't appear in the dictionary, but should

The Welsh word for sandwich is brechdan [ˈbrɛxdan], which comes from the Irish word brechtán (butter, fat), according to the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru.

However according to MacBain’s Dictionary, is related to the Scottish Gaelic word for pancake, breacag, which is related to breachdan (custard), which comes from the Middle Irish breachtán (a roll), which is related to the Welsh words brithog (mottled, variegated, multi-coloured, speckled, fine) and brith (marked with different colours, variegated, coloured, chequered, mottled, pied, spotted, speckled, brindled, grey), which are related to the word word breac (speckled) in Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

According to the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, brechdan is a sandwich, and also a slice of bread and butter; sandwich; cake or shortbread.

There are also a number of interesting types of sandwich in Welsh:

– brechdan fawd / gorddi = slice of bread on which butter is spread with the thumb
– brechdan gaerog / ddwbl / linsi / fetal / deiliwr = an oatcake on a slice of buttered white bread or between two slices of white bread
– brechdan grasu = toast, toasted sandwich
– brechdan i aros pryd = slice of bread and butter to carry on with until the next meal, snack
– brechdan doddion = slice of bread spread with dripping
– brechdan driagl / driog = slice of bread spread with treacle

For details of the origins of the word sandwich, see Sandwiches and Portsmouths

Tell Me a Story!

By Simon

An fear ciúin / Seán O'Ceapaire

When I was in Ireland last week I heard plenty of stories, including some traditional ones in Irish. There was a night of sean-nós singing, dancing and story telling on Thursday, and afterwards we had a long talk with our sean-nós singing teacher, Gearóidín Breathnach, about various things, including the decline in traditional story telling, and how the Irish language is losing it’s richness, particularly it’s vocabulary.

Gearóidín is a singer and story teller who has passed on her songs and stories to her children, however many of the traditional story tellers in Ireland don’t have children and there are few people who want to learn the stories from them. As a result, traditional oral story telling is disappearing. Gearóidín also believes that people don’t have the patience to sit and listen to long stories any more.

I’ve been thinking about these things since then, and have come to the conclusion that although traditional story telling might be disappearing, we are all still interested in stories. These days we can get our stories from many sources – books, TV, films, computer games, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and each other. There are new kinds of stories and new kinds of story tellers, and many people spend hours every day watching their favourite TV soap operas, reading books and other material, chatting with friends, and generally taking in and sharing stories.

I usually have lunch in the café at the Folk Village (An Cláchán) in Glencolmcille, and in one corner of the café there is a manikin dressed in tweed, sitting at a table, with a pipe in one hand and a fiddle in the other (pictured top right). He used to sit by the fire in the gift shop, along with a female manikin dressed in traditional attire, however that fireplace has been removed and he now sits on his own in the café – I don’t know where the woman has got to.

One day I decided to make up a little story about him, and told it to some of my friends, who embellished it. The man, who I call an fear ciúin (the quiet man) or Seán O’Ceapaire (John Sandwich), came into the café on his way to a music session in 1967, ordered a cup of coffee, and is still waiting for it. Since then he’s met Nora, who works in the kitchen and who he married, and they’ve had five children and 25 grandchildren. When Seán came to the café he didn’t speak a word of Irish, and Nora spoke no English, but now Seán speaks Irish fluently, and Nora has learnt English. There were other details that my friends added, but I don’t remember them all.

Are there any traditional story tellers you know, or have heard of? Is there a tradition of oral story telling where you are, and is it still alive (practised, and passed from generation to generation)?

Now, is it you that’s in it?

By Simon

Now, is it you that's in it? Anois, tusa atá ann?

An interesting Hiberno-English expression I heard today is “Is it you that’s in it?”, which is a direct translation of the Irish “tusa atá ann?“, and is used as a greeting meaning something like, “Hello, how are you?”.

Another Hiberno-English expression that came up in conversation this morning was “Don’t talk to me (about that)”, which is used when agreeing with someone. For example, if someone says to you, “It’s a terrible day today” (referring to the weather), you might reply “Don’t talk to me about that”, meaning something like “It is indeed”.

The word now, and the equivalent in Irish, anois, is also used a lot in Ireland, also well as meaning at this moment, it can be used to express dismay; disbelief; in pubs, shops and restaurants as a way to ask customers what they would like; and when delivering orders in pubs and restaurants – in a similar way to the German word bitte.

Spleoid

By Simon

This week I came across the wonderful-sounding Irish word – spleoid [sˠpˠlʲodʲ], which appears in expressions like Spleoid ort! (Shame on you!) and Spleoid air! (Hang it! Confound it!). It is also used without the s as pleoid.

Other Irish words beginning with spleo- include:

– spleodar = cheerfulness, vivacity; exuberance, boisterousness
– spleodrach = cheerful, vivacious; exuberant, boisterous
– spleotán = patch of poor land

From: http://www.teanglann.ie

Súilíní

By Simon

Súilíní

I discovered an interesting word in Irish yesterday – súilíní [ˈsˠuːl̪ʲiːn̪ʲiː] – which is a diminutive form of súil [sˠuːl̪ʲ] (eye) and means literally “small eyes”, and actually means eyelets, an aperture-sight, or bubbles. For example, uisce gan súilíní is still water (“water without bubbles”) [source].

More common Irish words for bubbles are bolgán and boilgeog.

The word súilíní is also used in Hiberno-English to mean “bubbles of fat floating on top of a stew or clear soup”, and is also written sooleens [source].

The word súil (eye) comes from *sūli, an alteration of the Proto-Celtic *sūle (suns), the dual of *sūlos, which is the genitive of *sāwol (sun), from the Proto-Indo-European *sóh₂wl̥ (sun). Apparently in Irish mythology the sun was seen as the “eye of the sky”, and the word for sun came to mean eye [source].

The words for sun in other European languages come from the same root, and most start with s, e.g. saũle (Latvian), sol (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese), Sonne (German), etc. There are some exceptions though, including haul (Welsh) heol (Breton), howl (Cornish) and ήλιος (ḗlios – Greek) [source].

Gleann Cholm Cille

By Simon

This week and next week I am in Gleann Cholm Cille (Glencolmcille) in Donegal in the north west of Ireland. I’m doing courses at Oideas Gael, an Irish language and cultural centre: a harp playing course this week, and an Irish language and culture course next week.

This is my 11th visit to Gleann Cholm Cille, and the second year I’ve done the harp course. On the harp course page of the Oideas Gael site there are pictures of the harp group from last year – I’m third from the right in the first one, and in the middle at the back in the second one (see also below).

2014 Oideas Gael Harp class
2014 Oideas Gael Harp class

This year we have a different teacher – a music student called Elsa Kelly, who also plays the flute. We’re learning some O’Carolan tunes and some other traditional Irish tunes, and it’s great fun.

I’ve been speaking plenty of Irish with people here – locals and students – and have also spoken bits of German, French, Scottish Gaelic, Dutch, Russian and Czech. People come here from all over the world to study Irish language, music and related subjects, so there are plenty of opportunities to practise languages.

So far the weather has been very mixed – cloudy and windy one minute, warm and sunny the next, then the rain starts, and it can go on all day and all night sometimes and be rather heavy. This is fairly typical for this part of Ireland, but local people are complaining that they haven’t had much of a summer this year yet.

Polyglot Gathering Berlin 2015

By Simon

I got back from the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin about an hour ago. I took the train all the way from Berlin to Bangor, via Cologne, Brussels, London, Crewe and Chester, leaving Berlin just before 7am this morning, and arriving in Bangor just after 9pm this evening. On the way there I also travelled by train, though I had to stay in Brussels for one night, and continued the next day. It cost slightly more than flying (only about £20 more) and took a bit longer (about 2 hours – more on the way there), but I saw so much more, and went through parts of France and Germany I hadn’t been before, and visited Belgium for the first time. The engineers on German railways started a 5-day strike today, and I was worried that my trains might not be running. Fortunately they did run, and were more or less on time.

The gathering was bigger than last year with about 350 participants from many countries. There were many people there I knew from last year’s gathering, and from the Polyglot Conference in Novi Sad, and I met lots of new people. I had conversations in all the languages I know well, and most of the ones I know less well. There was a Breton speaker there, though I didn’t get to talk to him, as well as speakers of Welsh, Irish, Cornish and Scottish Gaelic. Like last year, there were plenty of Esperanto speakers, and I had quite a few conversations in Esperanto, which I brushed up a bit beforehand. There were a number of people who had studied sign languages there, including BSL, ASL, Dutch Sign Language (Nederlandse Gebarentaal / NGT) and Slovak Sign Language (Slovenský posunkový jazyk / SPJ), and the Slovak signer demonstrated how she interprets songs in SPJ, which was fascinating to watch.

The talks and lectures were really interesting, and I went to quite a few introductions to languages, including Northern Sami, Navajo, Arabic, Hebrew, Milanese, Gottlandic, Finnish, Greek and Basque. I don’t intend to learn any of these languages just yet, but it was fascinating to find out more about them. My own presentation, on the History of Writing, was well received, and I got lots of positive comments.

Some of the polyglots at the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin in May 2015
Some of the polyglots at the Polyglot Gathering – from right to left: Richard Simcott, Alex Rawlings, Christopher Huff, Jimmy Melo, and me – between us we speak at least 20 or 30 languages, to varying degrees.

The evening activities included a polyglot games evening, an international culinary festival – I took some Welsh cakes and bara brith, which were popular – a book fair, a polyglot game show, a concert with the multilingual French singer JoMo, who sang in 25 different languages, and an international cultural evening, at which I sang a Scottish Gaelic waulking song (Ceud soiridh soiridh bhuam) and one of my own songs – A Hen in My Hat (in 5 languages). After the cultural evening there was a little Irish and Scottish music session – I had a couple of tin whistles with me, and a few other people had instruments.

So now I’m back in Bangor and will start to catch up with the work I couldn’t do while away due to time constraints and internet connection issues.

One Person One Language (OPOL)

By Simon

An illustration of a bilingual family

This post is based largely on an article by Francois Grosjean: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201504/one-person-one-language-and-bilingual-children

One popular way to raise bilingual children is for each parent to speak only their native language with their children. For example the father will speak English and the mother will speak Spanish, and the children will acquire both languages. At first the children might mix the languages, but they will soon come to associate one language with each parent. There is also a belief that if the parents mix languages, e.g. the Spanish-speaking parent sometimes speaks English, and the English-speaking parent sometimes speaks Spanish, the children will get confused.

Problems with the OPOL approach
There are problems with the OPOL approach – children is likely get more exposure to one language then to the other, and one language is likely to become dominant. The children may come to prefer that language, especially if both parents speak it, and the children may be able to understand but not speak the non-dominant language. This is quite often the case with minority languages like Welsh and Irish.

It can also be difficult to stick to OPOL when other people are around who only speak one of the languages. For example, if a Spanish/English family is with Spanish-speaking friends, does the parent who only speaks English with the children stick to English, even though the friends might not understand, or do they switch to Spanish? Parents can find such situations stressful and might adapt their approach to context and be more flexible rather than sticking rigidly to OPOL.

Does the OPOL approach actually work?
There are have been a number of the OPOL approach, including a notable one of 2,000 families by Annick De Houwer, which found that children in a quarter of the families did not become bilingual, and that in families where parents mixed languages, as many children became bilingual as in OPOL families.

What is the OPOL approach based on?
Given the popularity of the OPOL approach, you might think that it’s based on sound foundations of research and testing. This is not the case. It has probably been around for a long time, but the first reference to it in modern linguistic literature is in a book from 1913 by Jules Ronjat, a French linguist with a German wife. In 1908, when his son was born, Ronjat asked his colleague, Maurice Grammont, for advice on raising his son bilingually. In a letter Grammont advised Ronjat to speak only French to his son, and for his wife to speak only German. Since then many other people have discussed the OPOL approach, and often cite a book by Grammont, Observations sur le langage des enfants (Observations on Children’s Language) which was supposedly published in 1902, however does not in fact exist, according to François Grosjean. So the OPOL approach is based on the opinion of Maurice Grammont, who published nothing on language acquisition, as expressed in a letter to his colleague Jules Ronjat.

Have you tried or are you trying the OPOL approach?
Did it work / is it working for you?
What problems have you had with it?

Links
Life as a Bilingual: The reality of living with two (or more) languages (by Francois Grosjean, and Aneta Pavlenko)
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual

Links to websites with information and advice about raising children bilingually
http://www.omniglot.com/links/bilingual.htm#kids

Articles about bilingualism
http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/index.htm#bc

Language, accents and tourism

By Simon

Arrr! Avast me hearties! Authentic pirate gibberish spoken here

I came across an interesting article today about ways to attract tourists with regional accents and languages. It discuses moves to encourage the use of French in parts of Canada and Louisiana, and Irish in Ireland, as well as regional accents in Newfoundland and in Skane in southern Sweden. People from the regions are promoting their languages and accents to attract visitors looking for ‘authentic’ experiences.

I certainly like to hear different accents and languages in parts of the UK and other countries I visit. When I meet people in such places who come from elsewhere and don’t have a local accent or speak the local language, I am somewhat disappointed. Although their way of speaking will probably be interesting to me anyway, even if it isn’t local to that region.

My own accent could not be defined as ‘authentic’ to the area where I grew up – the north of Lancashire. Instead it’s a kind of non-region specific British accent with influences from various places I’ve lived.

Do you enjoy hearing different accents, dialects or languages when you travel? Are you disappointed if people don’t speak in the way you expected?

Compulsory languages

By Simon

In an article I came across today in the Irish Times the writer, an Irish speaker, wonders whether the compulsory teaching of Irish language in schools in Ireland is the best way to keep the language alive. He argues that those who are interested in the language will continue to learn it and speak it even if it is no longer compulsory in schools. I’ve seen suggestions like this many times for Irish and other minority languages, and it is difficult to say what is best as there is some truth in the idea that making a subject compulsory isn’t necessarily the best way to get people to study it.

What are your thoughts on this?