The Dog Ate My Homework

101. Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.

There was nothing like that in the past papers!

#80 has been used to highly entertaining effect in Father Ted.

All I want

Is one break

Which is not

My neck

#25, I think, reads rather differently in Irish English than in American English.

10. The Modh Coinníollach.

I’d be interested in the story behind that one. I’m always looking for good linguistics jokes.

The conditional is to Irish what calculus is to math — the episode of academic torture that separates the ones who have a chance from the ones who’d be happier and healthier elsewhere.

I always thought that was partial differential equations.

Also I swear Enda Kenny has used eight of the top ten in the last ten years.

My personal favourite;

81. You try running three houses on my salary and see how you get on.

Padraig Flynn’s attitude in the interview that comes from fair sums up the culture that got Ireland into this mess

And here’s the (sweary) Des Bishop clip. He’s a fun example: Irish parents, brought up in NYC, moved to Co. Wexford as a teenager but was exempted from the Irish language requirements, and spent a year as an adult learning intensively in Connemara with the aim of doing an entire gig in the language.

Oh I just love that my favourite high-falutin academic blog is talking about Myles na gCopaleen

Language learning how-to’s: they depend on your goals, where you’re starting from, and how much time you have to achieve your goals. To read Old/Middle Irish when you know nothing really even about more recent Irish? Or to read Vergil or Homer within a year or two? (No one’s going to be asking Cicero directions to the train station or worrying over cattle raids.) Better just to memorize hard and fast all those declensions and conjugations (not so arbitrary, once you get hold of the phonetic linguistics — really really hard in Irish, to be sure — so I am told), better just to learn all those grammar constructions (hard-won analytic skills, transferable, btw — and they seem simply elegant, once you’ve learned them). But if you’re in seventh grade, yeah, there are other ways, maybe better ways. Some of these still a waste of time, though, for bright and motivated 12-year-olds. Life is short, and there are so many languages to learn!

Still and all that: Frank McNally may be a lesson in Irish of another kind and anyway. Languages do live. In and through us. Beyond us.

I’ve read that Russian language schools are enjoying brisk trade in Russia itself. Businesses there find it hard to recruit copywriters with reliably perfect grammar, so adults are going back to school to brush up.

Of course Russia was for centuries among the most reactionary of countries, and convoluted grammar is convenient for the exhibition of social status. By the same token, blaming the Modh Coinníollach for Ireland’s ills may not be as ridiculous as it sounds. In particular, if our rulers or the mercenaries that were their power base had possessed a less evolved sense of their own importance then those 800 years might have been less oppressive.

I lost my way home.

Of course Russia was for centuries among the most reactionary of countries, and convoluted grammar is convenient for the exhibition of social status.

It’s even more convenient to speak a totally different language, like French. Many Russian nobility could hardly speak grammatical Russian.

Adrian Kelleher: what’s the evidence that Russian has ‘a ludicrously complicated grammar’ ? Apart from a certain amount of monkey business with numbers (twenty-one beers is nominative singular? Really? ) I’m not convinced it’s appreciable worse than German. Certainly simpler than Finnish or Turkish for my money.

@dk

French only came in after Peter the Great made them shave their beards off. Like Ireland, Russia became a Western country late in the day and with great reluctance.

What is “The Modh Coinníollach” ?

Is it any class of a relative to “An Modh Coinníollach” ?

Basically, it’s the conditional tense and it requires you to decline each verb again, with different endings for him/her/them, etc. and there are just oodles of irregular verbs that look nothing like their root.

Oh, you mean like “go” and “went”, “be” and “was”, etc?

Irish has about a dozen or so irregular verbs, and the Modh Coinníolach changes for the stems of those are the same as the corresponding changes for the future tense, e.g. “itheann”/”íosfaidh”/”d’íosfadh”. The main difference is that the standard language has more synthetic verb endings for the Modh Coinníolach than for other tenses.

It’s also tricky because you have to use different words for ‘if’, ‘if not’ and also extra words that I don’t think have an equivalent in English but are needed to say, for example, ‘I would’ along with the verb and article. Then add in actual tenses – because the MC is technically a mood and not a tense – and there is a lot to learn, both because of the complexity and also the exceptions seeming to outnumber the rules.

The MC, despite its name, is effectively a tense. I really don’t see why it’s considered the bogeyman of Irish language learning.

The glaring omission from the list is pari passu.

101. A big boy made me do it, and then ran away.

(Applicable to any former colony.)

For instance, “I fear that he may come” vs. “I feared that he might come.”

So nice to see that someone still remembers the difference. :)

Failure to grasp the distinction is so common that surely language change will do away with it one of these decades. Examples from my collection:

“If the Times had printed only one review of Keegan, readers may take it as a lesser work than McPherson’s, to be sure, but one that deserves a place on the shelf. McPherson’s review suggests otherwise.” (from a reader comment here)

and

“Lamarckism…would have played an even greater role in people’s thinking than it did. It may still be with us now—we would be trying to figure out how progress occurs out of necessity, rather than it being the rather odd view of people like Conway Morris.” (from a defunct Lawyers, Guns, and Money link)

This (mis)usage drives me crazy. Then again, I’m getting older and crankier every day, so a lot of things drive me crazy. (Like when people leave out “that” between “ensure” and a following clause. That file isn’t as big as the may/might one, but it’s growing.)

*****

Second point: surely how difficult a language is to learn is heavily dependent on which language(s) the learner is already familiar with. … ?

Janie M and Uncle Kvetch, I am sure we’d all agree that in teaching a new language, as in teaching anything, you start from where your students are coming from. (Just as, for persuasive writing or speaking, you start in large measure from where you gauge your reading or listening audience to be coming from.) For the foreign language teacher, considerations of students’ age and motivation, of available textbooks and other resources, of larger goals (will English-speaking students of French learn only how to ask directions to the train station — that’s no mean accomplishment — or also to read Racine?), of all kinds of things come into play — especially the language(s) students already know. That’s what got me to wondering if, in addition (probably) to some pretty mediocre-bad general techniques on teachers’ part, an investment teachers and students may share in imagining some unbridgeable gulf between Irish and English may also be getting in the way of good Irish-language teaching to English-speaking students. (Boy, the “may’s” piled up there!)

Language-learning should be one of life’s greatest pleasures (and challenges — we should be encouraging the young, especially, not to think that “difficult” rules out “gratifying” or even “fun” — rather, the opposite.) Learning “foreign” languages as well as one’s “own” should be pleasurable, if often difficult. (There are still so many “Englishes” for me to learn! And more will come after I die, so I can never become engaged with them all…. Sad.) For me, it’s my wonder at the way languages change (yep, English is sure changing — inevitable and wonderful), the sheer profligacy of their growth, that makes me a stickler for standardized grammar and usage, at least for certain contexts. For democratic purposes, we need a standardized form of a given language that we can all share — in civic contexts, for instance. And even standardized forms will change over time — no one need worry about that. But we (speakers of a given “language,” whatever the “dialect” each of us speaks) need to be able to talk to and understand one another, every bit as much as native speakers of wholly different languages do.
This is the opposite, btw, of the state’s banning Irish and the other Gaelic languages (as happened, historically). Irish and English both, I say. Challenging — and also more fun. But a common (bound to be standardized) language is also needed, as well and all the more.

@Meredith you know most Irish political commentators attribute Ireland coming out of recession in the early ’90s in large part to our success in the Italia ’90 World Cup? That stuff works!