Sure in this country you’d be known as Micheál Luas

This precisely the point that the crack bored office workers of the D^2 comments thread have been trying to figure out for the past two days, Zamfir.

Not a great article, but Colm McCarthy’s account of the financial regulator’s appearance on TV made it worthwhile:

“What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.”

circles of stones or mushrooms that occur in Irish fields

This is still bugging me. “Stones or mushrooms”? If it’s in your field and you’ve got the job of ploughing or mowing it, then it’s pretty darn important whether it’s a circle of stones or a circle of mushrooms.

Kieran: presumably you read it so we don’t have to. Does Luas make Irish men look as silly as he did Icelandic men?

Don’t miss the Q&A backgrounder for more shamroguery:

In earlier drafts of your piece, you had a character called the King of the Travelers. Tell me about him.

But I asked him to turn around and we went back to the house and pulled off on the side of the road in front of the house. I started to get out of the car and, out of a trailer in the back of the house, came the man himself with a baseball bat in one hand and his fist balled up, and he was coming to beat the crap out of us. And I thought, Maybe I should try to put in a call first.

I think the editor who cut that bit out deserves either a medal or a kicking, or perhaps both.

A few days after I’d arrived the students followed suit, but their protest was less public anger than theater, and perhaps an excuse to skip school. (DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING, read one of the students’ signs.)

I still find it startling this managed to sail past any fact-checker.

Fianna Fáil (pronounced “Feena Foil”) – no, it isn’t
I heard it pronounced “Fail” on Channel 5 News in England the other night, which as a general election was just being called was partially appropriate.

@Ray – I see that wikipedia does give liberty caps as one of the species that grow in rings, instead suggesting that it “grows solitarily or in groups on the ground”( it also claims that they are found in the Netherlands, though I’d always been under the impression that their mushroom industry had arisen because they didn’t have their own, with a possible explanation the lack of hills of their own). I’m sure I’ve seen them grow in spirals rather than concentric rings.
And if you’re going to extract the urine, best to start with the reindeer.

Ian turns out to have a good feel for what I, or anyone else, might find interesting in rural Ireland.

This reads like a very thinly veiled confession by Lewis that he knows this material is nonsense.

I heard it pronounced “Fail” on Channel 5 News in England the other night, which as a general election was just being called was partially appropriate

Given that the great Irish national legend, or at least one of the great Irish national legends, is all about the deeds of the Fianna, the party could legitimately be renamed Epic Fail.

You can click here for the pronunciation.

IME, there is just basically no point in attempting proper pronunciation of Irish Gaelic.

1) it is the most cursedly non-phonetic language in the world. Welsh gets all the ribbing for words with lots of consonants, but when you remember that we use letter-combinations for sounds that Nordic languages bring in Unicode for, and that “y” is a full vowel, it’s pretty phonetic from then on in. Irish is full of names that are spelled “Gioaoaiaoamnh” and pronounced “Chris”.

2) for a small country, it has the most amazing variability in accents, so even if you spend years learning to pronounce words exactly like the guy who taught you Irish, ten minutes later you are going to meet someone who comes from a town ten miles down the road and he will go “hahahaha you aren’t even trying to pronounce that properly”.

3) it is in some way a totally different sound set – every Irish person I’ve ever spoken to on the subject claims that the words “Doyle”, “Doyle” and well, “Doyle” are three completely different vowel sounds.

There’s basically no way you can win; it’s not like French. All you can do is try not to be too studiedly ignorant and use English names for things as much as possible (always “Irish Prime Minister” if you can, “Irish Parliament” unless the context is confusing, and don’t even dream of having a go at “Teachta Dála” – “Feeyanna Foil” and “Feener Gale” are both wrong but unavoidable).

“If he doesn’t live there, why does he just happen to be there when they visit”

I asked my friend the tin-dancer about that, he’s a very handy man who has abstruse knowledge of the very sort I need, and he informed me that Irish people of the fictional persuasion often wish not to be found in their place of legal residence due to various confleries as per their financial status, and as a consequence thereof will spend inordinate amounts of time in places that they do not live. If you disturb them there they will beat upon you, looking ruddy and smelling of beer-sweat.

In the spirit of D^2 contribution, non-Irish commenters are asked to attempt their pronunciation of

Caoimhghín

noting that one commenter has the Anglicised version of that name.

And finally, if you are ever backed up against a wall and can’t avoid “Taoiseach”, as a native English speaker you need to go for the absurdly incorrect “Tayshuck”, just to make it abundantly clear that you are not doing the joke about an Irish tea-shop.

Also, this is patently bollocks:

“Back in October 2008, after the government threatened to means-test for medical care, the old people marched in the streets of Dublin. A few days after I’d arrived the students followed suit, but their protest was less public anger than theater, and perhaps an excuse to skip school. (DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING, read one of the students’ signs.) I’d tapped two students as they stumbled away from the event to ask why they had all painted yellow streaks on their faces. They looked at each other for a beat. “Dunno!” one finally said and burst out laughing. Other than that … silence. It’s more than two years since the Irish government foisted the losses of the Irish banks on the Irish people, and in that time there have been only two conspicuous acts of social unrest. In May 2009, at A.I.B.’s first shareholder meeting after the collapse, a senior citizen hurled rotten eggs at the bank’s executives. And early one morning in September 2010, a 41-year-old property developer from Galway named Joe McNamara, who had painted his cement mixer with anti-banker slogans, climbed inside the cab, drove through Dublin, and, after cutting the brake lines, stalled the machine up against the gates of the Parliament.”

Just from my own recollection there were massive protests in February 2009 over the pension levy; this “meek, quiescent Irish” schtick your man Lewis has here seems a bit overdone.

I’m vaguely remembering something about soil composition affected by prehistoric building or farming techniques or outhouse placement causing mushrooms to sprout in a vaguely circular fashion every year.

Mushrooms are round, and they propagate by dropping spores vertically down around their circumference. That’s what causes fairy rings.

a Michael Lewis thumbsucker about Ireland

In Ireland’s case, the author (mostly) understand the local language.

So it’s a best case article about Exotic Foreigners.

dsquared @ 24: In Wild Wales, George Borrow tells how he assiduously learned Welsh, launched himself into the countryside, and within 30 seconds of first opening his mouth, he had the entire population of the village doubled over and gasping for breath. He was either speaking South Welsh in North Wales or the other way around, I forget which.

Iontach beagáinín gaeilge a fheiscint ar an mbord, fiú cúpla focail amháin, go háirithe i gcomhthéacs an paddwhackery sin…

But seriously – “do Irish people believe in fairies?” – “No, but get this! They believe Americans and English people will actually fall for it when they say they do believe in fairies!”

We were just saying today how the acceptability of paddywhackery by foreigners seems to be directly linked to the current levels of destitution in Ireland – there’s certainly been a resurgence of recent months …

Pity because it is a decent article besides…

The thing that you all are missing is that Lewis is writing for an American audience. We all know about the Blarney Stone, so we’re familiar with the fact that the Irish are compulsive liars. It’s the same way that we know that so-called moderate Muslims are faking it, because we know about taqiyya.

Not to mention his piece about Iceland.

Why did he leave the native Greek fairies or elves or imps or whatever out of the Greece piece, but include them in the other two? Greece’s fairies are the ones we’re most familiar with in the Western tradition, like naiads, dryads, etc. Seems inexplicable.

Caoimhghín

I tested “Kevin Donoghue 02.04.11 at 5:38 pm” link, and the answer was cromagnon, to be exact the nearest term they have. Now they don’t pronounce cromagnon the way I do.

The bit about Achill at the end is fun, at least: I remember being there in mid-spring during the early 2000s, and it was windy, freezing, bleakly beautiful, but pretty much devoid of visitors.

DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING signs are actually ubiquitous at Irish protest rallies.

Thus.

Isn’t the truth even more incredible than leprechauns?

Not really. It’s a matter of degree (a multiplier of 103, say), not kind.

We went to Achill Island in July of, I think, 1982, during a week of temperatures in the 80s (F) and bright sunshine. We visited the beach and the people sunbathing were beet red. It was a painful evening for a lot of them.

Down With This Sort Of Thing

For those who don’t know, this is a Father Ted reference. It’s not necessarily unique to Ireland but we are very fond of ridicule as a weapon to really annoy the powerful. Bear in mind that Dermot Morgan’s (Father Ted himself) satirical radio show “Scrap Saturday” was cancelled due to political pressure. Our politicians and financially powerful may be able to take a punch but they sure as hell can’t take a joke.

#3 @Ray: “Fianna Fáil (pronounced “Feena Foil”) – no, it isn’t”

gimme a break. Considering the variability of both Gaelic and Anglophone accents, that’s a perfectly serviceable approximation.

“Great Potato Famine” OTOH…

Did you hear the one about the Irish economist who emigrated to the US? He doubled the national IQ of both countries! ;-)

Well, OK, so he didn’t actually go to Ireland, but he did have a bar of Irish Spring in his hand, which is just like taking a bath in Ireland, and since taking a bath is about all the people of Ireland are doing right now….

Not to say anything about what was in the other hand.

“Feck it, sure it’s grand.”

dsquared:

IME, there is just basically no point in attempting proper pronunciation of Irish Gaelic.

1) it is the most cursedly non-phonetic language in the world.

It’s not that illogical, once you know the rules:

a) first get your consonants (h always forms part of the preceding consonant),

b) then figure out whether they’re broad or narrow (velarised vs. palatalised) which you’ll know from the vowel letter immediately following or preceding (a,o,or u, vs. e or i),

c) then know which vowel is stressed (the one in the first syllable in northern Irish, the long vowel in Munster Irish), and that the other vowels are then reduced either in length or to schwas,

d) know the pronunciation of a few common vowel groups that represent diphthongs – /aoi/ is always “ee”, /ao/ is “ay” or “ee” depending on dialect, /abha/ and /amha/ are “ow-eh”, /eo/ is a long “o”, /adh/ at the end of a word is a schwa or “oo” depending on dialect, /igh/ at the end of a word is “ee”,

e) know the conventions for the aspirated consonants – /bh/ or /mh/ are “w” (broad) or “v” (narrow), /ch/ is “kh”, /dh/ or /gh/ are a Dutch “g” (broad) or “y” (narrow), /fh/ is silent, /ph/ is “f”, /sh/ and /th/ are “h”,

f) know that the eclipsed consonants – /mb/, /gc/, /nd/, /bhf/, /bp/, /dt/ – are pronounced as if the second letter didn’t exist, apart from /ng/ which is pronounced as it would be written in English,

g) palatalised /d/ is roughly “j”, palatalised /t/ is roughly “ch”, palatalised /s/ is roughly “sh”, palatalised /n/ is “ñ”, palatalised /l/ is a Spanish “ll”,

There are a couple of other rules as to when vowels should be pronounced long when followed by particular consonants (/m/, /rr/, /ll/, /nn/, /rd/, etc.) but by comparison with English or French, the pronunciation is generally regular with a few exceptions.

So, with Caoimhghín, or as it’s written in modern Irish, Caoimhín:

from rule a) your consonants are a broad /c/ (always hard in Irish), a narrow /mh/ (a “v”), and a narrow /n/ (a “ñ”),

from rule d) both /aoi/ and /í/ represent an English “ee”,

which gives you “KEE-vien” or “kie-VEEN” (the “ie” is a shortened “ee” sound) depending on dialect, with a slight “w” sound after the “k”.

Simples ;-)

dsquared, have you seen “My big fat gypsy wedding”? It has an interview with a great big barrel-chested ex bare-knuckle-boxing Traveler who lives in a big white house (I think it might be a mobile home). That’s in the midlands. My father claims that the manager of his trailer trash park (who also lives in a big white house) is a Traveler, though he could just be saying that because the manager is a bit dodgy, and my father thinks anyone dodgy is foreign or Irish. Such beliefs have certainly helped my father succeed in this world, which is why he lives in a trailer in Devon.

I don’t recommend watching “my big fat gypsy wedding,” or speaking to my father. But they seem to be about as reliable as sources of information as this Lewis chap.

it was interesting but I still thought it had a fair bit of condescension and sneering in it, though largely on the basis of their poverty/lack of class, rather than the typical racial stereotyping.

Scottish Gaelic’s even more consistent because it doesn’t really have dialects to the same degree that Irish seems to have

That said, if you pronounce my wife’s name (Gaelic and very easily Googleable) correctly, it’s, um, a boy’s name, thanks to my non-Gaelic speaking father in law having the best stab he could in a bar in Ankara. (long story.)

It’s occurring to me that there’s a very good analogy to be drawn between English/Celtic languages and Windows/Linux here, which, given that it would intertwine nationalism and geekiness, has the possibility of becoming the best bit of troll bait ever.

Ajay @ 67
I love that play! Be fair, the piece of dialogue is in fact, “The sweet smell! Smell it! It’s the sweet smell! Jesus, it’s the potato blight!” – the modern characters are given a late 20th century Northern Irish style of speaking, not the Synge-esque diction you’re forcing in to their mouths (aah!! just like those evil ordnance survey etc etc). You might think the foreshadowing is a bit forced, but the ‘eve of destruction’ atmos is what many critics read in to Chekhov these days, Friel’s favourite playwright IIRC.
As for the ‘brutal Brits’ stuff, it’s hardly Braveheart or Rob Roy – how enlightened exactly was British rule in 1833 Ireland anyway?

Shouldn’t that be, “De ting about de Irish people?”

72: I stand corrected but I don’t think that the actual line is that much of an improvement on my admittedly flawed recollection of it. In my defence, I saw the damn thing about 15 years ago and have not felt the need to reread it.

The great thing about it is that, just when you’re thinking to yourself, “good grief, this play has hit pretty much every Irish cliché except the potato blight”… it mentions the potato blight.

And I should quote Gussie Fink-Nottle on authentic Irish dialogue:

Irishmen don’t talk like that. Have you ever read Synge’s Riders to the Sea? Well, get hold of it and study it, and if you can show me a single character in it who says “Faith and begob”, I’ll give you a shilling. Irishmen are poets. They talk about their souls and mist and so on. They say things like “An evening like this, it makes me wish I was back in County Clare, watchin’ the cows in the tall grass”.

I saw Translations. It had Rufus Sewell! He was really really good. Donal Donnelly was good too.

It also had a lot of Homeric Greek and Irish and maybe some Latin too.

76: Isn’t the Fink-Nottle quotation a bit of a cliché in its own right, though? Perhaps not in Wodehouse’s day, but if I had a silver penny for every time someone made a crack (craic?) about lyrical Irish dialogue, I’d be an aggressively drunk leprechaun.

I’d still defend the ‘potato’ line, unpromising though that brief sounds. It’s a rather plain piece of staccato, panicky repetition, which ‘works’ because it communicates her fear of the staple crop failing, perfectly reasonable given the time and the place.

A lot of my friends have made similar criticisms of Friel plays, and it often turns out that they consider the subject matter of Irish rural life a cliché in its own right. Not saying that’s the case with you, Ajay, and to be honest I’d rather **** the pope than watch a new play in that vein. But Friel isn’t one of the chancers, and it’s not his fault that rural Irish people really do go to mass, eat potatoes and gripe about the English.

80.1: well, that’s sort of the joke; Gussie’s saying “no, no, that cliché about how Irish people talk is completely wrong. They actually talk like this completely different cliché”.
It’s like someone saying “no, you fool, Russians don’t all wear big fur hats and greatcoats and talk about capitalist stooges. They all wear leather jackets and have tattoos and talk about the vorovskoy zakon.”

“Crack” is the older version; “craic” is the Irish spelling of an originally English word. Cf. “raidio”.

ajay @67,

Gaelic pronunciation may be difficult but it is at least consistent. Yes, it’s a bit weird that “bh” is pronounced “v” but at least it’s always pronounced “v”.

That is a highly admirable trait in Gàidhlig, then, but the same cannot be said for the language when it spells itself Gaeilge. That “bh” can be a “v” or a “w”, as can “mh”. It is not, however, random. Which it is will depend on what vowel(s) it touches, so there is an element of regularity. Most of the time. Each of “dh” and “gh” can be (again, depending on the adjacent vowel(s)) “y” or a noise that is equal parts French “r”, Dutch “g” and death-rattle; unless instead it is merely telling you to make the preceding vowel long, or to pronounce that “a” as though it were an “oo”. It is bizarre to the native anglophone. But it is not highly irregular as English is; its regularity simply features both ambiguity and degeneracy.

I have recently begun trying to pick up Turkish. It is blissfully regular and phonetic. It’s not Esperanto; there are exceptions and divergences from strict phoneticity (e.g. a tendency to make terminal “r” sound a bit like that difficult Czech “Å™”). But they are few and they are not daunting. Word order is vastly different to the English norm, but you can usually approximate correct syntax by taking the English phrase you’d like to make Turkish and imagining that Yoda were saying it (“I want to learn Turkish” is Türkçe öğrenmek istiyorum, literally “Turkish to learn wanting am I”).

81: I’d dine out on it for sure, but pleasant? I have been assured that scheduling according to a cycle can take the pleasure out of things, never mind servicing a vulgar rip-off of a Blackadder joke formula. I’ve also been advised by Plato and Mill that avoiding the unpleasant is not in itself pleasant. Let’s not even speak of the feelings of guilt and shame that might follow that one for someone of my background.

I got it wrong–they filtered off stage right (audience’s left).

dsquared:

I should probably add that while Welsh is scrupulously phonetic, this is as much a curse as a blessing, because the pronunciation of words changes a bit depending on word order (it’s physically difficult to say “fy cariad i”, for example), and some mad bastard decided that this would be best handled by having the spelling of the word change accordingly (“fy nghariad”). With the consequence that if you hear an unfamiliar Welsh word, you are going to have a bastard of a time looking it up in a dictionary unless you have memorised the multiplicitous rules on “mutations”.

Irish is trying to cope with using the subset of the Latin alphabet available in AD450 to represent distinctions between palatalised and velarised consonants (see Russian), which is why we need all those extra vowels we don’t actually pronounce :-) In addition, like Welsh, it has to deal with two different types of mutations of initial consonants depending on gender, case, preceding preposition, etc.

Welsh goes with the utilitarian approach of strict phonetics and can leave learners puzzled; we go with preserving the initial consonant but adding something to it, so that in “mo choiligh” or “a gcoiligh”, the learner knows that the basic noun must begin with “c”, and is then merely left to figure out that “coiligh” is the plural of “coileach” :-)

@ D^2

Doyle isn’t so bad. “Cahill” can be at least ca-hill, cay-hill and cal is various parts of Leinster.

My best stab at rendering “Caoimghin” is cuiv-een.

@ roac

Well, I consider Welsh to be rather “mumbly”, so I let that one go without much ill-feeling.

Not related to a certain Norwegian ‘Raven’ who used to discuss Tolkien, are you?