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Aug. 22nd, 2011 09:40 am
Grammaring
If you're wondering why you have seen more posts from me here on the subject of language, it's mostly because I'm a lazy git. But it's also because I'm plowing some of those urges into an irregular series of post on Irish grammar in the community ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
gaeilge. Here's the most recent of three so far. The series title is "Sentence of the Day" which--if you've noted my usage in this journal--is by no means a promise that there will be one every day.
Some of what's left is going into preparing for my weekly tutoring sessions. Not a lot because we're still in the introductory stages and, moreover, the Rabbi is the kind of enthusiastic student who drives the lessons. So it's far less about coming up with ways to keep him engaged and far more about making sure I've got the tools to answer his barrage of questions. You'd think some good fodder for posts would've come out of this already, but nothing really comes to mind except for one pronunciation quirk:
The Rabbi is the second person I've tutored from Long Guyland and I'm having the same problem I had years ago with that friend of my stepmom's, namely getting him to pronounce ng as [ŋ] rather than [ŋg]. For most English speakers, this is the difference between singer and finger. German doesn't have this contrast; singen and Finger both lack [g]. And of course it's hard to explain this to the linguistically unsophisticated, since "drop the g" to them would mean saying *Finner. Moreover--as is often the case with speakers who lack a certain phonological distinction--neither of them can even hear the contrast in pronunciation. I say "gegangen", they repeat "geganggen".
Obviously it's only a small flaw, but it's irksome. If I can learn to hear the difference between pen and pin so that I say "Englisch" when I speak German and not *"Inglisch", then they should be able to simplify this one cluster, right? Time will tell, I guess. In the meantime, it's back to reordering all the elements of a simple sentence so I'll be able to come up with explanations on the fly for why some possibilities are ungrammatical, unidiomatic, or simply odd.
gaeilge. Here's the most recent of three so far. The series title is "Sentence of the Day" which--if you've noted my usage in this journal--is by no means a promise that there will be one every day.Some of what's left is going into preparing for my weekly tutoring sessions. Not a lot because we're still in the introductory stages and, moreover, the Rabbi is the kind of enthusiastic student who drives the lessons. So it's far less about coming up with ways to keep him engaged and far more about making sure I've got the tools to answer his barrage of questions. You'd think some good fodder for posts would've come out of this already, but nothing really comes to mind except for one pronunciation quirk:
The Rabbi is the second person I've tutored from Long Guyland and I'm having the same problem I had years ago with that friend of my stepmom's, namely getting him to pronounce ng as [ŋ] rather than [ŋg]. For most English speakers, this is the difference between singer and finger. German doesn't have this contrast; singen and Finger both lack [g]. And of course it's hard to explain this to the linguistically unsophisticated, since "drop the g" to them would mean saying *Finner. Moreover--as is often the case with speakers who lack a certain phonological distinction--neither of them can even hear the contrast in pronunciation. I say "gegangen", they repeat "geganggen".
Obviously it's only a small flaw, but it's irksome. If I can learn to hear the difference between pen and pin so that I say "Englisch" when I speak German and not *"Inglisch", then they should be able to simplify this one cluster, right? Time will tell, I guess. In the meantime, it's back to reordering all the elements of a simple sentence so I'll be able to come up with explanations on the fly for why some possibilities are ungrammatical, unidiomatic, or simply odd.