Looking ahead

[muckefuck]

Right now, I'm exactly two-thirds of the way through Teach Yourself Irish ("Lesson XVIII: Weak plurals and irregular nouns") and I'm determined to make it through to the end. I know I can do it because this time last year I was working on Teach Yourself Punjabi and I finished that off before the end of February. Unfortunately, I don't retain much, but I think I'll have more success with Irish because I've got a lot more reinforcement and a much longer background. (I started getting interested in it while still in grammar school, whereas I'd never tried to learn any Panjabi at all before last year.)

In any case, it occured to me that I have ten other TY books I haven't tackled yet, although I've started (in the sense of beginning with Lesson 1 and progressing linearly until I lost interest) seven of them in the past. The others I've completed are Teach Yourself Living Welsh (high school), Teach Yourself Catalan (second year of college), and Teach Yourself Modern Greek (third year). If I can keep this roll going, my bleak midwinters will be occupied with new acquistions through 2018.

Then I've got thirteen books in the Routledge Colloquial series (one is Colloquial Welsh, but I could use the review, if only to boost my stock of vocab and fixed expressions) and language-learning texts (as opposed to reference grammars, dictionaries, etc.) for twenty-four other languages, only three of which (German: a structural approach, Learning Korean, and Bright's old English grammar and reader) I've completed--all in the context of a university course.

So there it is: I just need to live to be 81 without acquiring any more self-instruction texts and I'm set!

Comments

[keyne.livejournal.com]

This is why I decided to cull my language shelves. :)

(Which reminds me ... one of these days I'll mail you some books.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I understand that you've had one or two other things on your mind. At this rate, by the time they arrive, I might just have a place to put them!

[jakflak.livejournal.com]

How is Welsh helping you learn Irish? Are there a lot of similarities (like English and German)?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

There are fewer resemblances in vocabulary and more in syntax. For instance, it's hard to recognise fíor/gwir as cognates or fear/gŵr (especially when you contrast English/German true/treu and man/Mann), but I actually find myself accidentally starting sentences with mae (Welsh for "is") instead of tá because I'm putting them together in my head and more often than not the organisation is almost the same. Here's an example I posted earlier:

Irish: D'fhanas in éineacht leo ar feadh tamaill agus do bhíomair ag caint.
Stayed [I] together with.them for while and were [we] a-talking.

Welsh: Aroses i gyda'u cilydd ers meitin a roedden ni'n siarad.
Stayed I with them together for while and were we a-talking.

Compare the German: Ich bin eine Weile bei ihnen zusammen geblieben und wir haben mit einander geredet. "I am a while by them together remained and we have with one.another talked."

Kol HaKavod!

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Well you're doing far better with Teach Yourself Irish than I -- the spelling conventions were one of many things that I managed to completely get tripped up on when trying to self-study the language. One of these days ...

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Which TY Irish? I have the older version that teaches Munster pronunciation, and this is a problem because the reformed spelling is more closely based on Connacht speech in some respects. Of course, having said that, I realise that Learning Irish, which teaches a Connacht dialect (Cois Fhairrge) has at least as many deviations and respellings as my book.

The long and short of it is them's the breaks when you learn a language without a normative pronunciation standard. I'm finding Ó Siadhail's other book Modern Irish : grammatical structure and dialectal variation quite useful because it states many of the apparent exceptions in the form of dialect-specific phonological rules. Of course, that's probably far too technical an approach for the average learner.

In any case, I think the Irish orthography gets a bad rap overall--particularly from native speakers of English, who have absolutely no room to cast aspersions!--and I've been meaning to do a post defending it. It's really extremely consistent overall with only a few digraphs (e.g. oi) that are truly ambiguous.

[moa1918.livejournal.com]

After some earlier (not very succesful) tries, I've once again (that is, yesterday) decided to learn the Irish spelling. My thoughts for now:
Although it's common to use extra letters to change the pronunciation of others, it seems counter-intuitive to use extra vowels to mark the pronunciation of consonants. :p (Though I guess it's just as illogical to add consonants to change the pronunciation of the vowels, as for example in Swedish, where the consonant is doubled after a short vowel.)
As for the consonants, I haven't gotten very far with them yet...

My biggest problem for now is not the spelling but the pronunciation. It will take some time to learn the difference between "broad" and "slender" consonants. The vowels are not so easy to distinguish either...

As for there not being a pronunciation standard, I rather thought it would make things more difficult!

Btw, I would be very interested in reading your post defending Irish ortography if you get around to write it! :)

Moa

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

In Russian, phonemic palatalisation is also shown in the vowels rather than the consonants, e.g. нёс /'nʲos/ "he carried" vs. носе /'nosʲe/ "nose [prep.]". (If you rewrote these words in Irish orthography, they would be neos and noise, respectively.) But because it has only five phonemic vowels and ten vowel symbols, it can get by without using digraphs, whereas Irish is saddled with the five vowel characters of Latin (and has twice the number of phonemic vowels to boot). My argument is that, despite this handicap, the orthography is actually very consistent and unambiguous.