Aug. 13th, 2008 02:01 pm
Méar a sháigh ann
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muckefuckI'm still plugging away at Bun-Ghaeilge--I practised with it practically every night during my week in Tahoe, in fact. I'm just not posting my new words learned any more partly out of laziness and partly because I seem to have reached a point where I can no longer easily distinguish between words which I've really just learned for the first time and those which I've learned before without them quite making it into my active vocabulary.
Only ten lessons to go and I'm pleased to say I've gotten better at spotting the lies in the book. For instance, the declension of "finger" is given as an mhéir, na méire, na méara. Now, independent of the fact that this is a word I should already know (having listed already among the words I learned over three months ago--see, this is what I'm up against!), something looked wrong to me about it: While there are examples of words ending in a slender consonant that become broad in the plural (e.g. deoir "tear", plural na deora), it's apparently more common for a broad-ending noun to slenderise in the genitive and dative. Consequently, méir screams "dative" to me.
Sure enough, the standard citation form is an mhéar. It's not unusual for the nominative/accusative to get replaced with an originally dative form--other examples include Gaeilge in Connacht or tigh in Munster--so I assume that there is some attested variety somewhere that has an mhéir for "the finger". As I mentioned before, the language of the book is a mélange of forms seemingly selected on the basis of "simplicity" for the learner. Nouns ending in a slender consonant are normally feminine in Irish, so using an mhéir disposes with a troublesome exception. (Well and good, but then why isn't it listed among the deviations from standard forms in the appendix?)
Of course, it does this at the expense of introducing another exception in the shape of the "irregular" plural. Which rather underlies the difficulty with reshaping a language for paedogoical purposes: There are so many interlocking patterns, and they are sometimes at odds with each other. Regularise one exception and you may end up creating another elsewhere. What will serve the student more in the end? In the absence of good data showing, for instance, that L2 learners pick up a certain rule before another, it's all subjective, so applied linguists would do well to tread lightly. I rather wish Risteárd Ó Glaisne had trod a bit lighter when writing his book, but I've got enough alternative sources that I'm not particularly worried about weeding out his infelicities.
Only ten lessons to go and I'm pleased to say I've gotten better at spotting the lies in the book. For instance, the declension of "finger" is given as an mhéir, na méire, na méara. Now, independent of the fact that this is a word I should already know (having listed already among the words I learned over three months ago--see, this is what I'm up against!), something looked wrong to me about it: While there are examples of words ending in a slender consonant that become broad in the plural (e.g. deoir "tear", plural na deora), it's apparently more common for a broad-ending noun to slenderise in the genitive and dative. Consequently, méir screams "dative" to me.
Sure enough, the standard citation form is an mhéar. It's not unusual for the nominative/accusative to get replaced with an originally dative form--other examples include Gaeilge in Connacht or tigh in Munster--so I assume that there is some attested variety somewhere that has an mhéir for "the finger". As I mentioned before, the language of the book is a mélange of forms seemingly selected on the basis of "simplicity" for the learner. Nouns ending in a slender consonant are normally feminine in Irish, so using an mhéir disposes with a troublesome exception. (Well and good, but then why isn't it listed among the deviations from standard forms in the appendix?)
Of course, it does this at the expense of introducing another exception in the shape of the "irregular" plural. Which rather underlies the difficulty with reshaping a language for paedogoical purposes: There are so many interlocking patterns, and they are sometimes at odds with each other. Regularise one exception and you may end up creating another elsewhere. What will serve the student more in the end? In the absence of good data showing, for instance, that L2 learners pick up a certain rule before another, it's all subjective, so applied linguists would do well to tread lightly. I rather wish Risteárd Ó Glaisne had trod a bit lighter when writing his book, but I've got enough alternative sources that I'm not particularly worried about weeding out his infelicities.
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