Tue, 22 May 2007
Well, theres a General Election here in Ireland on the 24 May, and the politicans are well and truly on the last lap of the campaign trail. We're a bit rural to see them all, for those who don't make it to the door, here's something to think about.
In Moycullen we are on the edge of the Gaeltacht. Various institutions, such as the main primary school, have been struggling to retain that status with the encroachment of the Béarla 'burbs (suburbs of the Gaeltacht where English dominates).
Our children go to Baile Nua, the villages' gaelscoil. To hold standards, the school has a policy of capping its current enrollment (to 84, I think), to keep class sizes small, until the potential intake is large enough to justify another teacher. Fair enough.
However this has the side-effect that, in an area supposedly set aside to protect the Irish language, students are necessarily turned away from the only Irish-language school in the Village. Any comments?
Wed, 25 Feb 2004
I've been localising Gnome to Irish recently on the train; its a task I can do on the old pentium-class laptop. Translating throws up interesting conundrums.
Firstly, Irish has no words for the abstract concepts "Yes" and "No". This means you've got to phrase a lot of the dialogs carefully : "Do you want to do X? " "I do" "I don't", so you use the same verb each time.
So, discussing this with friends, we wondered, whats the first word a native speaker of Irish learns (I learnt English as my first language); normally for babies, its "no". In Irish, we reckoned, it would be "Don't!" :-)
But, A Friend Isolde is an Old Irish (languages, that is) scholar. It turns out, Old Irish did have words for yes and no. How do you forget and drop constructs like "yes" and "no" from your language?