#irish languages/dialects

[aiteanngaelach]

Image ID: a screenshot of the hiberno-english entry in encyclopedia.com that has 3,967,691 views and has the logo of the oxford university press. it reads: HIBERNO-ENGLISH. A VARIETY of English in Ireland, used mainly by less educated speakers whose ancestral tongue was IRISH GAELIC. It is strongest in and around the Gaeltachts (Irish-speaking regions) and in rural areas. It preserves certain Gaelic... Screenshot ends. End ID

I literally made this same post last year and it's still up like. "spoken by the lesser educated" it's spoken by almost everyone in Ireland you weird classist english fucks. colonialist british empire mentality alive and well i see... Hiberno-english is literally so much nicer sounding than english english anyway. "ancestral tongue" "Irish gaelic" Labhraím GAEILGE inniu tusa liúdramán

[mapsontheweb]

Historical distribution of Irish dialects.

by dublin2001

This is a rough guide as to the main historical dialects in Irish. Roughly this corresponds to 3 out of the 4 provinces of Ireland - Ulster, Connacht and Munster. Each of these is split in two, this seems to be the most common thing done in Irish linguistics.

I marked most of Leinster in grey (those parts that didn't speak Ulster or Munster Irish), this doesn't mean that it never spoke Irish, but that it is not usually included in classifications of dialects as Irish became extinct there first.

This map doesn't include more local details such as Ulster influence in parts of County Mayo, or the current Irish speaking areas in County Meath (or indeed "Connemara" or "West Kerry" - those are all historically part of much larger dialect groups). I previously made a pointlessly detailed map of Irish dialects a number of years ago, but I wanted something much simpler and less prone to errors.

This map only deals with the choice of dialect for a given area, and doesn't mean that the area in question spoke only Irish.

[an-spideog]

Just spent a minute trying to find a source for this to make sure I wasn't crazy (and I wasn't!)

So I thought I would share, since lots of people might not be aware. In Kerry Irish, the emphatic pronouns (s)eisean, (s)ise, and (s)iadsan are generally replaced by the demonstrative forms (s)é sin, (s)í sin, and (s)iad san. Literally "that" (masculine), "that" (feminine) and "those".

So instead of having "Rinne seisean é" - "He did it", you would have "Dhein sé sin é" And that's just another neat dialectal quirk!

PS if you're confused about san, it has the same meaning as sin, but in Munster you usually only use sin after slender sounds. PPS if you're wondering what the difference between (s)iadsan and (s)iad san is, there's two things. 1. is the stress, first syllable versus second syllable. And the 2. is the vowel, the first has a schwa (since it's unstressed) and the second usually has an o or a u vowel, it's just written like san for historic reasons. PPPS source: Gaeilge Chorca Dhuibhne by Diarmuid Ó Sé

[irishthings]

Why do irish people sometimes talk with yoda grammar?

We have to make sure we get our point across, so we do.

An actual answer, I think it's a holdover from the Irish language in certain dialects. I'll look into it because somehow I've never thought about it!

Related, my childminder knew a lad who was quoted, upon finding that someone had eaten his small lunch, as saying the line "who ate my banana who?"

[quatregats]

Also I realize that the answer is probably just reading enough period sources but as a linguist I really do need to pick Patrick O'Brian's brain about where in the world he got his different speech patterns from

[river-taxbird]

[writingforaliens]

Gale: info dumping about arcana, the Weave, theories, literature, and recipes. random mentions of Tara

Talara: 😍

Talara: info dumping about history, folk lore, and how there's this one dialect of elvish that is lost to time because no one bothered preserving the pronunciation

Gale: 😍

Everyone else: Please shut the fuck up

[blue-hi]

there are many things i am a fan of joey batey in the witcher for and being the first person to more or less correctly pronounce a welsh word is now one of them

[kim-dokja-hate-blog]

one of the weirdest parts (that i genuinely like) abt reading translated webnovels (and maybe just translated novels in general) is you can feel the places where there would’ve been a joke. you can feel the places where something would’ve been worded differently, where the language wouldn’t be as flat, where there quite simply wasn’t a way to translate what was originally written. i genuinely feel so much respect for translators bc they’re able to work through this. and sometimes i imagine what it’d be like if i was reading it in the original language (this, of course, would mean i would actually have to know the original language) and like. i still wouldn’t get all of that. the difference in culture, in what’s popular, in slang, all would mean that there’s just a context there that i will never be able to fully understand the way i understand what i grew up with.

[trans-cuchulainn]

not people thinking the poll is an irish lit reference lmao

[princekirijo]

germans also bully eachother because of dialects and shit. like we're not even cool with eachother in the same nation what makes some ppl think europe doesnt have actual racism like girl 😭💀

Yeah that is actually very true tbh I can't speak for other countries but I know Irish people definitely bully each other for accents and also the Irish language dialects (the few people who speak it at least but that's a separate issue). Here at least the accents/dialects is done in good humor but it's still like you know. Weird ig?

But for real Europe is so full of racism its like... Baffling when I see other people be like "Europe good no racism eheh :]" 💀

[aiteanngaelach]

"Saol trí mhíol mhór saol iomaire amháin, saol trí iomaire saol an domhain.

“Three times the life of a whale is the lifespan of a growing ridge, and three times the life of a growing ridge is the lifespan of the world.”

These thirteen words encapsulate just how far back the knowledge contained within the language stretches on this island, as a whale was thought to live for one thousand years, (although they actually live for about a century), so it was known that the cultivation ridges we can see in the fields around us could be up to three thousand years old. Archaeologists agree that there are indeed ridges of that age still visible in places like the Céide Fields in Co Mayo or Slievemore on Achill Island. The span of three cultivation ridges would amount to 9,000 years, which brings us to the date that archaeologists believe humans first arrived here – the beginning of our world. The fact that our people appear to have somehow kept a count of how long we have been on this island and that they encoded it in our language is precious.

My grandmother often pointed out the still-visible cultivation ridges left by her great-grandparents’ generation during the Great Hunger in the 1840s. Some were more visible than others as they had been left undug – with my ancestors either too weak to dig them, or, having noticed the blight-rotted potato stems, they realised there would be nothing but a slimy mush beneath the soil. I had been struck by the longevity of such memories, but it wasn’t until I heard the proverb that I realised quite how far back these folk memories actually stretch.

It appears, at least, as though we managed to keep some wispy thread of memory intact from our Neolithic forebears, who planted, weeded and harvested along these ridges thousands of years ago. The knowledge is contained within the land, and over the years I’ve realised the best way of accessing it is through the language."

-Manchán Magan, 'Thirty-Two Words for Field'

[tartigglez]

i refuse to accept the existence of american english.

[an-spideog]

What is the d' in d'ól?

The d´ in d'ól (drank), d'fhág (left), d'ith (ate) and so on, is a contraction of the past/conditional particle do. You may be wondering why you don't see the particle before other verbs, and in fact, it's still used sometimes before consonants in munster, so you get things like do bhíos ann (I was there), do bhí fear ann fadó... (long ago there was a man...)

It's not used before consonants really in the other dialects or in the standard, so why is that? Basically it's because the effect it causes (lenition) makes the past tense clear anyway, and it was an unstressed particle, so it's easy to skip over in speech, so in most places "do bhí" just became "bhí".

But in the case of vowels, because it doesn't add another syllable, it was preserved.

If you look at older texts (around the 1900s even) you'll often see do written constantly.

[star--nymph]

makes it my canon that Eurydice and Clan Lavellan speaks a variation of elvish that leans heavily into Gaeilge. Why? Because I'm Irish and I can >:3

[ainawgsd]

I have been tasked with making the kolacky dough