Gaelscoilis -- error-laden pidgin or creative creole: Breandan mac Ardghail at TEDxFulbrightDublin
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ส.ค. 2024
- Breandán Mac Ardghail's talk is entitled Gaelscoilis: An error-laden pidgin or a deviously creative creole? By exploring the weird and wonderful linguistic features of the language spoken in Irish immersion schools, he offers an alternative perspective on the non-native schoolyard Irish of Gaelscoil pupils. In 2012, Breandán was a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at the University of Montana.
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This guy is right, gaelscoilis can easily be converted into gaeilge, people only need to speak and improve their irish.
That would not happen. If Gaeilscoilis speakers had children and raised them with Gaeilscoilis, those Gaeilscoilis speaking children aren't going to change the way they were raised speaking naturally.
For example, imagine trying to convince a large group of people to change their accent, grammar and sounds of the language they speak in order to mimick how their ancestors sounded. Imagine trying to convince everybody in South Dublin to speak English like their great great grandparents did. It's not going to happen.
What would happen is a new language with anglicised phonetics, grammar, idiom, everything, would have been created based on Irish vocabulary wise but with English grammar influences and English pronunciation and intonation. This would be passed from parent to child and would call itself Irish except it would be nothing like native Irish or the Irish of the countries heritage.
(Although current Gaelscoil students are in a position to learn properly if they have the desire and motivation and quality of teacher to help them do so.)
Also, speaking will only improve your Irish if you are using the correct sounds to produce the speech. Gaelscoil students rarely use the phonemes of the Irish language or follow its broad slender rule. They will only be reinforcing their anglicised pronunciations, but doing so with increased fluency.
It seems you learned one thing well: you can never overuse the ellipsis
His thinking is evident in many areas of modern teaching theory. It is seen in the accepting of poor spelling and grammar in English . The failure to correct error is a failure to teach. They do their student a massive disservice because the kid never acquires the basic tools and skills in the lower levels of the education system . It is seen as stifling creativity and individuality to insist on the basics of good grammar and spelling and writing and math technique and arithmetic. These are the kids who later in university can't produce a readable essay with a coherent structure.
@Ter Rowle Yes, he made a mistake and mixed up taught and thought. But his point still stands as a very good one.
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A pidgin is made to communicate with native speakers in a rudimentary way, Gaelscoil Irish is made for English speakers to communicate with each other in code.
How can they break the rules of language when they and their teachers have no idea what the rules are?
Let's apply no rules then to Béarla. How about not distinguishing between Polish and polish? Or then and than?
Or Irish, ais for áis? Or suas leat féin instead of fút féin? How about everyone having an idiolect?
I call it bearlachais a mix between irish and English
Orla Kate Campbell you sure you’re not thinking of Hiberno-English it’s English with gaeilge roots
@@michelleflood8220 Hiberno English has its roots in 17th-18th century English dialects with a certain degree of influence from Irish.
Dublin English has roots in even older English dialects and has been developing for a lot longer than standard Hiberno English, which besides influences from other languages, helps explain the differences in prosody/stress/intonation between traditional Dublin English and traditional Hiberno English.
(Keeping in mind that among younger people traditional speech is mostly only spoken today by rural males and the working classes. - see studies on Supraregional Irish English for more detail.)
Bearlachais is a suitable name for Gaelscoilis. Hopefully it catches on and Gaelscoil students will actually want to learn Irish for real.
My teacher used that word too, but she would use it more for things like fón vs guthán
I would describe translating English to Irish using the English structure and adhering to the translated English vocabulary as Béarlachas. It always has a different balance when translated. Eg bus lána or even lána bus for bus lane. Maybe not a great example as their is no Irish equivalent but you get my drift. Maybe it should be “bóithrín an bhus” or something like that. I’m sure someone more academic could explain it. I have always found using partially English/Irish words more honest and better integrated to the language as you then don’t have to restructure the balance of the sentence to include a new or foreign concept. Sorry I cannot think of an example.
Have them buy and study "Teach Yourself Irish Grammar You Really Need to Know"!!!
Immersion is the best way.
It's not true immersion if you are immersed with other learners only.
Immersion is when you go to Russia and nobody can speak English and you're surrounded by the native sounds and natural speech of that language all day everyday. Full immersion isn't really possible with a minority language like Irish, which is why people need to make much better use of the years recordings of native speakers we have collected over the last seventy years to prepare ourselves for this eventuality.
The notion that all rules can be thrown out the window may be seductive, but it leads to chaos. Certainly not to unambiguous and efficient communication. Furthermore, some of the "rules" actually pertain to what I would term the deep (intrinsic?) structure of a language. For instance, it is just fundamental to Irish that "He is a man" is not expressed as "Tá sé fear"; we say "Is fear é". "Tá sé fear" is just woefully NOT Irish and grates on the ear of anyone who has even minimal exposure to the language. Yet, of course, it is present in the second example presented at 3:50. You might as well just thump your chest and grunt "Me man". It barely qualifies as pidgin. Thinking that the natural language engine of teenagers is somehow magically going to generate the kind of coherent grammatical and syntactical structure needed to communicate genuinely complex ideas and abstract concepts is just misguided.
In short, failure to help these kids learn Irish that is grammatically and syntactically correct does them a grave disservice. Rebranding a failure to grasp the fundamentals as "creativity" is an abrogation of responsibility, almost Trumpian in its disdain for learning.
Great talk
I lived in new York in the 80s we used words like ceathair fear.. Foreman..
While I agree with you somewhat, you present a lot of loose theory as fact, which is very misleading
Tá eagla orm aon rud a rá Góa (Gáire ós aird) xxxxxx Too true, every word xxxxx
Could someone explain what's wrong with the examples given @ 03:50? While I'm sure there are more emphatic and expressive ways to say these things, as simple bland statements the examples don't seem obviously wrong.
I'm not fluent as gaeilge, but I have a reasonable command of it. Those sentences are comprehensible, but to me sound a little odd. "Ní maith leis an cluiche a h-imirt" and "Is é sin mo pheann é" or maybe "Is liomsa é an pheann sin" would be a bit more natural sounding to me. The examples do sound to me like english sentences with irish vacab swapped in. And maybe that's where the language is headed, maybe an urban creole is what will survive as more 'pure' native forms drift into the realms of academia and away from everyday life...
In Irish, like Gàidhlig, the verbal noun comes at the end. 'Ní maith leis imirt an cluiche' is wrong because imirt is in the middle of the sentence, it should be 'ní maith leis an cluiche a imirt'.
The second one is simply incorrect, I'm not sure why, it just is. To indicate possession in Irish you have to use the preposition 'le' meaning with. 'Tá sin mo pheann' is wrong because it's just a direct translation, no more than you'd say j'aime tu in French for I love you, but rather je t'aime. The correct way to say it would be 'is liomsa an peann sin', where liom is the prepositional pronoun made up of 'le' (with) and 'mé' (me).
Móran taing dhuibh uile :-)
@@tadhgomaoldhomhnaigh8720 Ta peann agam.
Taghg - very well put
You have you leave home, to learn 🇮🇪
Would it be more accurate to say they are inventing a new language ? Ah I see he explains later. But why would you want to re-invent the wheel? Do I need to learn gaelscoil-ish and forget everything that has been developed for the last 2,000 years ?
No the solution is to have proper standards in place so that they learn the grammar naturally. It will never be perfect, but with the way it's going now they're just completely forgetting about most of the language.
The problem is surely that there´s no viable community of adult speakers (especially perhaps young-ish adults) out there in the ´real world´ for the kids to identify and integrate with in daily life outwith the school. In a sense it´s unfair trying to place the burden of restoring Irish on to the kids, alone they just don´t have the resources.
You´ve been an independent nation for almost a century now, but you´ve chosen to flush your language down the tubes. Now you seem to be expecting your kids to do the work for you. Small wonder the result is a travesty. Is mór an truas sin a dh´fhaicinn.
I'm delighted to say that you are incredibly wrong. I've been learning again and the more people I talk to about it the more native speakers I find. From the lads I play football with to my taxi driver and people at work. The community is there, its down to if you wish to engage with it or not
I genuinely hope what you say is true ...
marconatrix you just have to engage with it. It's the people that don't that don't see it and then claim it's dead
ConorJMagic he’s right all of my cousins speak it fluently one is even a teacher so of course she’s using it daily RTE has programs in it and there is adults who do speak it all signage is bilingual so there are people out there it’s up to you to find them
@@marconatrix Yes, as Conor says, you can find a community if you look for it.
But for the most part your comment is true I'm afraid. Very few of the parents in Ireland have any Irish beyond very basic phrases. Most parents who send their children to Gaelscoils are simply passing the buck to their children. Most people don't really care enough to do anything.
Galescoils are primarily about separating middle class kids from kids from poor families, travellers and immigrant children. The spoken irish never improves past baby talk because that is not the reason the parents send their kids to these schools so they have no interest in pushing their kids to improve, learn with them or push the school to attain a higher standard.
If these were schools for kids with musical or acting talents and that aspect of the education didnt progress how long would the parents tolerate that?
Then, how to revived Irish language?
@@Motofanable how did Israel revive Hebrew? Yes they started with kindergartens and schools in Hebrew only. The Hebrew grew out of the language schools and went back into the homes. Do the Irish parents really have a hunger for gaeilge? Do they speak it back to their children and to each other in front of their kids? That's all it takes. up untill about age 3/4 you are going to have loads of gaeilge to talk to your children if you went through our education system.
After that as their vocabulary explodes you need to have put in the effort to stay ahead of them.
Going back to the Israelis. What they did next after kindergartens and Hebrew schools was suppress Yiddish and other languages. All the migrants had to learn Hebrew. The state stopped offering services in other than Hebrew and people started changing to using the Hebrew form of their names etc.
Could we all start using our irish names only, yes and more state services through irish yes.
Unlike the early 20thC Israelis we have the advantages of still having large numbers of gaelgoirs among us, the language is still alive in the community in some areas.
our massive disadvantage is the power of English. It smuthers all other languages it touches. Our second problem is the 6 inches between our ears. So many of the Irish have a hang up with the language, for example if you want to get someone with a little school irish to really try to have a conversation they preform better when 1. Out of Ireland and 2. With a drink taken what does that say about what's stopping them.
What do you think
@@twoonthewall If you ask me, don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
This is the only thing i will going to say.
@@twoonthewall The Hebrew language was revived in Palestine many years before the foundation of Israel.
It was in fact the first language of the majority of Jews in Palestine before 1920.
How did they do it?
- Adults learned the language, which had always had Rabbis and educated Jews able to speak some, the texts and the pronunciations of the words had been considered sacred and were passed through the generations via prayers that all Jews learned, even if their first language was something else
- Hebrew medium schools were built to cater to and help the adults who were determined to raise Hebrew speaking children
- These people formed insular communities and networks and shunned non-Hebrew speaking Jews completely.
- These communities and networks grew in size and were linked with the Aliyah re-settlement movements and the Zionist movements
The founders of Israel were Zionists and Hebrew speakers, and the majority of Jews already there were Hebrew speakers. There was no question that Hebrew was going to be the language of Israel, but they had to work hard to assimilate the large numbers of European Jews who resettled after the Second World War and stamp out Yiddish. Thankfully for them they had the advantage of being there first and having the State on their side
@@twoonthewall You make two particularly great points though,
- the power of English (the Hebrew revivalists didn't have to deal with a language as pervasive and omnipresent as English currently is).
- the attitudes of the majority of parents of Gaelscoil students. They are not ideologues. They are not revivalists. They are not Irish speakers (the majority are not really Irish speakers, few are good Irish speakers). The vast majority are not raising their children through Irish. They like the idea of the intellectual benefits of bilingual education more generally and many like the vague notion of their children having Irish as a 'second language'.
Surveys show that most Irish people like the idea of a bilingual country 'with English as the first language'
And most of the people who like that idea wouldn't be willing to put the effort in to learn to understand Radio na Gaeltachta and speak the language well. That's just the reality of the situation
Tá se go híontach!!!
What is go hiontach about it? He just showed graphs proving what we already know about how different Gaelscoilis is to native Irish. I know people who graduated from Gaelscoils who can't understand native speakers and still pronounce ach as ock, nevermind slenderising r's.
C C what’s the solution for non-native speakers who want to learn the language of their forebears in a foreign land?
@@languageoffootball I know people from America, France, Germany and Russia who make far more convincing Irish speakers than most people who learned in school in Ireland, including Gaelscoil students.
The best books are books that are comprehensive enough to take you from complete beginner to intermediate and include a lot of audio of native speakers.
One of the most highly recommended ones is 'Learning Irish' by Micheál Ó Siadhail. It includes a transcript at the end of each chapter read by natives of the Cois Fhairrge dialect. I heard an American speaking once and was convinced he was a native speaker until he spoke English! This was the book he used. Chapter one deals with Irish phonetics in detail, something that the Irish school systems should give a lot more attention to in order to avoid the continuing anglicisation of the Irish language.
If you are interested in the Munster dialect Myles Dillons Teach Yourself Irish is a good option and for Ulster Buntús na Gaeilge is not bad. Regardless of which you choose I'd still recommend chapter one of Learning Irish for it's treatment of the basic phonetic system as I have not seen it explained as well anywhere else.
(e.g. The only difference between the words 'beo' and 'bo' is that 'beo' uses a slender b. Most non-natives will say beo as if there is a literal 'e' there to be pronounced which isn't exactly the case in Irish.)
(For a more casual/less intensive course, which uses standard Irish as opposed to dialect, and uses native Connacht speakers, 'Buntús Cainte' is quite good.)
I recommend the above whether you are learning in Ireland or abroad. Even if you are taking Irish courses in Ireland I'd still recommend the above because teachers of Irish can vary greatly in quality whereas the quality of the above materials is guaranteed.
C C Thank you very much for taking to time to provide such comprehensive and well-sourced advice.
@@cigh7445 what do you think about the way the oral exams are structured and examined ? I had a fairly average experience back when I did mine. I ended up speaking English to my examiner as he didn’t have enough Irish to converse other than the scripted version ([1]cad a rinne tú ar sáoire........? [2]........)that was being taught in the classroom. I agree that the spoken proficiency of some teachers is disgraceful by the way.
German has Danglish Irish has this .
and a mix of french and english is called franglais lol
Maith thú