The EU recognises the Irish language's resurgence
Posted on 12/27/2006 7:43:11 AM PST by Jedi Master Pikachu
|
The EU recognises the Irish language's resurgence
|
The Irish language (Gaeilge) is set to get official status in the EU on 1 January, bringing the total to 23.
The European Commission says Bulgarian and Romanian are expected to get official status on the same day, when the two Balkan countries join the EU.
According to Ireland's 2002 census, 1.57 million of the four million population can speak Irish.
The commission says the EU will not have to translate all legislation into Irish, "mainly for practical reasons".
The EU will have a team of 29 translators and editors to handle Irish, as well as 450 freelance interpreter days annually, costing some 3.5m euros (£2.3m; $4.6m).
Despite the resurgence of interest in Irish, increasing numbers of students are choosing not to sit exams in Irish, the commission says. The language is compulsory in Ireland's schools.
The commission describes linguistic diversity as a "key theme" in the EU, noting that Catalan, Basque and Galician have been granted semi-official status.
If they become official the costs will probably be incurred by Spain, it says.
Does that mean we should now recognise "Feck" and "Fup" as swear words?
Maybe. Cartainly calling someone "English" will be hate speech.
What about Welsh?
Wot about Manx? Wot about the English genocide of the Manx?
What about Welsh or Scottish?..........or even
begorrah bejeez
Erse BUMP.
I thought they just cut their cat's tails off..........
However, if Basque and Catalan have semi-official status, then it wouldn't be too much of a stretch for Manx or Welsh (or Scots, etc.). to be put in. It is more of an ethnic pride thing at the expense of the EU taxpayer.
Nice !
Och, bairn, ilka Sassenach maun no ken Anglic verra mickle!
Out of that, the only thing sort of discernable is English (Anglic). What's the translation?
"What about Welsh?"
Well, they agreed to include Welsh, too, but changed their minds and didn't do it, even though they agreed to it.
Gaelic was a beastly language before, and according it the recognition of being an acceptable means of communication only means the level of rhetoric will ratchet up, with some of the most colorful insults known to the Western world.
Gaelic would have died out as a language five hundred years ago if the English had taken advantage of the Irishman's natural weaknesses for alcohol and avarice, by paying well for their whiskey, rather than trying to prohibit either.
Searching for the Welsh-Hindi link
BBC
Monday, 14 March, 2005, 10:31 GMT
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1363051/posts
A BBC journalist is urging helpful linguists to come forward to help solve a mystery - why the Hindi (India's official language, along with English) accent has so much in common with Welsh. Sonia Mathur, a native Hindi speaker, had her interest sparked when she moved from India to work for the BBC in Wales - and found that two accents from countries 5,000 miles apart seemed to have something in common.
It has long been known that the two languages stem from Indo-European, the "mother of all languages" - but the peculiar similarities between the two accents when spoken in English are striking.
Remarkably, no-one has yet done a direct proper comparative study between the two languages to found out why this is so, says Ms Mathur.
"What I'm hoping is that if amateurs like myself - who have indulged in doing a little bit of research here and there - come forward, we can actually do proper research with professional linguists," she told BBC World Service's Everywoman programme.
No coincidence
Ms Mathur explained that when she moved to Wales, everyone instantly assumed she was Welsh from her accent.
"I would just answer the phone, and they would say 'oh hello, which part of Wales are you from?'," she said.
We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels
Sonia Mathur "I would explain that I'm not from Wales at all - I'm from India.
"It was just hilarious each time this conversation happened."
Her interest aroused, Ms Mathur spoke to a number of other people whose first language is Hindi.
One Hindi doctor in north Wales told her that when he answered the phone, people hearing his accent would begin talking to him in Welsh.
"I thought maybe it isn't a coincidence, and if I dig deeper I might find something more," Ms Mathur said.
Particular similarities between the accents are the way that both place emphasis on the last part of word, and an elongated way of speaking that pronounces all the letters of a word.
"We tend to pronounce everything - all the consonants, all the vowels," Ms Mathur said.
"For example, if you were to pronounce 'predominantly', it would sound really similar in both because the 'r' is rolled, there is an emphasis on the 'd', and all the letters that are used to make the word can be heard.
"It's just fascinating that these things happen between people who come from such varied backgrounds."
The similarities have sometimes proved particularly tricky for actors - Pete Postlethwaite, playing an Asian criminal in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, had his accent described by Empire magazine as "Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea".
Proto-European language
But not only the two languages' accents share notable common features - their vocabularies do too.
'Apu from the Simpsons holidaying in Swansea' or Pete Postlethwaite? Ms Mathur's own research on basic words, such as the numbers one to 10, found that many were similar - "seven", for example, is "saith" in Welsh, "saat" in Hindi.
"These kind of things really struck me," she said.
"When I reached number nine they were exactly the same - it's 'naw' - and I thought there had to be more to it than sheer coincidence."
She later spoke to professor Colin Williams of Cardiff University's School Of Welsh, who specialises in comparative languages.
He suggested that the similarities are because they come from the same mother language - the proto-European language.
"It was basically the mother language to Celtic, Latin, and Sanskrit," Ms Mathur added.
"So basically that's where this link originates from."
(An internet search brought up translator from English to Scots/Scottish, but no Scots/Scottish to English).
I have at least one ancestor who came over from Sodor during the famine of 1849, along with six of her siblings. (It wasn't just the Irish who suffered.) When I was born there were well over 1,000 people whose mother tongue was Manx. The last native speaker of Manx died during my lifetime.
I could read it, though I be nae Scots. Mickle Sassenach ken Scots speak, if they read it slowly enough, bairn.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.