The GaelMinn Gazette: December, 2013 http://ezezine.com
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#103): December, 2013
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The GaelMinn Gazette, a monthly e-newsletter from Gaeltacht Minnesota,
carries helpful items for anyone studying the Irish language, anywhere,
as well as news of interest to local and regional students.
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Content (C) 2013 Gaeltacht Minnesota
CONTENTS
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Tips, Tools, & Tricks
Prepare Your Editorial Calendar
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
Your Portable Phrase Library
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE
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This edition of The GaelMinn Gazette is coming to you a few days late,
as the usual 25th deadline was Christmas Day, and I was off with family
playing in (very cold) snow on the Minnesota-Canada border.
ATHBHLIAIN FAOI MHAISE DUIT!
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Hope you had a great holiday season and are looking forward to a
wonderful New Year!
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------PREPARE YOUR EDITORIAL CALENDAR
We have just been through the big winter holiday season. As you checked
out at the grocery store, you noticed all the magazines with special
holiday decorations, recipes, and other themes. You may have come home
and watched some holiday specials for seasonal entertainment, as well.
Maybe you heard some new songs, or new versions of old songs, on the
radio.
None of those items were created in December, of course. They were
planned well in advance. The temperatures may have been blistering when
those holiday songs were recorded, and there certainly wasn't any snow
on the ground when the editors of those magazines assigned articles and
topics to writers.
Indeed, you may have found yourself grumbling when Halloween rolled
around and some of the stores were already putting up Christmas
decorations ...
But maybe you should behave more like that!
Here's the problem: in your next conversation -- with a study buddy (in
person or via technology), in a class or workshop, in a conversation
group, or even in your own diary or blog where you practice writing in
Irish -- you're going to want to talk about your holidays, what you
did, whom you saw, where you went, and more. And you'll discover that
you are missing a lot of the vocabulary, or don't quite know how to
shape the grammar, to tell the tale.
By the time you figure all that out, your holidays are old news. You'll
be facing a new topic, for which you are equally unprepared.
So work ahead. The time to figure out what you are likely to say about
Christmas, or Hannukah, or New Year's Eve is a month before those
occasions. You can't predict everything, but enough carries over from
year to year to let you do most of this homework well in advance. You
can look up vocabulary, even write out some complete sentences you'd
probably want to have ready.
Then, when it comes time to talk about them, you've got most of what
you need. You've had time to practice and drill, rehearsing the
conversations and running through the sentences you'll use to share
your news. You might have a few blanks to fill in -- you didn't look up
"left handed solar powered egg beater" before you got one as a present
-- but you'll be way ahead of the game.
And you'll be more relaxed in those conversations, and enjoy them more.
Magazine editors, in particular, lay out an "editorial calendar" well
in advance, often at least a year ahead. They assign themes for each
edition and put people to work on developing the needed content weeks
and months ahead of time. We'll still have plenty of snow in Minnesota
when some magazines are working on their Fourth of July material.
Lay out your own editorial calendar. Take a yearly calendar and mark
the dates when you'll have something special to talk about. Some of
those could be holidays, from New Year's to Valentine's Day to all the
standards. Others could be planned trips to interesting places. Hobbies
and recreational activities are another source of themes -- around
here, we think about gardening and skiing at very different times of
year.
Choose the ones you are going to want to be able to talk about in
Irish. Then shift their dates at least four weeks earlier in the year.
When those topics come up on your editorial calendar, do your homework.
Try to write out things you'll want to say, and then look up the
vocabulary and the grammar you need to get it done.
Stick to your calendar and you'll banish those annoying situations
where you'd love to tell them about your trip, or your special holiday,
and where you are forced to do it all in English because you don't have
the tools to do it in Irish.
Talking about real activities and real interests is always more fun
than the generic stuff. Putting together, and following, an editorial
calendar is the secret to making that happen.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------GREAT CHRISTMAS DINNER!
We had a fabulous time on Dec. 16 at our 33rd annual Christmas Dinner.
We especially enjoyed seeing family and friends who support our
engagement with the Irish language all year long. We had great music
from Martin McHugh, Pete Tritz, Daithi Sproule and Laura McKenzie, not
to mention a fine assortment of excellent "party pieces" from one and
all, and the awarding of the infamous Traveling Trophy to a steadfast
student and volunteer. And special thanks to Suin for handling the
hosting negotiations and arrangements.
----------PENCIL IN JAN 26
We're expecting to hold our annual fundraiser on the last Sunday
afternoon in January, same place, same deal as usual, but we haven't
finalized the arrangements yet, so we can't make it official right now.
Keep an eye on our web site for final details.
----------SCHEDULE NOTES
Mary starts Jan 6, off site.
All three classes return to Central on Jan 13.
No class (MLK) on Jan 20.
No class (here comes da prez) on Feb 17.
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LESSONS LEARNED
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Sharing ideas we learn from both instructors AND students.
----------YOUR PORTABLE PHRASE LIBRARY
When you're trying to express yourself in Irish, the gears are always
turning inside your head, trying to grind through the rules of the
game, as it were. Is that preposition followed by a mutation? Do I use
the independent or dependent form of the verb in this situation?
Knowing your rules of grammar is great, of course. But sometimes it is
faster to take advantage of "role models" you might have learned along
the way.
Take the preposition "i", for example. You probably know (and sometimes
remember, in real time, and sometimes don't) the rule of grammar that
"i" eclipses a following noun: "i gcarr" = "in a car", say.
If you have been studying Irish even a short while, however, you
probably have learned the phrase "i gcónaí" for "always". (Or perhaps,
because of where you live, you use a phrase like "i gCalifornia" quite
often.)
If you use that "always" expression yourself, you have a handy
reference in your head. If you aren't sure what to do when you have
just inserted "i" in a sentence, think of "i gcónaí" and you'll
instantly realize that eclipsis is called for.
Maybe you have learned to use "le cúnamh Dé" or "le cuidiú Dé" ("with
God's help") in your speech, particularly when talking about the
future, meeting someone later, and so on. There's your reference phrase
to tell you that "le" doesn't lead to any mutation in a directly
following noun.
One phrase I learned early on was, "Nuair a bhí mé óg", ("When I was
young"), a famous book title as well as a useful common phrase. And as
part of my mental reference library, it helps me remember to use the
independent form -- Nuair a bhí -- and not the dependent form (Nuair a
raibh) in that situation.
Similarly, I know, from observing people working out how to say things
in class or in our conversation group, that the phrase "ar an tsráid"
helps people remember that that t-before-s change, when the article
precedes a feminine noun, still occurs after a preposition (as in the
"ar an ... " construction).
If you're just aware of the practice, you can easily build your own
reference library of phrases to carry around inside your head. Then,
when you are constructing Irish in real time, you can learn to think of
a "role model", a familiar example, to guide you.
But it has to be your own library. Everybody's will be a little
different. When you come across phrases you use fairly often (maybe you
talk about "mo charr" a lot), think about making an extra effort to
store them in memory as a reference phrase. Or you may come across
groups of words in your texts or readings or listening activities that
immediately strike you as phrases you'd like to use, both in
conversation and in your mental library.
Phrases can help you with mutations, with prepositions and relative
clauses, with verb forms, with absolutely anything. You just have to be
mentally prepared to learn them, store them, and use them.
They can even help with things like dialect differences. Being "at
home" is something most of us learn to say fairly early. We learn "sa
bhaile" if we're using the Standard, or if we're interested in using a
Munster or Ulster dialect. But speakers of Connaught Irish learn to use
"sa mbhaile". Whatever your dialect, that common phrase will guide you
in using "sa" correctly.
Keep learning those rules of grammar, of course, that's part of
learning Irish.
But some mental shortcuts in the form of a library of familiar phrases
can often help you out just as quickly and effectively when you are
trying to express yourself correctly in spoken or written Irish.
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ABOUT GAELTACHT MINNESOTA & THE GAZETTE
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Gaeltacht Minnesota is a volunteer organization that has been teaching
free weekly classes in Irish for more than two decades. Besides free
classes, we offer several workshops each year, publish a printed
newsletter for learners, and participate in a wide variety of community
events.
The GaelMinn Gazette is distributed to our subscriber list on the 25th
of each month: Will Kenny, editor.
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