The GaelMinn Gazette: February, 2015
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#116): February, 2015
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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.
Please FORWARD this newsletter to any friends who may want to learn Irish. And if you received this Gazette from someone else, go to www.gaelminn.org to sign up.
To read this newsletter as a web page, go to www.gaelminn.org/lastgaz.htm .
Content (C) 2015 Gaeltacht Minnesota
CONTENTS
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Tips, Tools, & Tricks
---Spell to Speak
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
---Great Do It Yourself!
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------SPELL TO SPEAK
Mutations -- both lenition and eclipsis -- are among the most challenging elements of the Irish language to master. It just takes time, folks, and a lot of practice. Accordingly, any little tricks that might help are worth a try.
Now, one of the tools we use to learn mutations can be something of a two-edged sword. We're talking about spelling!
Take lenition. Do you think of it as "adding an H"? Certainly, we need a spelling convention to indicate lenition in modern spelling, and the H serves a very useful purpose.
But it also interferes a little. For instance, when you get a combination like SH in Irish, the sound you associate with SH in English can pop into your head (and your mouth). And when we spend too much time thinking of "mutation" as "a change in spelling", we fail to focus on the real situation, which is "a change in sound that is represented in spelling".
Similarly, we can get too dependent on spelling when we are learning about eclipsis. This is particularly true for "unpacking" eclipsis when it is heard. As we are learning, hearing "ar an mbord" can be hard to connect to the noun "bord". But when we see it, the substitution is obvious ... and perhaps that crutch is as much a hindrance as a help.
One way to focus more on the sound substitution aspect of mutations is to spell those mutations a little differently during practice exercises. Start by writing out a list of simple sentences that contain mutations. These can be from text materials, but they are best if they are simple things you might say in a conversation with another student.
And it really helps to write or type them out, not to just work from already printed text.
Now, "unpack" any instances of eclipsis and leave just the "new" sound represented in the spelling. For instance, if you start with the sentence, "Tá an cat ar an mbord", simply rewrite that sentence so it ends with "ar an mord". (You may even want to use a capital, "ar an Mord".)
Then read the sentence, as rewritten with the altered spelling, out loud a few times.
For lenition, try using the consonant + dot over it, that you might have seen in old texts. We can't show that in a text newsletter, so we'll use a capital letter. Replace each of those "consonant + H" combinations with the dotted version.
From "bhris sé an fhuinneog" you might write, "Bris sé an Fuinneog" (again, upper case = dotted consonant). And again, read your new version out loud several times.
Lenition takes a little more practice in this scheme, because the sound isn't as obvious from the spelling. But the key is that you get practice in thinking of "S" and "lenited S" (with the dot) as two different consonants, two different sounds.
You can go further in that direction, in fact. Perhaps you respell "ó shin" as "ó Hin", reflecting how it sounds more clearly.
When we teach absolute beginners in Gaeltacht Minnesota, we spend the first couple of hours without showing students any written Irish. We encourage them to "write what they hear" using any system that appeals to them. So "Cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?" might come out "Kay kwee will too"!
It doesn't hurt to go back to odd, idiosyncratic spelling from time to time, because it helps bring your focus back to the sounds. Take a paragraph, rewrite the mutations, and then read the revised paragraph out loud several times. It really can help you not only see where the mutations occur, but to treat them as matters of pronunciation and hearing, not of spelling.
Good spelling can be a big help. "Bad", or at least "odd", spelling can be a great help, too, in improving your spoken Irish!
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------STILL TIME TO REGISTER FOR "INTRO" CLASS
Our next Community Education "Introduction to Irish Gaelic" class will be held on the first four Mondays of March. Registration is now open on-line, and we have a link to the registration page, and more information about the class, on our web site. Visit http://www.gaelminn.org/commed/index.htm .
Completing this class will allow you to join our regular Monday evening classes.
----------APRIL WORKSHOP TAKING SHAPE
Each year we hold a one-day workshop, all levels taught, on a Saturday in April at St. Thomas University in St. Paul. This year the workshop is scheduled for Saturday, April 11. In about a week we should have complete information on fees and downloadable registration forms will be available on our site at www.gaelminn.org . There will be a significant discount for registrations received by March 30.
Note that if you have been waiting to join our Monday classes, this will get you in.
----------FUNDRAISING THANKS!
We had many helpers and supporters at our January 25 fundraiser. Thanks so much to all of our musicians, our dance friends, and especially to Suin for pulling things together.
Of course, our deepest thanks go to everyone who made a donation. We're particularly grateful this year because, for whatever reason, our actual event was somewhat sparsely attended, and many donations in class and by mail have since made up the difference.
Thanks to everyone!
----------GAELTACHT MINNESOTA SUMMER WORKSHOP
Our annual weekend workshop, held in central Minnesota on the lovely campus of St. John's University, is scheduled for July 25-26. We'll have more details in the next Gazette.
----------OTHER WORKSHOPS IN OUR REGION
We're pleased to see that our friends in Iowa will be hosting their first weekend workshop in Cedar Rapids, June 27-28. You can get more information, as well as pick up your registration form, at https://iowairishlanguage.wordpress.com/ .
Meanwhile, if you're in the Indianapolis neighborhood this spring, you can catch their weekend event on May 1-3. Visit http://www.indianaceltic.org for more information.
----------CLASS NOTES
Mary's class will get some variety while she is out of her usual classroom for a few weeks. Our thanks to Clár for stepping in to help, along with Wes for looking after both his and Mary's class during this stretch.
No Class, March 30, spring break
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LESSONS LEARNED
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----------GREAT DO IT YOURSELF!
We recently received a delightful document from our good friend Karen Olson, who's one of the ringleaders of the study group in Fargo, North Dakota. Karen was looking for a way to remember the verbs that are irregular in the past tense -- like téigh/chuaigh, feic/chonaic, etc. -- and she came up with a great solution.
In fact, her first great idea was that she could make her own study tools, devise her own exercise. Textbooks and reference material are wonderful, but when you take action to create something, you engage the language much more deeply than you do when you are trying to memorize forms from a list in a book.
Karen's solution: rewrite some classic lines from songs she knows well, and call them up from memory when she's at a stop sign or waiting someplace for something or someone. Here are a few examples:
“Chuala mé it on the grapevine.”
“Rinne sé her wrong.”
“Fuair mé my thrill on Blueberry Hill.”
And perhaps my favorite:
“Chonaic mé mommy kissing Santa Claus.”
Notice that this is Karen's personal list of songs. You could do the same thing, but with different songs, your own favorites. That would make these bilingual sentences, if you will, easy to remember. It's a handout that, once constructed, is easy to carry around in your head, precisely because you have heavily personalized it.
Now, we strongly encourage you to create your own tools as a regular practice. They don't have to be perfect, they just have to help. Creating even simple exercises often helps you explore the language with more focus than any amount of reading about grammar.
And when you do make your own materials and exercises, follow Karen's example. She managed to avoid some common mistakes and to focus on what works.
First, she didn't make the easy, well-intentioned mistake of translating the entire song title in Irish. That may seem like a good idea, but it's not, for this exercise. By having only the verb in Irish, it really focuses her attention on the past tense form. She isn't distracted by trying to remember a complicated sentence in Irish. If all of these lines from songs were fully translated, she would quickly stop using this activity, as it would just be too much to remember.
What's more, the easy part to remember -- the English words in the song -- are precisely what helps Karen to remember the irregular past verb she's looking for. So using a mix of Irish and English -- we know that goes against the philosophy of some teachers and students -- actually helps Karen learn and remember her irregular verb forms much more effectively than a pure Irish version would.
And that's the second point, that she focused on just one problem, those verbs that are irregular in the past. She's created a tool that she can access in her head when she needs that particular piece of information. If she tried to deal with too many things -- more tenses, or other aspects of grammar and vocabulary -- it is unlikely that she would learn as quickly, or remember what she learned as well.
Third, because she had a simple, short device she could carry around in her head -- again, because she had very familiar English "hooks" to hang it on -- she can tie this exercise to her "triggers" in her daily life. Sometimes Karen tries to remember one of the song titles each time she comes to a stop sign. Or you could say one every time you see a red car, or pass a gas station, or every time you hang up your phone! Again, because all you have to do is pull out ONE song in that moment, you can get a lot of practice without a lot of stress and strain.
Again, this device can work for you because it is easy to personalize. Choose your own songs, and your own "triggers" in daily life, and you'll quickly get comfortable with those irregular past forms.
But this song list is just a start. You can create many other tools to help yourself learn. Just remember to focus on a single thing at a time, perhaps by mixing languages, to keep things easy to remember and easy to use in a spare moment.
This really works. I know, because ... “Chuala mé it on the grapevine.”
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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 three decades. Besides free classes, we offer several workshops each year, publish introducing the language to readers of columns in regional publications, 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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You can stay up to date with Gaeltacht Minnesota at www.gaelminn.org , or drop us a line anytime at info@gaelminn.org .
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