The GaelMinn Gazette: April, 2015
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#118): April, 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.
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Content (C) 2015 Gaeltacht Minnesota
CONTENTS
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__Thanks For Your Patience!
Tips, Tools, & Tricks
---Of Fish And In-Laws
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
---Possessive Mutation Practice, Part 1
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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----------THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE!
This edition of the Gaz is coming out a few days later than usual, due to travels and competing projects. Thanks for your patience!
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------OF FISH AND IN-LAWS
I remember my old friend Seán T. talking about a trip he was taking in which he'd be staying with relatives, and how he was limiting his stay. He believed in the adage that both fish and in-laws start to stink after they've been around for three days.
What does this have to do with learning Irish?
I'm a strong believer that some good study and practice activities are best done without making any attempt to get at the meaning of the Irish text, without translating a word. But the urge to find out what a sentence or word or passage means is very, very strong.
I figure you can resist that urge for about three days.
Now, let's back up for a brief overview of how to use material without translating, something that has been covered from a variety of angles in this newsletter over the years. Here's the plan:
First, collect some Irish text. Because you are not going to translate it, not look up a single word, it doesn't matter if you're a beginner or an advanced student, you can use the same sources. I'd suggest starting with http://nuacht1.com . This is a site that aggregates content from multiple sources, so it is easy to just click on the article summaries and print off a few pages of Irish text.
Second, spread this text around, don't put all of it with your study materials. Putting an article next to your favorite chair where you watch TV is ideal. You can pick it up and work with it for just a couple of minutes during commercials. You could put an article on the corner of your desk at work, or somewhere in your kitchen while you're waiting for dinner to cook, or anywhere else where you might bump into it and spend just a couple of minutes on it.
HINT: don't put articles anywhere near your dictionary, that's just creating a temptation you don't need.
Third, choose an activity to perform on your article. We'll list some ideas below, but it is good to stick to one or two activities and do them day after day, rather than try to handle multiple activities at the same time.
Fourth, after three days, get rid of the article whether you've touched it or not. Don't promise to get around to it, don't translate any of it, don't save it. Toss it and get new ones. You'll find that printing new articles when you haven't used the previous ones is actually more motivating than hanging on to text until you do something with it.
As part of this three day limit, you might consider changing activities. Again, if you have just one activity on your to-do list, it is easier to do it quickly during commercials or other opportunities, and your learning is more concentrated.
So, what activities can you do with articles that you do not understand?
* READING ALOUD is a terrific exercise. If you read aloud without worrying about what it means, you can concentrate on the sounds. You can focus on how the spelling reflects pronunciation. And you'll become much more aware of things like eclipsis, of patterns of sound that are not just "changes is spelling".
* CIRCLE MUTATIONS: if you're new to Irish, just finding the mutations, the lenition and eclipsis, is a good activity. You only need to process a couple of sentences each time you pick up your article, and then throw it out when you come to the end. If you're more advanced, circle the mutation with the structure that triggers it, for example, instead of circling just "mb" in "mbord", circle "ar an mbord" to show that the preposition + definite article sets up the eclipsis.
* VERB FORMS: Identifying the tense of the verbs you see is a great activity. Or finding some of those forms that incorporate the subject into the ending (pógaim, phógfá, etc.) is worthwhile, although they won't appear in every article. Or simply circle the endings of the verbs, or just the first few letters, and see what patterns you can discern.
Those are just starting activities, you can think of many more. The idea is that any time you study a pattern in Irish grammar -- verb forms, noun plurals, clauses and particles -- you can look for matching patterns in your articles without translating.
Important tip: if you come across something that looks like your desired pattern, but you can't be sure without translating, skip that one! Just find the ones that obviously fit what you're learning.
It takes some discipline to leave the dictionary alone and to replace your reading material every three days. But if you adopt this approach, you'll find that you "steal" a lot of very good study time with little effort, but with big results.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------THANKS FOR A GREAT WORKSHOP
We had a very good time, and learned a lot, at our language workshop on April 11. The feedback we collected showed that our three instructors, Mary, Wes, and Clár, all did wonderful work in the classroom.
Our thanks to a great group of participants, as well as to Jim Rogers and the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas for co-sponsoring this event.
----------GREAT LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES
There are a number of interesting opportunities to learn or practice Irish in the coming months.
MAY in INDIANA: 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.
JUNE in IOWA: 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/ .
JULY in MINNESOTA: 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 available in the next couple of weeks.
AUGUST in AN RINN: John Handy of Pennsylvania is coordinating an immersion week in An Rinn/Ring in the middle of August. For more about this effort, visit www.facebook.com/irishlanguagelearners .
----------CLASS NOTES
Classes are thinking about their summer locations and schedules.
No Class, May 25, Memorial Day
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LESSONS LEARNED
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----------POSSESSIVE MUTATION PRACTICE, PART 1
Think about expressing possession and you think of things like "my dog, your hat". In Irish, the equivalents of "my", "your", and all the other possessive adjectives come with rules for possible changes to the following word, the thing possessed. So, mo mhadra, for example, with lenition after mo.
Most students get the hang of forms for "my, your, our" fairly quickly (although they struggle a little when the following word starts with a vowel). It is easy to remember, after all, that "mo" is followed by lenition (or by no change before a vowel), even if it is sometimes hard to actually do it in real time conversation.
But then we come to "a", which can mean "his", "her", or "their". Which one is intended is entirely a matter of the mutation (or lack thereof) to the following word, the thing possessed. So some extra practice with these forms can be very helpful.
And not just for saying "her dog" and the like. In Irish, possessive adjectives are often combined with other structures to express things that wouldn't have any possessive connotations in English. For example, when something is in front of ME in Irish, it is os mo chomhair, and when it is in front of YOU, it is os do chomhair. Many other compound prepositions (made of more than one word) work the same way.
So let's use that structure to practice these "a" forms until we can produce the right form of the noun, or the thing possessed, automatically. We'll deal with these possessive forms in front of consonants in this issue, and tackle words beginning with vowels in next month's Gazette.
Comhair is only used in prepositional phrases, it has no stand-alone use. The form os chomhair expresses "in front of" or "opposite". So, os comhair an dorais (genitive because doras follows the noun comhair) means "in front of the door" or "opposite the door."
As mentioned above, we insert the possessive adjective into this phrase to say, "in front of me", os mo chomhair. Mo triggers lenition of comhair.
So what about the "a" forms?
* "his" = a + lenition. "In front of him" = os a chomhair.
* "her" = a with no change. "In front of her" = os a comhair.
* "their" = a + eclipsis. "In front of them" = os a gcomhair.
To get started, simply create flash cards (paper or electronic) with these English phrases on one side and the Irish phrases on the other. Move through the deck as rapidly as possible until you can instantly produce the right change in comhair when you see the English phrase. You may want to create multiples of each card to make it more random and more intense.
When that's pretty comfortable, we'll add two more compound position prepositions.
* os cionn expresses "above". So create cards for above him, her and them, with the Irish phrases os a chionn, os a cionn and os a gcionn.
* i ndiaidh expresses "behind" or "after". Create cards for behind him, her, and them with ina dhiaidh, ina diaidh, and ina ndiaidh.
Again, you may want to create multiple sets. Then mix these new sets with your os comhair cards and drill some more, until you can say all these phrases instantly with the right mutation (or lack of mutation).
Next, take out three sheets of paper. In the center of one, draw something to represent a single male -- a stick figure will do just fine. Draw a female stick figure on the second, and several figures on the third. Put the drawings in the middle of the paper, and keep them small enough to have some white space on all sides of the figure.
Now, go through your stack of phrases, looking at the Irish side. As you turn over each one, say it aloud, and put an object -- a penny, say, or a paper clip or sticky note, anything -- in the appropriate position.
That is, if you turn over the card "os a gcionn", you would put the penny above the multiple stick figures. If you turned over "ina diaidh", put the penny behind the female figure.
Finally, put your cards aside and randomly position the penny on your drawings. Naturally, each time you move the penny, you will describe its position with one of these phrases.
As always, keep up the drill long past the point where you think you "get it", keep going until responses are truly automatic. Go for maintaining high speed of correct answers.
The mastery you achieve of possessive forms and mutations, especially these troublesome "a" forms, will come in handy in a multitude of uses in Irish that are very different from English. We'll explore possessives a bit more in the next issue.
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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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