The GaelMinn Gazette: May, 2015
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#119): May, 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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Tips, Tools, & Tricks
---Summer Studies
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
---Possessive Mutation Practice, Part 2
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------SUMMER STUDIES
(With apologies to our southern hemisphere readers ...)
It can be hard to maintain your usual pace of learning during the summer months. We just seem to have more interruptions in our weekly schedule with summer actvities. Some study groups (including ours) cut back on how often they meet over the summer. Some students don't have a group to work with, but they still have a pattern of study that gets disrupted when the warm weather arrives. And even if you have a group that is meeting regularly over the summer, you may find it harder to make all the meetings.
Whether it is travel or the call of the ballpark or your garden, there simply seems to be more competition for your time.
You can "just try harder" to keep up your study schedule. But that can be frustrating.
It might be better to recognize that your situation is different during the summer, and to come up with some strategies to fit summer conditions.
One adjustment that can work for you is to schedule "off site study appointments", little "binge" sessions. Now, we confess that this newsletter relentlessly harps on getting in frequent, if brief, work on your Irish. But if you can't sustain your regular schedule during the summer, explicitly schedule hearty study sessions, spaced farther apart.
It's important to treat these sessions as formal appointments. Put them on your calendar, let your family know you'll be busy, and do your darnedest to "meet yourself" at the appointed time.
Equally important: do your study session someplace different. Go to a coffee shop, go to the library. The act of gathering your materials and going someplace special, someplace separate from your usual haunts, will reinforce your commitment to your study session.
It will also take you away from a lot of potential distractions!
By the way, these sessions don't have to run for hours. An hour is good, especially if you can schedule your next appointment within a reasonable time after the first one.
As for what to study, summer is a great time for vocabulary work. In particular, why not develop word lists around the very summer activities that are interrupting your study schedule?
If you are taking a trip, make a list of words that you would use to talk about your trip. That could include how you travel, descriptions of the places you visit, and terms for some of the activities you enjoy.
If you do a lot of gardening, or fishing, or camping in the summer, assemble the vocabulary you need to talk about those things in Irish. It is easier to learn new vocabulary when it refers to stuff you enjoy doing, and actually are doing.
In fact, combining these two suggestions -- assembling "relevant" vocabulary and scheduling study appointments -- may be the best solution. Set the goal of each study appointment to be the production of a "diary entry" from your summer. Try to write a paragraph, or two, about some summer activity or event.
For instance, you might head to the coffee shop one week to look up vocabulary about gardening, and to write a diary entry about your gardening activities. Ten days later, you make an appointment wiith yourself to go to the library and write an entry about a road trip with friends or family. And so on.
You might have to take it easy on grammar study when your schedule becomes irregular due to competing summer activities. But concentrating your efforts, in time and by topic, can make sure you don't accumulate too much rust between now and the fall.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------JULY WEEKEND WORKSHOP
Summer brings a great opportunity for students in our region to get started on the language, or to polish what they already know. Our summer weekend, July 25-26, offers a compact format, running Saturday morning through Sunday afternoon. Lodging is available on campus Saturday night.
We'll have complete information, along with downloadable registration forms, up on our web site at www.gaelminn.org next week.
----------CLASS NOTES
No Class, May 25, Memorial Day
Last class at Central, all classes meet June 1
After June 1, each class will have its own schedule and location, so check with your instructor. We'll also put meeting dates on the Events page on our web site.
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LESSONS LEARNED
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----------POSSESSIVE MUTATION PRACTICE, PART 2
In the previous edition of the Gaz, we looked at how possessive adjectives are incorporated into other structures, in ways that don't happen much in English. In particular, we used compound prepositions like "os comhair" and "os cionn", meaning "in front of" and "above", respectively, to practice the mutations that go with the three forms of "a", meaning "his", "her", and "their".
Getting those mutations to come to mind (and tongue) automatically is a challenge for most students. So we practiced with phrases like os a chomhair ("in front of him"), os a comhair ("in front of her"), and os a gcomhair ("in front of them").
That's good for practice with mutations of consonants. But it usually takes even more drill to get the hang of these mutations when they apply to words that begin with a vowel. And to practice with vowels, we'll use a different structure, namely, the pronoun object of a verbal noun. The grammar of this structure is complicated, so we won't offer a thorough explanation of how it works. We'll just concentrate on the third person pronouns, "him", "her", and "them".
Well, technically we're talking about "it", rather than "his" and "her". Unlike in English, of course, "it" can have gender in Irish.
For instance, you might say something like, "I bought an apple and now I am eating it." In Irish, that would be "Cheannaigh mé úll agus tá mé á ithe anois." Without going into fine details, "eating it" is expressed by á before the verbal noun, that á really being a shortened version of the preposition de plus the possessive masculine adjective a, which triggers lenition. But lenition doesn't do anything to a vowel.
If you were eating "meat", that would be "feoil", which is feminine. The feminine possessive a doesn't cause any mutation, and that LACK of mutation is shown before a vowel by adding an h: Tá mé á hithe.
And if you bought a bunch of "berries", or "caora", you would be eating "them". The plural possessive a triggers eclipsis, shown by prefixing an n to a vowel, so you get "Tá mé a n-ithe".
To summarize, "I am eating it/them" comes out as:
* masculine it: Tá mé á ithe.
* feminine it: Tá mé á hithe.
* them: Tá mé á n-ithe.
Now it's a simple matter of assembling some flashcards. On one side, write either the singular or the plural of a food, in Irish (suggestions below). On the other, write the appropriate version of "I am eating it/them", based on gender and number, using á ithe, á hithe, and á n-ithe.
Start by looking at at the food side and generating the sentence. That is, if you see the plural "caora", you respond with "Tá mé á n-ithe".
As you get familiar with your flashcards, go the other way. That is, when you see, "Tá mé á n-ithe", come up with a plural food noun.
To get you started, we've listed a few likely food terms, in the singular and the plural, although for some words, the plural doesn't seem natural and we've left it out.
P.S. You don't need to know what these words mean to do the exercise effectively!
MASCULINE nouns:
briosca > brioscaí
cairéad > cairéid
iasc > éisc
milseán > milseáin
onniún > onniúin
sailéad
silín > silíní
úll > úlla
FEMININE nouns:
cáis > cáiseanna
caor > caora
feoil
fige > figí
pónaire > pónairí
raidis > raidisí
seadóg > seadóga
ubh > uibheacha
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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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