The GaelMinn Gazette: July, 2015
THE GAELMINN GAZETTE (#121): July, 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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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
---Flashier Flash Card Use
GaelMinn News & Announcements
Lessons Learned
---Sloinnte: Surnames in Irish
About Gaeltacht Minnesota
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TIPS, TOOLS, & TRICKS
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----------FLASHIER FLASH CARD USE
Many students use flash cards to memorize vocabulary. You might write an Irish word on one side of an index card and the corresponding English word on the other side. Or you might use an app of some sort, or a web site, to do flash card practice.
It doesn't matter which format you use. You may even use several.
But you probably can get more out of your flash cards. In other words, you can practice a lot more things than vocabulary.
Suppose I pull a card out of my deck and see the word:
BRIS
Now, the traditional use would be to say, "break", that is to give the meaning of "bris" in English. But what else could you do when you see this word?
* Conjugate it. That is, instead of stopping with "break", you might give the Irish for "I broke" or "She will break" or some other tense.
* Don't forget the negative versions of the above: "I did not break" and "He does not break".
* Eclipse the word: mbris.
* Lenite the word: bhris.
* Generate other forms: verbal noun, verbal adjective, and even forms like "breakable" and "unbreakable".
Those are a few quick exercises for verbs, and they can easily be adapted to whatever level of ability you have reached in your Irish studies. Flash cards are a great way to get in some quick grammar practice (not just vocabulary learning) at odd, free moments during your day. They can help nudge you to use a little Irish, and to practice a concept, without waiting for some elusive block of free study time to become available.
One key to making this work is to limit your practice to a very narrow range. One week, just do the "I will" and "I will not" forms. Another week, do one of the other activities. Get a lot of repetitions in one exercise, rather than scattering your efforts over multiple activities.
Let's look at one more example, options with nouns:
You might turn over "bean" or "fear", and remember they mean "woman" and "man". Then you could:
* Add "the", the definite article": "an bhean", "an fear".
* Add an adjective: "bean mhaith", "fear maith".
* Generate plural forms, and if you're more advanced, genitive forms.
* As with the verbs, perform eclipsis and lenition.
With a little imagination, you can expand your range of words and activities. For example, with prepositions (ag, ar, roimh, etc.), you can add a noun and apply the proper mutation. Or you could generate the personal forms like agam, agat, and so on.
Flash cards may be an old idea, but they can provide great ways to seize the moment and practice your grammar. Get past thinking of them as "vocabulary tools" and find ways to use them to get many repetitions, in stolen moments, of grammatical usage.
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GAELTACHT MINNESOTA NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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----------WE NEED VOLUNTEERS FOR IRISH FAIR, AUG 7-9!
Our booth is one of the first things visitors to the Irish Fair see, and we engage in a couple of thousand individual conversations over the course of this annual event. That's why ...
We Need YOUR Help!
You do NOT need to speak Irish well to help out. Beginners can be just as good at this as advanced students. You are not teaching people Irish at this booth, you are sharing your experience as a learner of Irish! Every one of our students is capable of helping at this event.
And there will always be a more advanced speaker in the tent to handle any tricky questions that arise.
Please visit http://www.gaelminn.org/volpage.htm for more information, and use our on-line form to let us know when you will be available to help.
----------GAELIC CLASSES THIS FALL IN ST. PAUL
During the fall term, Gaeltacht Minnesota will offer our four-week Introduction to Irish Gaelic. This class will get you into our regular Monday classes.
In addition, we will also offer an Overview of Scots Gaelic, or Gàidhlig, four one-hour classes.
Registration opens September 8, and we'll have more information in our next Gazette.
----------CLASS NOTES
For the summer, each class will have its own schedule -- meeting less frequently -- 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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----------SLOINNTE: SURNAMES IN IRISH
You probably know a lot of people with Irish surnames. Many of them might have an O' or a Mc in them: O'Malley, O'Connor, McCarthy, McBride. Of course, you also recognize Irish surnames without these prefixes, like Hogan and Murphy.
Now, within their communities, many Irish speakers rarely used surnames. There is a "leasainm" (nickname) system that serves for local use, that gets you names like Seán Phádraig Sheáin, or "Seán, son of Pádraig, son of Seán". But in modern times, with wider travel, and in official uses, surnames apply.
For males, the correspondence between English and Irish versions of sloinnte --"sloinne" is the Irish word for "surname" -- is fairly straightforward. But many students know little about the female versions of surnames.
Starting with the males, these prefixes O' and Mc are represented by Ó and Mac in Irish, standing as separate words rather than joined to the name. Ó means, as you might suspect, "from", meaning "descended from", and can refer to a grandfather. There is an older form of Ó, Ua, and in recent years it has become a bit fashionable to use that older form.
Mac is, of course, "son".
Neither Mac nor Ó trigger mutations, as you'll see . But Ó does put an h before vowels. So what has come down to us in English as Hogan is actually derived from Ó hÓgáin, and the same is true for many Irish surnames that begin with h in their English forms. That name also reminds us that although the prefixes may be dropped from the English versions, they are much more persistent in the Irish versions. For example, the English name Murphy is derived from Ó Murchú.
And these forms you see after Ó and Mac are genitives. But you'll generally see these forms "as is", already formed, so there's little need to worry about the grammar.
It gets more interesting when we come to the female versions of these surnames, as there are different forms for married vs. unmarried versions. (And it should be noted that traditionally women were much less likely to change their surnames upon marriage than was the case in, say, America.)
In the unmarried forms, we find Ó replaced with Ní, and Mac replaced with Nic. This is because the unmarried female name once included "iníon", indicating "daughter of". Over time, names like Síle Iníon Uí Chonchúir and Sorcha Iníon Mhic Bhríde were shortened to Síle Ní Chonchúir and Síle Nic Bhríde. (Uí and Mhic are genitive forms of Ó and Mac, to express the "daughter OF" the surname.)
These forms trigger lenition of the following name, as you can see, with the exception that when two C's come together -- Nic Carthaigh -- lenition is generally omitted. But Uí (and by extension Ní) has no effect on vowels: Bríd Ní Ógáin.
For married woman, a similar mechanism is in place. Rather than "iníon", "bean" ("wife") is inserted. So the spouse 0f Ó Conchúir-- again, assuming she even takes her husband's surname, not a given -- would be Síle Bean Uí Chonchúir. But the "bean" is frequently omitted, so you are likely to encounter Síle Uí Chonchúir, or Sorcha Mhic Bhríde for the Mac form. Again, the same lenition rules apply as mentioned above.
By the way, there are some Irish surnames that don't include Ó or Mac, and they don't change. Seán de Paor (Power) might be married to Síle de Paor and have a daughter Bríd de Paor.
One other wrinkle. In English, we might say, "Power did it", using just the last name to refer to a person. In Irish, we are more likely to use a form created by adding -ach to the name and putting the definite article in front of it. "Rinne an Paorach é," we might say. Getting the hang of this is a little tricky, but the main thing is to be able to recognize what is going on when you encounter it.
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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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