Leinster Irish [split from Random language thread]

[kevin]

[ɹ] and company have no business in any language other than English. I fail to see why it's important to Ciaran, or anyone, to have English r's in Irish. There is no question that they are English r's, is there now?

You're not serious, are you? This sound definitely isn't unique to English. There are many languages of which I don't have a clue, but even among the few that I do know there are examples: Some German dialects have [ɹ], you can hear it from some Dutch speakers, and Wikipedia knows quite a few other examples.

Now, in the case of Irish it may actually be an English influence, but generalising this to "any language other than English" is a bit too much...

[Llawygath]

Now, in the case of Irish it may actually be an English influence, but generalising this to "any language other than English" is a bit too much...

Okay, okay.
But my point still stands. English r's have no business in Irish and if you think they're part of your 'identity' then you're more than a little confused. Something I didn't bother to point out is that the 'some of my ancestors were English therefore anglicisms are part of my identity/heritage/how my ancestors spoke/whatever' argument intentionally misses the point. It's implied that you're talking about Irish ancestors when you're bringing out the 'don't you want to speak like your ancestors' deal, nach ea?
And don't get me wrong -- this isn't only about the r's.

[Lur]

The example of wiki of the use of that r in Spanish is extremely unusual to me. The famous case is Costa Rican Spanish. An allophone of s? Where???

I think the thing here is that we're making subjective aesthetic appreciations, regardless of what would be correct or incorrect to teach or reinforce. Some probably prefer Irish not to sound like English but to be more unique. Not because of dislike of English, necesarily. Some prefer it to sound like English. And under this there's the influence of each one's hidden prejudices, and even influence from each one's mother tongue, making people more sensible to some sounds than others.

This was less than five years ago, and if there are recordings of people like him, then the phonology and intonation of Leinster Irish might be reasonably easy to get a general outline of, without having to resort to derivations from English.

There must be some recordings.

Had I known this was so close, I wouldn't have brought up my example with Arabic.

You're situation is similar in some ways, but different in other important ones. Are the Andalusians the descendants of Arabic speaking people who lived there before and who learned Spanish as a
second language and passed that language onto there children? Because that would make Andalusian Spanish a language formed out of the broken L2 Spanish of native Arabic speakers, who then passed said broken L2 Spanish on to their children as their L1. In that case, it would likely have significant Arabic influences in grammar, vocabulary and above all phonology. And how long was Arabic spoken there? And who by? And would you say that the Arabic world had a particularly large influence on Andalusia after Arabic stopped being spoken there? You also have to see how while Hiberno-English was spoken in Dublin it coexisted on an island which for the majority of its history was far more Irish speaking than English speaking (which you cannot say of Andalusian Spanish).

Those are interesting questions, I would go into that but I'd be derailing the thread. Suffice to say, there were similarities and differences, because a land between two seas and two continents will have a more confusing and violent history than a quiet island in the Atlantic.

I just found it annoying to be simply told I didn't understand without thinking I might actually understand, and when precisely talking here about it with the idea of understanding.

Why would native speakers of other dialects speak like Leinster speakers? They wouldn't, and I'm not asking them to.

I'm imagining that the different Irish dialects sounded similar to each other, and distinct to English. Which not a strange assumption to do. We are considering them the same language after all.

As I've said above, the histories of the two situations are different, which is what makes it valid for me to use a Dublin accent in Irish and not so valid for you to use an Andalusian accent in Arabic.

See above.

They only reason to do any of this is for identity's sake.

How specific is that identity supposed to be anyway?

As specific as possible. The way I speak English identifies me as not only Irish, not only from Leinster, not only from Dublin but from a certain socio-economic group within Dublin, and a certain age group at that. So with all the specificity that that carries, maybe you can see how a choice between three dialects, all of which are spoken on the parts of the island furthest away from me, is just not good enough. I'd settle for something that's from my own province at this point, and in time maybe sub dialects could develop.

Isn't learning a language supposed to bring you closer to the people who speak it?

[Llawygath]

As specific as possible. The way I speak English identifies me as not only Irish, not only from Leinster, not only from Dublin but from a certain socio-economic group within Dublin, and a certain age group at that.

Why does one need this? What's it to you if someone can identify you as being from X twiddly social class and Y plickery age group? For me that would be plain annoying. But then, I'm not you, I don't fixate quite as much on identity even though I'm another person who doesn't speak my main hereditary language.

[Jurgen Wullenwever]

I found some old recordings from county Louth, which seems to be in Leinster.
http://dho.ie/doegen/taxonomy/term/31
http://dho.ie/doegen/taxonomy/term/31?page=1

[Llawygath]

As specific as possible. The way I speak English identifies me as not only Irish, not only from Leinster, not only from Dublin but from a certain socio-economic group within Dublin, and a certain age group at that.

Why does one need this? What's it to you if someone can identify you as being from X twiddly social class and Y plickery age group? For me that would be plain annoying. But then, I'm not you, I don't fixate quite as much on identity even though I'm another person who doesn't speak my main hereditary language.

It's also worth mentioning that Ciaran will only be identified as his narrow pigeonhole of an identity by someone really familiar with lots of fiddly Irish accents. Relative outsiders won't be able to get such a precise reading. Think about that for a while.

[Saim]

[snip]

Not meaning to derail the thread, but the dominant mother tongue of Al-Andalus was actually Mozarabic, a Romance variety with an Arabic superstrate. Arabic was only ever the language of the elite. Not to mention that lots of the Muslim invaders were actually speakers of Amazigh.

Quite a large portion of the Andalusi population was actually expelled, being replaced by Galicians (--> Portugal), Catalans (--> Valencia, Balearics, Murcia), Aragonese (--> Valencia, Murcia) and Castilians (--> Murcia, Andalucia, etc.), Leonese (Extremadura). So Ciaran is right that the situation isn't that comparable with that of Ireland, where colonization by the English/British wasn't as strong as that of Al-Andalus by the Christians of Northern Iberia.

I think it's much more important to preserve the use of Astur-Leonese in Extremadura, Catalan in Valencia and Majorca than to hearken back to some Arab past. In fact, some Valencians use the legacy of Al-Andalus to justify their anti-Catalan sentiment, saying that Valencian is actually a variety of Mozarabic.

[Lur]

Sorry for derailing another thread

[snip]

Not meaning to derail the thread, but the dominant mother tongue of Al-Andalus was actually Mozarabic, a Romance variety with an Arabic superstrate. Arabic was only ever the language of the elite. Not to mention that lots of the Muslim invaders were actually speakers of Amazigh.

I know this. Although what we know call Mozarabic wasn't homogeneous. I wish I could learn it. All languages we have now are from the North, and the languages of the South always ended up destroyed. If I refer to Andalusi Arabic instead of Mozarabic is because the later is gone and we barely know anything about it, while we could consider that the Arabic dialects of the very Northern Morocco are the modern continuation of that part of the Arabic dialect continuum.

If I remember correctly, Mozarabic died out in the 14th century and the final Granada was completely arabized [I would like to confirm or discard this, I'm not sure]. Too much pressure from too many angles, I guess. And afterwards, everybody was forced to speak Castilian or otherwise expelled or killed.

The way it's usually taught to people, they make it sound as if everybody spoke Arabic, and Arabic only. Which annoys me.

Quite a large portion of the Andalusi population was actually expelled, being replaced by Galicians (--> Portugal), Catalans (--> Valencia, Balearics, Murcia), Aragonese (--> Valencia, Murcia) and Castilians (--> Murcia, Andalucia, etc.), Leonese (Extremadura). So Ciaran is right that the situation isn't that comparable with that of Ireland, where colonization by the English/British wasn't as strong as that of Al-Andalus by the Christians of Northern Iberia.

I know this too. But the whole ancestry thing is irrelevant. I was referring to the cultural heritage of a place.

I didn't mean to make a perfect analogy of any sort, it was just a thought.

I think it's much more important to preserve the use of Astur-Leonese in Extremadura, Catalan in Valencia and Majorca than to hearken back to some Arab past.

I agree that they should be preserved. But one thing is Valencia or Extremadura, and another is Granada, where they don't have anything to preserve anymore because, as usual, it's all gone. There's only a series of cultural heritages that some know superficially and very few actually know and understand.

In fact, some Valencians use the legacy of Al-Andalus to justify their anti-Catalan sentiment, saying that Valencian is actually a variety of Mozarabic.

Now that's a dumb justification.

If I'm not mistaken, the Valencian anti-Catalanism is a reaction to the tendency of the Catalan bourgeoisie to call Catalunya what isn't Catalunya, and to impose the Catalan of Barcelona as the correct form of the language, even if Valencian developed a literary standard earlier [or so I'm told]. (I have seen this conflict between Valencians and Catalans more than once. )

And back to the thread:

It's also worth mentioning that Ciaran will only be identified as his narrow pigeonhole of an identity by someone really familiar with lots of fiddly Irish accents. Relative outsiders won't be able to get such a precise reading. Think about that for a while.

It seems to me that to people from outside Ireland it would be just either "generic Irish" or "generic Irish with an English accent", and that'd be the end of it.

[Saim]

If I remember correctly, Mozarabic died out in the 14th century and the final Granada was completely arabized [I would like to confirm or discard this, I'm not sure]. Too much pressure from too many angles, I guess. And afterwards, everybody was forced to speak Castilian or otherwise expelled or killed.

If Wikipedia's anything to go by, you're right about Arabic eventually supplanting the Romance varieties of Al-Andalus. Thanks for the clarification.

The way it's usually taught to people, they make it sound as if everybody spoke Arabic, and Arabic only. Which annoys me.

That's true, and people tend to conflate Mozarabic and Arabic... there have even been cases to this day where people have requested translations or language services for Maghrebi immigrant communities only to find that they're actually Amazighs.

I think it's much more important to preserve the use of Astur-Leonese in Extremadura, Catalan in Valencia and Majorca than to hearken back to some Arab past.

I agree that they should be preserved.

But one thing is Valencia or Extremadura, and another is Granada, where they don't have anything to preserve anymore because, as usual, it's all gone.

Well, in a linguistic sense there's certainly a very distinctive dialect. More so than Extremadura and definitely more so than Valencia, the latter of which has a much more standard Castilian accent because the Castilianization has been much more recent than in Extremadura, I suppose.

If I'm not mistaken, the Valencian anti-Catalanism is a reaction to the tendency of the Catalan bourgeoisie to call Catalunya what isn't Catalunya,

Only some Catalan nationalist radicals call it all "Catalonia". The word people use here is the Catalan Countries (Països Catalans), and it includes Majorca, Valencia, Andorra, Perpinyan, a bit of Aragon (the eastern strip), and a city in Sardinia. It refers to a cultural sphere rather than a country, so I don't like the amount of bile from españolistas that's directed towards the term.

Of course, there are people who want this Catalan cultural sphere to become a sovereign state. I'm sympathetic to the idea, although I think the economic and cultural realities of Valencia, Northern Catalonia and Alguer (the last one is usually left out anyway) may be too different to make an extra-Spanish union between them and Southern Catalonia work. I do think however that a union of Catalonia-Balearics as a EU member state would be quite feasible. This isn't really imperialism; of the one Majorcan, one Ibizan and two Menorcans I've met all of them identified themselves as Catalan by nationality. Majorca is not Valencia.

Although yes, I would be surprised if an illenc ("islander"; a Catalan euphamism for Balearic people) studying linguistics at the University of Catalonia wasn't Catalanist.

and to impose the Catalan of Barcelona as the correct form of the language,

Now this I just don't see. Maybe within the Principat (i.e. Catalunya), but I don't see how barceloní is being imposed on Valencia. The true enemy of Valencian is Castilian, not barceloní.

even if Valencian developed a literary standard earlier [or so I'm told].

I've heard the same thing from people who say that Valencian is a dialect of Mozarabic and Catalan a dialect of Provençal (and thus they are not closely related), so I'd doubt its veracity. En plan Intereconomía, you know?

The whole thing about all these arguments that really grates on me is that they're hardly ever made in Valencian, you know? The most rabidly anti-Catalan people in the Valencian Country are the same ones who don't know much Valencian and don't particularly want to learn it. That's why I think they want to distance it from Catalonia, because that way the valencianitat is weaker and becomes more susceptible to becoming just "Spanish".

Just head over to twitter and search something like "No Mos Fareu Catalans" (you won't make use Catalan") or NoVolemTv3 (we don't want TV3, Catalonian public television). You'll see things like:

Y adios a todo lo valenciano, no? con la llegada de vuestra querida tv3 #NoVolemTv3

See? The actual use of Valencian is just tagged on at the end as an afterthought. In this way, the language just becomes something regionalized and even folkoric (and thus, doomed to disappearance), rather than a living expression of cultural or national identity.

[Lur]

(hum, maybe these posts should be moved somewhere else?)

I can see we have some points in common.

The way it's usually taught to people, they make it sound as if everybody spoke Arabic, and Arabic only. Which annoys me.

That's true, and people tend to conflate Mozarabic and Arabic... there have even been cases to this day where people have requested translations or language services for Maghrebi immigrant communities only to find that they're actually Amazighs.

I've had to explain to people what Amazigh languages are I get blank stares with "Don't they speak Arabic?"

But one thing is Valencia or Extremadura, and another is Granada, where they don't have anything to preserve anymore because, as usual, it's all gone.

Well, in a linguistic sense there's certainly a very distinctive dialect. More so than Extremadura and definitely more so than Valencia, the latter of which has a much more standard Castilian accent because the Castilianization has been much more recent than in Extremadura, I suppose.

I speak a mild version of it. Which would be in no danger if the zone somehow got a bit of linguistic diversity, in fact I think it'd only reinforce the local dialect.

I don't know, man. This is just me and my language envy.

If I remember correctly, Mozarabic died out in the 14th century and the final Granada was completely arabized [I would like to confirm or discard this, I'm not sure]. Too much pressure from too many angles, I guess. And afterwards, everybody was forced to speak Castilian or otherwise expelled or killed.

If Wikipedia's anything to go by, you're right about Arabic eventually supplanting the Romance varieties of Al-Andalus. Thanks for the clarification.

Another point to remember is that although we tend to imagine Al-Andalus as even reaching France, for a big deal of its existence it was much smaller, and Eastern Andalusia was the longer reduct of Mozarabic and Andalusi Arabic. Valencians should totally speak Valencian, and I'm probabbly not bringing up the Arabic thing there or in Extremadura, but I would in Granada. I would also bring up Mozarabic if we actually knew it.

Only some Catalan nationalist radicals call it all "Catalonia". The word people use here is the Catalan Countries (Països Catalans), and it includes Majorca, Valencia, Andorra, Perpinyan, a bit of Aragon (the eastern strip), and a city in Sardinia. It refers to a cultural sphere rather than a country, so I don't like the amount of bile from españolistas that's directed towards the term.

I think I was confusing the term Catalunya with the term Països Catalans.

Of course, there are people who want this Catalan cultural sphere to become a sovereign state. I'm sympathetic to the idea, although I think the economic and cultural realities of Valencia, Northern Catalonia and Alguer (the last one is usually left out anyway) may be too different to make an extra-Spanish union between them and Southern Catalonia work. I do think however that a union of Catalonia-Balearics as a EU member state would be quite feasible. This isn't really imperialism; of the one Majorcan, one Ibizan and two Menorcans I've met all of them identified themselves as Catalan by nationality. Majorca is not Valencia.

I don't want them to go (well of course hey wouldn't go anywhere, they'd still be there, but...) I still have enough trouble with Portugal being in a different State as well, I want both States to join.

But I'm afraid people are more easily seduced by the idea of creating borders than by the idea of demolishing them. Maybe it makes them feel more like in a film. "Freeeedooom!!" and all. Even if it's only freedom for the few rich that rule over them.

and to impose the Catalan of Barcelona as the correct form of the language,

Now this I just don't see. Maybe within the Principat (i.e. Catalunya), but I don't see how barceloní is being imposed on Valencia. The true enemy of Valencian is Castilian, not barceloní.

I agree that Castilian is a danger there. I guess I'm mistaken about the whole barceloní thing.

even if Valencian developed a literary standard earlier [or so I'm told].

I've heard the same thing from people who say that Valencian is a dialect of Mozarabic and Catalan a dialect of Provençal (and thus they are not closely related), so I'd doubt its veracity. En plan Intereconomía, you know?

Some people just aren't ok with a language having different names depending on the place. But I imagine that in the past this was the norm and nobody cared. Like the Aragonese dialects today.

Sometimes I like bothering people calling the whole language Valencian or Majorqui. Or "southern Occitan"

Intereconomía

The whole thing about all these arguments that really grates on me is that they're hardly ever made in Valencian, you know? The most rabidly anti-Catalan people in the Valencian Country are the same ones who don't know much Valencian and don't particularly want to learn it. That's why I think they want to distance it from Catalonia, because that way the valencianitat is weaker and becomes more susceptible to becoming just "Spanish".

Just head over to twitter and search something like "No Mos Fareu Catalans" (you won't make use Catalan") or NoVolemTv3 (we don't want TV3, Catalonian public television). You'll see things like:

Y adios a todo lo valenciano, no? con la llegada de vuestra querida tv3 #NoVolemTv3

See? The actual use of Valencian is just tagged on at the end as an afterthought. In this way, the language just becomes something regionalized and even folkoric (and thus, doomed to disappearance), rather than a living expression of cultural or national identity.

[/quote][/quote]
Well I can't certainly take the anti-language people too seriously (I have the impression that many here are scared by languages.)

[Saim]

The way it's usually taught to people, they make it sound as if everybody spoke Arabic, and Arabic only. Which annoys me.

That's true, and people tend to conflate Mozarabic and Arabic... there have even been cases to this day where people have requested translations or language services for Maghrebi immigrant communities only to find that they're actually Amazighs.

I've had to explain to people what Amazigh languages are I get blank stares with "Don't they speak Arabic?"

You'd be surprised how much this sort of stuff comes up in my daily life. I have to restrain myself to not constantly be doing linguistic pedagogy (because most people, frankly, don't give a shit )...

"well in Pakistan the largest native language is Punjabi, but the official language is Urdu, there's no such thing as 'Pakistani'"
"actually in Italy they speak lots of languages"
"no, Catalan isn't a mix of French, Spanish and Italian anymore than a rat is a mix of a tiger and a human or you are the mix of all your siblings"
"no, Aranese isn't a mix of Catalan and French any more than Catalan is a mix of Spanish, Italian and French"
"well, it's not just Mandarin or Cantonese, there are probably more than a dozen Chinese languages"
"no, generally you can't say a particular language is older than any other"
"it's actually not 'wrong' to say 'you was', it's just dialectal/colloquial/nonstandard"

...ad infinitum

I speak a mild version of it. Which would be in no danger if the zone somehow got a bit of linguistic diversity, in fact I think it'd only reinforce the local dialect.

This hits on a point that's kind of forgotten - that local accents and dialects are also threatened by linguistic homogenization, and are not being revitalized the way 'languages' are. Perhaps we need to work towards a real linguistic democracy, where no speech variety is discriminated against, to actually protect linguistic diversity...

But yes, I'm definitely in favour of teaching Arabic and Amazigh in Spain, not just because it's part of the country's heritage, but because these are neighbouring languages (so Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, etc. should also be taught) and the languages of large immigrant populations.

Another point to remember is that although we tend to imagine Al-Andalus as even reaching France, for a big deal of its existence it was much smaller, and Eastern Andalusia was the longer reduct of Mozarabic and Andalusi Arabic. Valencians should totally speak Valencian, and I'm probabbly not bringing up the Arabic thing there or in Extremadura, but I would in Granada. I would also bring up Mozarabic if we actually knew it.

That's a fair point, and you're right the Arabic/Mozarabic substrate is probably more present in Andalusia than in other parts of the historical Al-Andalus, including Valencia or Extremadura.

I think I was confusing the term Catalunya with the term Països Catalans.

Yes. The thing is people don't realize that in this context it means "of the Catalan language" rather than "of Catalonia". I understand Valencia has its own denomination for the language, but for me "Catalan Countries" is a synonym for "Catalanovalencian cultural sphere".

I don't want them to go (well of course hey wouldn't go anywhere, they'd still be there, but...) I still have enough trouble with Portugal being in a different State as well, I want both States to join.

But I'm afraid people are more easily seduced by the idea of creating borders than by the idea of demolishing them. Maybe it makes them feel more like in a film. "Freeeedooom!!" and all. Even if it's only freedom for the few rich that rule over them.

I understand where you're coming from, and I'm quite sympathetic to Spanish republicanism and federalism and don't see it as an enemy of Catalanism. The reason lots of Catalans have become disenchanted with federalism and have become independentists is that federalism doesn't have many serious proponents in monolingual Spain. The PSC-PSOE talks about how "sensible" federalism is ("la opció sensata"), but then doesn't even mention it in the rest of the country! And don't even get me started on the PP!

I used to be more in favour of a Spanish federation, but I (just as many Catalans) have come to realize that it'll probably be easier to construct a confederal, plurinational Europe than to drag the Castilians kicking and screaming into a federal, truly plurinational Spain. Any future union between Catalans and Castilians has to be negotiated on a "tu a tu" (equal) basis, not from a position where everything Catalan is constantly being attacked by Spanish nationalist propaganda. We need a normalization of relations between Catalonia and monolingual Spain as distinct cultural realities to even begin to a contemplate a Spanish federal republic. There's no use trying to construct a federation where everyone hates each other. I have nothing against Spain as a union of Iberian peoples, but in practice it's just a Gran Castilla, you know?

If only these ideas were more common in monolingual Spain:





But in practice you mostly get this anti-periphery (anti-Catalan, anti-Basque) regionalism:






And that's if you manage to go further than Francoist Jacobin ideas and even get to regionalism at all! In other words, if there wasn't this big disconnect in terms of national identity a federal Spain could be achieved with "constituent countries" like those of the UK. But it doesn't make sense when one of the "constituent countries" is "Spain" itself.

That's why I'm so Catalanist when it comes to Valencia. Because for me, it's not a conflict between Valencia and Catalonia, but between "monolingual Spain" and "the periphery". Is Valencia just a region of Spain like Murcia or Leon or is it a "historic nationality" like Catalonia or the Basque Country?

I agree that Castilian is a danger there. I guess I'm mistaken about the whole barceloní thing.

The thing is, Valencia governs its own standard, and I've never heard anyone in Catalonia complain about it. The people who bring this sort of stuff up, from where I'm standing, seem like the Valencian equivalent of people in Madrid and Andalucia who go about screaming Viva Ejjjjjpaññña while carrying propaganda like this:



I don't mean to be blunt about it but from Catalonia attitudes towards national identity in the rest of Spain (save the Balearics and the Basque Country) are looked on with total bemusement.

Some people just aren't ok with a language having different names depending on the place. But I imagine that in the past this was the norm and nobody cared.

Or we could even bring it a bit closer to home... castellano, español, andaluz?

Out of curiosity, what's more common in Andalucía, to say you speak castellano or español? Or just andaluz directly?

Sometimes I like bothering people calling the whole language Valencian or Majorqui. Or "southern Occitan"

I've seen Valencian nationalists talk about the "sort of Valencian spoken in Barcelona" or about how "Catalans speak Valencian" and so on. Of course, I'm not at all against that.

Well I can't certainly take the anti-language people too seriously (I have the impression that many here are scared by languages.)

It's hard not to take them seriously when the PP keeps winning absolute majorities in Valencia and Majorca.