Can anyone explain the Irish language to me? Like how is it structured, and how do you pronounce things, and shit...

Can anyone explain the Irish language to me? Like how is it structured, and how do you pronounce things, and shit? I'm not a "muh heritage" fag (even if I were, my ancestors were bongs) but I'm just curious. It's really strange looking and words rarely seem to be pronounced like they're spelled.

The language is structured very differently to English or other European languages for that matter.

We place the verb at the start of the sentence.

Chuaigh mé go dtí an síopa = I went to the shop

Chuaigh meaning "went" and mé meaning "I"


The orthography would take much longer to explain, but essentially the reason it looks so fucky is because we use the letter h not as a h sound but because it has an effect upon the preceding letter - it is called seimhiu.

For example: "Radhairc" means "view". The being followed by a h means the d sound is softened and becomes a y-sound, so it would be written as "rayarc" phonetically.

If you want to learn the language, there's a torrent pack on Piratebay.

>We place the verb at the start of the sentence.
reminds me Spanish when you make questions desu.

The spelling is geared toward a mix of phonetics and etymology as well as trying to incorporate dialectal variation in a pretty haphazard fashion. That said, once you know the rules it's more regular than English orthography.

Irish consonants come in a bunch of variations. In particular there are velarised ('broad'), palatalised ('slender') consonants. On top of that there is lenition and eclipsis, which have broad and slender varieties as well. The distinction between consonants is important as the difference between the grammatical nature of a word may solely depend on the pronunciation of the ending consonant.

In Irish there is a rule that a broad consonant(s) will be flanked by 'broad' vowels to indicate its broadness, and a slender consonant flanked by 'slender' vowels. In general a broad vowel will just be represented by a, o, or u whereas i, e are slender vowels. There are additional complications to this, like 'ae' being broad. Example: b is broad in the word 'abair', 'bó', and slender in 'aibéil', beo'.

Lenition in Irish is represented by adding a 'h' after the consonant. The consonant+'h' is also used in some long vowels or diphthongs which serves both a phonetic and etymological purpose generally. The effect is that of 'softening' a consonant, and it as grammatical function. 'bh' is pronounced like 'v' (slender) or 'w' (broad) depending. For some reason people act like this is crazy even though English has things like 'ph' (incidentally this is an 'f' sound in Irish too), th, etc.

The letter 'h' doesn't exist as normal letter so to speak, it depends to only occur in loanwords or during grammatical effect. The 'h' sound itself is made by the lenited sounds 'th' and 'sh'.

>If you want to learn the language

>words rarely seem to be pronounced like they're spelled.
it's spelling makes less sense than English, no idea why as I don't give a single shit about it.

Eclipsis is where the first consonant is 'nasalised' at the start of a word. In writing we write the new nasal consonant in front of the old, and the old is not pronounced. 'mb' (pronounced m) and 'gc' (pronounced g) are examples of this. The old consonant is still written to make it clear that a word is being modified.

The grammatical function of this can be seen with the possessive pronoun. In Irish there is a single word ('a') for his, her and their but they have different effects:

a cat = her cat (pronounced 'a kot')
a chat = his cat (pronounced 'a khot')
a gcat = their cat (pronounced 'a got')

Oh, dear. This sounds way too hard. Is it really mandatory to learn in Irish schools?

kot?
:3

FUCKING YES
>all those wasted hours what could be spent learning something which actually is usefull

Yes, but very few people actually learn it.

Chin up, you'd have wasted them anyway. Your failures are your own.

Eh let's be honest lad, what else were you going to learn at school that would've been more useful.

applied maths or russian, it was schooltime, not like an early bunk-off.

You're speaking it right now, retard! Fucking americunt education

Sad. Even Greek and Latin would have been more useful. Anyway, I suppose there may be some kids, such as the literary types, who get something out of Irish.

Most of what people learn in school is not useful, there's literally nothing wrong with cultural education. I took 9 subjects for my Leaving and out of them all I only found Maths to be particularly useful. Even Applied Maths was a bit of a waste because it all gets covered in college anyway, presuming you do something where it would actually be useful.

The only Irish phrase anyone needs to know is Tiocfaidh ár lá

Nobody really gets anything out of Irish as it is taught in schools. If you speak Irish the course is too simple. If you don't then it's an exercise in futility and learning off a bunch of meaningless symbols as prepared essays. It needs serious reform though I would keep it compulsory.

>Even Greek and Latin would have been more useful
It wouldn't though, we're not Greek nor are we Italian. You learn 2 languages in secondary school (from 12 to 18) Irish and then usually French, German or Spanish.

What does that mean and how do you pronounce it?

SOPA DE MACACO É UMA DELÍCIA

If it makes it any better, there's something like 11 irregular verbs in Irish in total which is not as ridiculous as some languages.

Other noteworthy features of Irish is there are two primary ways of saying "is". Supposedly this is similar to Spanish.

Also Irish used inflected prepositions: a preposition+pronoun is inflected as one word. "le" is the word for "with", "mé" is the pronoun for "Me/I". "le mé" is not used for "with me", rather the inflected form "liom" is used. The verb-subject-object order and the inflected prepositions is a similarity between Irish and Semitic languages because we are cryptojews.

If I were Irish, Welsh or even from Jersey or fucking Cornwall I'd love to learn the local language

it's the IRA motto mate

Tbh it makes perfect sense that a basement dwelling Murrican "Irish" retard would know it, then.

Lovely language, bit hard for me personally.

Something like Russian would've been nice, I'll grant you. The thinking is so limited here, always just French and German. I wouldn't have a problem if it were at least taught well (it isn't)

This was quite interesting to be honest