Gearóid Ó Laoi/Garry Lee wrote:
> My experience is that you have to learn Scots Gaelic, though it's very
easy
> if you speak good Irish.
> It's not a dialect. Dialects are mutually comprehensible. It's a
separate
> language.
> Before I learnt some of it, I could get the gist of it but no more.
> Some of the key words are very different.
> Also, Irish = chomh maith, freisin. SG cuideacht.
> Very Irish = an- ana-. SG glé-
> etc.
>
The literary language was the same up until the 16th century. Bards
travelled through both countries and were understood there. Gaelic ended
as a literary language during the 16th century and the various dialects
- Munster, Connacht, Ulter, Scots - developed more or less separately
until the Gaelic revival at teh end of the 19th century. But even then
there were major differences between the various dialects.
I learned Connacht Irish when I went to school in Roscommon during the
1950s. We moved to Donegal when I was 7 and I then had to learn Ulster
Irish. When I went to secondary school they were just introducing the
Caighdeán (Standard Irish), which is largely based on Munster Irish.
I can still remember some of the differences: in Connacht "How are you?"
was/is "Caidé mar atá tú?" whereas I remember "Conas taoi?" in Donegal
and "Conas tá tú?" in the Caighdeán. I also seem to remember major
differences in the form of the genitive plural and the use of the
séimhiú (aspiration was what we called it) and urú (called lenition, I
believe), although large parts of the grammar were more or less identical.
I would contend that the differences between the dialects within Ireland
were at least as great as those between any of the Irish dialects and
Scots Gaelic.
As I've already mentioned my father had no difficulty communicating with
Scots Gaelic speakers during visits to Scotland. Although not a native
Irish speaker, he spoke Connacht Irish fluently since his childhood (his
grandfather was a founder member of the Gaelic League) and spent the
last 40 years of his life living and working in Donegal, where a
significant pro****tion of his work was conducted in Irish in the
Gaeltacht and he regularly had to submit re****ts in Irish.
As to your statement that dialects are mutually comprehensible, I very
much doubt it. Most Londoners I know simply can't understand the
Glaswegian working-class dialect and I find Geordie, the dialect of
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, totally incomprehensible.
Here in Germany, most Germans find it impossible to understand Swiss
Germans - so much so that when Swiss German politicians are interviewed
on television (e.g. in the news) there are subtitles, although when
Swiss French or Swiss Italian politicians are interviewed they require
no subtitles since they speak excellent High German (the standard
dialect).
Even where I live in Chemnitz we are on teh boundary between two
dialects, in the city people speak Sächsisch (Saxon) whereas in the
mountains directly south of the city they speak another dialect
(Erzgebirgisch) - in places the boundary line between the dialects is
actually the city boundary.
I can understand about 30% of waht people are saying when they speak
Erzgebirgisch at a normal rate although I have no problems with
Sächsisch, no matter how fast teh people speak. Many natives of Chemnitz
say they understand only about 50% of what Erzgebirgisch speakers are
saying even when they know what the context is. That doesn't sound like
mutual comprehensibility to me, even though these people live only a few
miles from each other. Incidentally, most Erzgebirgisch speakers switch
to Sächsisch or to High German when they come to the city - the city
dwellers make no such effort when they go into the mountains!
Slán, Einde O'Callaghan
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