While many New Year resolutions are now falling by the wayside, one that self-improvers are more likely to stick with is learning a new language – most likely via a wildly overstimulated cartoon bird.
For more than a decade, the online Duolingo app has made language learning a more-ish, user-friendly hobby – either because of or despite its ebullient mascot, Duo the owl.
Other bouncy cartoon characters, encouraging sound effects and an overtone of wry humour have made the mostly-free learning system popular.
Duo learners find their school French or Mandarin comes whooshing back, and it’s fun – if a little infantilising – to make the big bear’s eyebrows go up and down.
This writer, however, suspects Duolingo has met its match in Irish Gaelic.
For all its frenetic applause and badges, Duo Irish can’t hold a shillelagh to everyday spoken Irish. Duo’s is considerately pitched at walking speed. In conversational Irish, every syllable is river-danced over in a Michael Flatley-esque blur.
Like the notes in traditional Celtic jigs and reels – circa 150 beats a minute – Irish syllables whiz past the ear at warp speed.
This would be manageable were Irish spelt according to the phonetics Anglo and romance language-speakers recognise. Though it probably has fewer spelling and pronunciation anomalies than English, it is constructed so differently as to prompt speculation – disappointingly unfounded – that the Irish made it deliberately complicated to frustrate and annoy their erstwhile Sasanach colonisers.
As should be no surprise in this madly sociable country, all Irish consonants and vowels travel mob-handed. To prevent donnybrooks, there’s a hierarchy. The consonants are pitilessly tyrannised by the near-ubiquitous H, which silences all or most of them. It can even silence itself just to show the others what’s what.
Several lesser consonants also habitually gag one another. Depending on things like prepositions and noun gender, Brian can become Bhrian – said as Vrian. Corcaigh, the city and county of Cork, can become gCorcaigh – pronounced gerky.
Vowels seldom travel fewer than three abreast, each affecting pronunciation of those fore and aft in different ways. Ts are sometimes said as S and S as Sh, while Ds can be maddeningly shy. And though there’s scarcely a word with an actual V in it, the V sound is extremely common.
Thus visitors are often confounded by signs saying “Dunlaoghaire” when they’re looking for somewhere pronounced dun-lee-ree. The beloved national sport of hurling is iománaíocht (said a bit like ammonia with a wee cough at the end). On television each night is Teanga Chomharthaíochta (sign language, not a clue).
If there sometimes seem to be more silent letters than pronounced ones, linguist Darach Ó Séaghdha (Darra O’Shay) cautions that they’re not all silent, but merely sleeping. One must tiptoe past them, marking their presence in the word with a subtle sigh or huff.
With frequently rolled Rs, liquid Ls, Teutonic throaty “ach” sounds and tightly clipped short vowels, Irish Gaelic can sound like an Arabic-Germanic-Russio-Asian-Scandi mash-up. There’s even a Māori-ish “ng” and a “mwha” sound like an air kiss.
Like te reo, Gaeilge is recovering from decades of Anglo suppression, but a growing minority of the population is fluent. Though generally spoken habitually only in the Gaeltacht – smallish districts – Irish is used beside English in all signage and public information and documents, and is uncontroversially used on television and radio.
Those struggling to master more than pidgin Gaelic could console themselves that they lack sufficient Irish DNA (that’s agaíde dí-oscairbeanúicléasach to you) to have a flair for it.
It should be some consolation that “craic” (crack) means fun and “fek” – commonly used here even by priests and stately grannies – doesn’t mean, and is wholly unrelated to, that rude thing you thought it meant.
