Uh huh.

Why I haven't been writing

Yesterday I finally completed the last assignment for the online Irish course I've been taking from the City University of New York. I owe a great debt of thanks to instructor Eimear Ní Cheallaigh, whose encouragement and corrections have been so helpful. Although it's listed as a grammar course, the reading and writing assignments have been just as interesting. I don't think I ever considered a creative writing class in a foreign language, but it's great fun.

So our final assignment was to write an essay on the theme: Tá cúrsaí eacnamaíochta na tíre ina phraiseach faoi láthair. (The nation's economy is in a mess right now.) I decided it would be fun to write an essay in verse, and somehow it came out in limericks. (If you want to try this yourself, agus má tá Gaeilge agat, uirlis an-úsáideach é an bogearra WinGléacht, especially the wildcard searches to help you find rhymes.)

Abair slán, slán go deo leis an craic
Tá an pobal ag dul ina raic
De bharr baincéirí cliste
Tá na bancanna briste
Agus ní fágfar dúinn ach faic.

I nDetroit tagtar lá an breithiúnais
Tá an Triúr Mór i mbaol chlisiúnais
Níl an Chomhdháil ar tí
Iad a tharrtháil, dar fía
Tar éis blianta fada dhíolúnais.

Éíríonn ardfheidhmeannaigh níos ainfhéile
Agus a gcomhlachtaí ag titeamh as a chéile
Íoctar bónais ollmhóra
Don saghas sin tubaisteora
Ach is orainne atá an deirbhéíle!

Here's an English version in case your Irish is rusty ;^)

It looks like the good times are through.
We're all seeing red, feeling blue.
Those bankers so sly
Have bled the banks dry;
There'll be diddley squat left me and you.

In Detroit it is now Judgment Day
The Big Three may go bankrupt, they say.
They asked Congress for dough,
But they told them, "Hell, no!
You'd just fritter that money away!"

CEOs have no cause to complain
While their companies go down the drain.
Those mischievious jerks
Get commissions and perks,
But we're the ones feeling the pain.

In other words...

..."No Smoking"
I see the recession has not affected verbosity at any rate.

This might explain a few things...

Understand now, I work for the federal government, and I'm proud to. And I know what this conference was about, and I think it's a valid topic.
But still.
Until we're known for plain language in government, sights like this conference tote bag will still be funny.

Favorite tools: The I.P.A.

When I studied linguistics in college, I had to take courses in phonology and phonetics. And I learned that despite having the sound "fun" in its name, phonetics was pretty darned dull. Though I did learn that any healthy human is capable of making the exact sounds of any language, and that was encouraging. (It's not that you can't make those sounds, you just don't make them on purpose yet.) Phonology was somewhat better, because it went into how sounds are used in a given language, and that was a welcome departure from the pure mechanics of speech production.

Although I was ambivalent about these subjects, they did give me one excellent tool that has stood me in good stead ever since: the International Phonetic Alphabet IPA), used for phonetic transcription.

Just as you can use musical notation to record a melody on staff paper, IPA lets you transcribe the exact sounds of any language. Once you have a good command of it, you can accurately record anything you hear on paper. Very low-tech, and very handy.

• IPA chart (PDF, 1pg, 58K) from the International Phonetic Association
• A nice explanation of that chart from Omniglot

I've used it for transcribing songs before I understood all the words. I've used it to improve my accent in French. I've used it to get a handle on how people from different dialects of Irish pronounce the same word.

The lack of it in my first Irish textbook ((See if you can) Teach Yourself Irish by Myles Dillon and Donncha ó Cróinín, 1961) convinced me that I could not learn the language from a book because I would never be sure how to pronounce anything. (The book did have a pronunciation guide, but it described the symbols it used in terms of sounds in common English words, probably in an Irish English or British English accent, which was useless to me. I come from a place where we actually say our r's, and I make no distinction between the vowels in the pairs tool/tune, do/duty, noon/new, loose/lure. And if you give me weird words, it's as good as no help at all: good/gules(??) Another odd thing about that book: it used IPA in the glossary, but this other odd system throughout the chapters.)

Once you have a way to describe what you are hearing, it improves your ability to hear the fine distinctions, and it's a great help toward actually producing the sounds intentionally yourself. Once you have a target to aim for...