Posted on 11/09/2013 7:47:07 AM PST by NYer
A record of the sounds of Irish as it was spoken throughout Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s is now online, thanks to a project between The Royal Irish Academy and academics from NUI Maynooth.
The bilingual Doegen Records Web Project website contains audio recordings made by Dr Wilhelm Doegen.
Doegen came to Ireland 85 years ago at the request of the Ministry of Education, to create a permanent record of the spoken Irish language in all districts in which it was still spoken.
Between 1928 to 1931, 136 speakers from 17 counties recorded 400 stories, songs, prayers, charms and parables.
Then the original wax matrices were transferred to Berlin and reformatted onto shellac discs.
Linguists have known about the shellac discs, according to NUI Maynooth, but The Royal Irish Academy Library wanted to make them freely available to everyone via a digital archive on the internet.
In 2008, armed with funding under the Higher Education Authority’s PRTLI4, the academy library began to transfer the recordings to the web, along with speaker details, annotated transcripts of content, translations of the transcripts and other data.
In case anyone is wondering why a German scholar was hired to record Irish speakers: http://matters-phonetic.blogspot.com/2011/08/wilhelm-doegen.html
Amadán Shliabh Gad - Diarmuid Mac Giolla Cheara
Bhuel, bhí amadán ar Shliabh Gad ina chónaí aigena athair. Agus ‘air a bhí, d’imigh sé ansin agus bhí sé ráite go rachadh sé a shuirí le níon an rí, a bhí ag (tnúth).
“Ó,” arsa siadsan, “goidé an mhaith duid choil a shuirí le níon an rí sin. Ní cha déan siad ach an ceann a bhaint (daod). Cha ngeobhadh duine ar bith níon an rí ach an té a bhainfeadh ‘Bréagach!’ aisti.”
Whew, tougher than Chinese!
D’imigh seisean agus fuaigh sé ann agus ‘air a fuaigh, d’imigh sé ansin agus thug an rí amach é agus (thaispeáin)[4] sé cruach fhéir dó. ‘Air a fuaigh, “An bhfaca tú a’n[5] chruach fhéir ariamh nas[6] mó ná í sin?”
Great history.
For those who didn’t read the page, this fellow went around POW camps in WWI to record native speakers in as many languages as possible. They used the following plan:.
“The prisoners of war recited the Parable of the Prodigal Son in their own language and dialect for comparative purposes”
In search of the Trojan war - The Singer of Tales
The bilingual Doegen Records Web Project website contains audio recordings made by Dr Wilhelm Doegen... Between 1928 to 1931, 136 speakers from 17 counties recorded 400 stories, songs, prayers, charms and parables. Then the original wax matrices were transferred to Berlin and reformatted onto shellac discs. Linguists have known about the shellac discs, according to NUI Maynooth, but The Royal Irish Academy Library wanted to make them freely available to everyone via a digital archive on the internet. In 2008, armed with funding under the Higher Education Authority’s PRTLI4, the academy library began to transfer the recordings to the web, along with speaker details, annotated transcripts of content, translations of the transcripts and other data.
Very interesting. It’s good to have these recordings since Irish is surely on its way out. English is just taking over the world.
At this site,
http://www.gaeltachttravel.com/gaeltacht-regions/statistics-on-the-gaeltacht-and-the-irish-language/
I found these figures from several years ago:
....28 April 2002, there was 1,570,894 Irish speakers in the country as opposed to 2,180,101 Non-Irish speakers. An Irish speaker is defined as a person who claims that they can speak Irish, but who do not necessarily use it in their daily life.
***
But I wonder how inflated the numbers are for those claiming to be Irish speakers. In Ireland, kids learn Irish in school, I think, but how many are fluent unless they are required to use it every day?
My maternal grandmother was born here to Irish immigrants. She said her prayers — and cussed —in Irish, according to my mother. But my mother and her siblings were not taught any Irish at all because her parents wanted them to be Americans.
English has been spoken in at least parts of Ireland since the House of Normandy arrived in The Pale, so perhaps the transformation hasn’t been all that rapid. :’) The population of Ireland that speaks only Gaelic, basically no English at all, has been getting more and more rare, but still can find someone bilingual to talk with using Gaelic. If there were a Gaelic-speaking population outside of Ireland, it might be worth having that offered at the high school level even here in the US. But there isn’t. Gaelic (both Scot and Irish, they’re very similar anyway) isn’t that much different in distribution from Norwegian, which is almost entirely spoken in Norway, and has relatively few speakers for a European language.
The husband and I visited Ireland in 1996. On the day that we took a ferry to one of the Aran Islands, we rented bicycles there and rode around some non-touristy areas. The Arans, of course, were always one of the more remote parts of Ireland, and, thus, less subject to cultural changes than areas on the mainland.
Two memories from that day that relate to the use of Irish there:
We stopped at a tiny pub where they never saw any tourists. While we were there, a man in his 30s came in to have the barmaid read something for him. He was able to speak English, but he could read only in Irish.
On a rather deserted stretch of beach, I struck up a conversation with a man who had three young children out for a romp among the rocks. He was living there as part of a government program that had relocated him and his family from Dublin. Apparently, the program was meant to address both overcrowding in the city and emigration from the islands. I assume the fellow was on the dole, as there were not many jobs to be had there at that time. Thus the large emigration numbers.
I wonder how much crime some of the new settlers brought, and I’d be curious to know how many of them took up the fishing and farming tradit ions of the islands. Tough work in most parts of the world, but really demanding in the Aran Islands. Also, can’t imagine that any of the new immigrants added to the numbers of Irish speakers.
Thanks, that was interesting. There are also other occasional risks to living on islands w of Ireland. :’)
Clare Places: Islands: Mutton Island or Enniskerry (9th century catastrophe in Ireland)
Clare County Library | prior to November 19, 2005 | staff writer
Posted on 11/18/2005 11:58:58 AM PST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1524751/posts
Today, Mutton Island is inhabited only by wild goats, seals, rats, rabbits and birds.
&&&
Interesting post. Thanks for flagging me to it. I wonder if anyone has since bought the island.
AFAIK, not. Over the years I’ve kept an eye on it, and the listing is not a conventional realty listing, one of those “if you have to ask you can’t afford it” type listings, and it had one offer that I inferred about, was taken off the market pending final sale, then the sale fell through. It has been for sale for perhaps ten years.
It has been for sale for perhaps ten years.
***
Probably a combination of the price and the uncertainty of assaults by the ocean on any structures a buyer would build there.
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