“The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too” Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
«Сердце человека очень похоже на море: у него свои шторма, свои приливы, а в его глубинах тоже есть жемчужины» (Винсент ван Гог).
Im going to be giving out about the lies people tell about ireland at Halloween for the next month.
Please do- the only things I know about Irish Mythology are the popular stories we have all heard. This is part of my ancestry and my belief system, and it crushes me that I have been repeating the same fodder for years.
Cheers I will.
The biggest thing that bothers me at Halloween is a popular story. The Stingy Jack fakelore. The real story is in the link to our national folklore archive below.
Some fucker decided to twist a traditional halloween story and turn the tragic hero into the American steriotype of a catholic/irish person. Lazy, cowardly, drunk who makes a deal with the devil.
Its probably all in aid of marketing pumpkins too. Not even a good cause.
Bookmarked for future reading-thank you 🙂
You’re welcome. I hope you don’t get sick of me before the months up.
I just stumbled across Sophia Morrison’s Manx Fairy Tales full online (with a pdf download!) and thought I’d share. Lots of interesting creatures and a bit about Manannan Mac Lir.
“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”
-Margaret Atwood
i think it’s important when you’re learning a language not just to build up vocabulary but to communicate your own ideas as soon as you can, so i thought of a way to do that with irish, for those just starting out. this is heavily, heavily inspired by mihalis eleftheriou’s thinking method: credit where it is given. ❤
all right– so there’s a video that goes around iripol tumblr a lot called “fuaimniú agus litriú na gaeilge.” it was made by karen reshkin, and it’s a great basic guide to irish pronunciation which, while fairly standard, isn’t intuitive for native english speakers. if you haven’t watched it, or checked out the nifty little worksheet she created, go do that. and then come back here.
[description: screenshot of the aforementioned video]
so the thing about that video is that we can look at its title and even if you don’t have any irish, it quietly lets you in on a grammar rule. the video title, literally translated, is “sounding and spelling of irish.” if you look at a grammar breakdown on a site like teanglann.ie, (which is the best, ever ever ever), you’ll see that this is a form of the verb called the ainm briathartha in irish, and the verbal noun in english.
[description: screenshot of a page in irish on teanglann.ie, with the “gramadach” tag selected. the ainm briathartha selection has a purple box around it.]
the irish name is a mouthful, but in my opinion it’s actually pretty useful to know, and hey, if ainm (name) is your first or fifth word in irish, that’s not a bad one to have. 😉
anyways, every verb has its noun form you can look up, and you can string them together into simple sentences without too much trouble. here’s a construction:
tá mé
ag foghlaim gaeilge. (i am [at] studying irish)
and here are a few sentences. before you hit google translate (use teanglann instead, maybe?), how many of these words can you guess? while lots of gaeilge words aren’t related to english ones, others are intuitive. both languages have some latin influence, so that could help us learn new words.
ta mé ag damhsa.
ta tú ag ith do bhricfeasta
ta siad ag scríobh.
if you can internalize this rule, rather than memorizing a ton of vocabulary for the sake of it, you can learn the words that matter most to you and start to express genuine thoughts and feelings, which is what matters most in a language. ❤
Ocean's Meadow 