Tourist in Ireland Part Four: Talking in Tongues

Many years ago, before one of my trips to Ireland, I decided to teach myself some Irish.

It is, of course, something of a colossal waste of time to try to learn a language
that is brutally difficult, not to mention spoken by so few people. Nevertheless, 
she persisted. Faugh a ballagh! (Irish battle cry that means clear the way.)

I was able to bleat out a respectable go raibh maith agat - thank you - to the Irish
Aer Lingus check-in person at Logan. She was neither amused nor impressed. Well,
póg mo thóin. That would be kiss my ass.

I didn’t really want apple pie, out there in a restaurant in the Irish speaking 
Connemara. But it was the only food stuff I remembered from my tape. So píóg úll 
it was.

The waiter sweetly said, “I know you’re trying to order something darlin’, but I don’t 
know what it is.”

I went back and listened to my tape. I had indeed pronounced apple pie correctly. 
What up?

Even by foreign language standards, Irish is a pretty darned foreign language. 
With Germanic and Romance language, we’re used to the rhythms, and even some 
of the words that have made their way into English. When we hear someone
speaking German, we know it’s German. And may even catch a word or two. 
Ditto with French. Spanish. Etc. With little effort, most of us can learn please/thank y
ou/where’s the toilet/how much. We can make ourselves understood, even if we
can’t comprehend much when people respond.

But with Irish, there are so few hooks for your ear to latch on to. I’ve been in 
Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas) and I can be listening to ultra-Irish looking folks
conversing and still I struggle to recognize the language they’re speaking as Irish. 
Often the only word I can pick out is agus, which means and. Ah, agus, Irish.

After the apple pie incident, I pretty much gave up on my Irish. Other than one 
sentence that kept floating around in my head. Ba mhaith liom dul ag siopadóireacht.
I want to go shopping.

Towards the end of the trip where I tried talking in tongues, we spent a couple of 
days in Dublin.

Once cab driver, a man a bit older than us, told us that, while students now learn
Irish in school, this wasn’t the case when he was growing up. So he’d made it his
business to learn his native tongue.

So many great sayings, he told us. Like níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.

Ah, I said, There’s no fireplace like your own fireplace.

How do you know that, he asked?

My response: I apparently learned off the same tapes you did. Which turned out to
be the case, It also turned that Irish is tough enough t learn, but there are all sorts
of regional variations. Which is why my apple pie order was Greek to the Connemara
waiter. The tape I learned from was, I believe, Irish in the purish King's English. 
(Chieftain's Irish?)  The Dublin cabby as the only one in the country I'd understood.
On the last week's trip, my sister and I were in a bookstore, picking up some greeting
cards.  Trish handed me one and there it was. Nil aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.

How did you know, I asked. After all, Trish hadn’t wasted any of her precious time 
trying to learn Irish.

Well, duh. The translation was on the back of the card.

Anyway, I won’t be cracking the Irish books or tapes any time soon.

If I’m going to learn another language, I’m thinking French.

Au revoir, Irish.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry this looks so awful. Can't figure out what's going on with this particular post.