Great idea putting this video up, with my non existant Irish skills I still feel I can follow what's happening here.I'm just starting (again) on Mícheál Ó Siadhail's 'Learning Irish'' which is a bit heavy,but stuff like this is a great aid for learners. Is Sorcha using the Ulster form of ''how are you''? and did Darren say he was from Rathcairn?.
Great vid. Gaeilge should be Ireland's main language, for TV, in schools, offices. Whereas, English is increasingly useless as England, N. America sink in debt (and I'm an American). I work internationally, the two main global languages of future are Chinese and German- low debt/high-tech, German a Euro hub. (With Japanese, Spanish, Hindi in 2nd group.) So Ireland could have Irish as main language, replace English with German for inter-European use- less cost, German is far more useful!
In Irish the retroflex r (the English r) doesn’t exist at all, there is the rolled r (as in Spanish perro) and the flap r (as in Spanish pero) though most native speakers can merge them as one sound, a flap r, they can still be separate (especially in north Mayo it’s very strongly trilled), that was for broad r. Now for slender r, you originally had the Czech ř which became a trilled r, though you can still use it, and the palatalized r which can become the j sound from French, or a short version of the Czech ř. In modern days, most Irish speakers natively speak English, so they replace all these r sounds native to Irish with their closest English equivalent, therefore, ceathar and ceathair, and tarr and tairr end up having the same sound even though a native Irish speaker would pronounce them differently. This is true for all consonants, for example slender and broad c have very distinct sounds, but these two sounds aren’t recognizably different to a monolingual English speaker’s ear. Also the vowels, you often hear é, ó and ú pronounced as ay (as in bay, lay, day), ow (as in no, bow, row) and ew (as in new, too, blue) when in fact they are pronounced as how a Spanish or French or Italian would pronounce them, as in single vowels. Basically the way they speak Irish sounds English because they aren’t native speakers of Irish, only of English, therefore a large amount of Irish sounds aren’t natural to them so they use the English phonetics. This isn’t always individuals’ faults, it’d also the Irish government that’s an utter and total embarrassing failure at teaching the Irish language in schools, and Irish traditions, values or culture not being valued and respected enough in Ireland as a whole.
Actually, I would say that Mairtín is the sole native speaker here, everyone uses the single English r, while Mairtín actually speaks using the multiple rolled r’s as well as the vowels pronounced correctly, the way he says "tú" sounds like how a Spanish would say it in their own language, same goes for é and ó. In general Mairtín speaks in a more natural or “non-forced” way.
@@deoirdanandrei1512 I knew it; it sounds like hell with the retroflex r! BTW, "Irish traditions, values or culture not being valued and respected enough in Ireland as a whole." Why? That's too bad.
