Kieran go brách

I've always had a knack for language. In school it was always the subject I excelled at (science and math--not so much). My high school offered language saturation, or immersion--three classes a day in Spanish, French, or Italian--for 4 years. The three classes were language, history, and literature. In junior year I took US history in Spanish, which was interesting when the Regents exam (a New York State required exam)--in English--rolled around, since I had learned the names of certain historical events only in Spanish.

Growing up in Brooklyn I learned a lot of Yiddish. For a shaygetz I don't do so badly. In college I got my B.A. in Spanish and studied Portuguese, French, Italian, and German, to varying degrees of fluency. I taught myself the Greek and Russian alphabets, and I even learned Esperanto, to the ridicule of almost everyone, including myself (sorry, LL Zamenhof). As an adult I took a Japanese class at the US Department of Agriculture but dropped out because classes were held at 8:30 a.m. every Saturday in the winter and I just couldn't drag myself out of bed. Before my trip to Indonesia in 1996 I immersed myself in Bahasa Indonesia and successfully haggled for an ebony statue.

My knowledge of English has markedly improved by learning other languages.

I embarked on learning Irish (or Gaeilge in Irish) with the same enthusiasm and approach as other languages I have learned. I figured it was time, given my interest in becoming an Irish citizen, to give it a go. So, earlier this summer, I copied my Pimsleur Irish for Beginners CDs onto my iPod and dug in.

Irish is hard.

I got stuck on Lesson 3 for about a month as the expressions became increasingly difficult (phrases like "excuse me"). The Pimsleur method is an effective way to learn dialogue, but there's no accompanying text, so I had no idea how the words looked. I have a photographic memory, so it's important to me have both the visual and the auditory. I used to call Irish "Dogbreath," since that's what words looked and sounded like to me. I haven't quite changed my mind about that yet.

I got my hands on a book and CD set called Teach Yourself Irish, by Diarmuid Ó Sé (Dermot O'Shea to Anglos) and Joseph Sheils. I copied those lessons onto my iPod too. The book is easy to follow, with dialogues and exercises and grammar and syntax lessons. You learn up front the exceptions to the rules. Turns out there are many.

The pronunciation of Irish versus its orthography is mind-boggling. Knowledge of linguistics (which, thankfully, I also took in college) is practically mandatory. Irish has broad (w-based) and slender (y-based) consonants, the sound of which is determined by contextual vowels. The vowels a, o, and u around a consonant make it broad, whereas the vowels e and i make it slender. Irish is one of the few languages that undergo two phonetic mutations based on grammatical and phonemic context: eclipsis and lenition. Eclipsis makes a voiceless sound voiced (for instance, p becomes b), and lenition makes a hard sound soft (b becomes v).

To illustrate lenition, I will use the only expression I knew in Irish before I took it up this summer: "póg mo thóin" (pronounced pogue muh HOE-in), or in English "kiss my ass." Normally the word "ass" is spelled "tóin" and pronounced TOE-in). But because "mo" is a possessive pronoun followed by a consonant, the t is lenited, or aspirated, and becomes "thóin" and is pronounced "HOE-in."

Clear, huh?

Even more befuddling is the phenomenon of eclipsis, since it makes Welsh, with its lack of vowels, look almost pronounceable. In Irish the county of Cork is spelled "Corcaigh" and is pronounced CORK-eh. If you ask someone if he is "from Cork" and he says "yes," he will respond, "Is as Corcaigh dom" (iss ass CORK-eh dum). But if you ask someone if he lives "in Cork," he will say (and write), "Tá mé i mo chónaí i gCorcaigh." The C in Cork gets canceled out by the g but both are still written, just that way. Corcaigh is then pronounced GORK-eh.

Even clearer, huh?

About 1.6 million people claim knowledge of Irish, and of those only about 70,000 use it as their first spoken language. When Ireland became a republic in 1922, Irish became the first official language, English second. This decision was made partly to inspire Celtic pride after a 19th century British policy of prohibiting the learning of Irish (similarly to the outlawing of Basque in Spain under Franco) and the ensuing Irish famine, which significantly wiped out Irish speakers in poor areas through death and emigration.

So I drag out my iPod on the subway every day and follow along in the book, mouthing the words but chewing gum at the same time so other passengers don't think I'm a serial killer. Sometimes I'll find myself blurting out expressions like "Diabhal scéal!" (Nothing at all!) to no one in particular. It's like my own little Irish Tourettes.

If I were not so interested in my genealogy and planning a trip to Ireland next year, I don't know that I'd have the tenacity to stick with it this long. Without other Irish speakers to practice with, everything will continue to look and sound like "Dogbreath" to me.

It's not surprising that more people don't learn this peculiar language, though it is rather fascinating. It's not unlearnable; it just requires a lot of work. Sometimes I want to say to my Irish book, "May the curse of Mary Malone and her nine blind illegitimate children chase you so far over the hills of damnation that the Lord himself can't find you with a telescope." And sometimes I just want to say, "póg mo thóin."