The unending fic has finally finished!

[lauren3210]

Alert the press! Call the media! Because yes, it's true! The fic I have been wrestling with for a fortnight - and complaining about vociferously - has finally come to an end! Hallelujah praise the Lord, amen. Actually, let's give thanks to St Patrick, because the luck of the Irish was definitely with me today!

So, as I'm sure you'll all be pleased to hear, that's one fest fic down and three to go, and unless I get conked on the head and lose my brain entirely, there'll be no more whining from me, because - shocked gasp - I actually know what I'm doing for these ones!

And now I'm off to celebrate with a pint of Guinness and a gaelic word game with my mother, and whoever stumbles first has to tackle my mountainous ironing pile! (I may have been practising for just this very moment tbh.)

Comments

[snowgall]

Yay for you! I'm just seriously impressed at how many fics you've taken on. I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to see if you can get them all done!

And a Gaelic word game? You must be a masochist. Does the game involve trying to guess how some word in Gaelic might possibly be pronounced? Because I once lived in Ireland for 4 months and took a course in Gaelic (however briefly) and wouldn't have the first clue. I can recall more Irish Sign Language than Gaelic, frankly, and I hardly know any ISL :)

[lauren3210.livejournal.com]

Ha, I should do now, I'm a fairly fast writer when I know what I'm doing, lol!

And lol no, I am Irish - although I was born in England - and I grew up with Gaeilge as a second language in our house. The game is a family one, where one of us picks a noun and the other has to say all the different variations within a time limit, and whoever misses the most loses. And that will probably only make sense if I tell you that in Gaeilge, the beginning of nouns (and most verbs) change depending on the tense of the sentence, lol.

And I know absolutely nothing about ISL, because I learned BSL when I met my husband, who can't speak a word of Gaeilge and tends to just sit there looking adorably confused when me and my mum start nattering on, haha!

[snowgall]

Oh, I recall the beginnings of nouns changing - it had something to do with nasalization, if I recall (nasals are n's, m's and ng's).

Here's what I know about ISL: it uses a one-handed alphabet like ASL, but has a fair amount of vocab in common with BSL. This is because of an interesting quirk in the Deaf education system - girls and boys were taught in different schools, with the boys' education considered more important so they had more emphasis on English and somehow this led to tutors familar with BSL and influence thereof. Girls on the other hand were left alone and allowed to do more signing, and for some reason this system was influenced more by the French (who also influenced ASL). The details are a bit murky to me, but the upshot is that the sign language used by Irish girls and boys was *very* different, at least until the late 20th century when things started to change. So when girls and boys started dating, they had to cobble together a system that was a blend of both. So ISL is weirdly like both ASL and BSL. Forgive me if I got some of the details wrong, but that's the general idea.

Anyway, my family lived in Galway from Sept-Dec 2009. We had a great time. Wish we could have stayed longer.

[lauren3210.livejournal.com]

It's actually more to do with what you want the word to do in the sentence. For example, madra means "dog", which sounds almost as phonetically as it looks, but if you want to say, "my dog", the word changes to mhadra which is pronounced completely differently (like wadra).

All that sign language stuff is really interesting, I had no idea about any of it!

[snowgall]

Yeah my problem with learning Gaelic was that I was much more interested in seeing the linguistic patterns in the sound changes (m -> w is a form of denasalization as well as lenition) than in remembering *when* that happened :) Although the question of 'when' is also a linguistic one, just a bit more arbitrary than the regularity of how the sounds change.

So I just looked it up because I wanted to remember. (None of this will be news to you, I'm just sort of thinking out loud here and explaining where my confusion came from)

The initial consonant of Irish nouns will often become lenited when the case changes (nominative -> genitive for example giving m->w) and this also happens in many other environments as well.

But in other environments, you get what's called eclipsis instead. Here, b -> mb, d -> nd, and g -> ng (this is what I was remembering as nasalization). You also get 'n' before vowel-initial words. p, c, and t don't get nasalized, but instead get voiced: p -> bp, c -> gc, t -> dt.

The fact that [b,d,g] act one way and [p,t,c] act another way *makes perfect sense* to a linguist. So that's the sort of thing that fascinated me, and I never paid enough attention to *when* these changes happened :)

I do wish I had had more time to learn Gaelic though. Knowing more languages is good for a linguist.

[lauren3210.livejournal.com]

You know, it's actually really weird to see it all written down like that, haha! It's not like when I learned Latin, for example, or French or Spanish, I've never been *taught* gaeilge, I just grew up *knowing* how to speak it without knowing *how* to speak it, if that even makes sense, lol! I know all of what you said, but I would never have been able to explain it the way you did. I wouldn't be able to do it for English, either.

I also suck at languages in general tbh, even with BSL I am better at hearing it than speaking it. I was the same at school, I could easily translate the foreign languages into something I could understand, but I had a lot of trouble communicating in them. Which, now that I think about it, is pretty much my day to day life in any language, lol!