“As my former partner is far from me, thus my shot upon him is misplaced”
Worst bumper sticker slogan ever, but not bad for indie lyrics
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Trinity college has a web interface for hearing the pronunciation of various Irish language phrase. You can choose between dialects, speaker speed and pitch, and download as an audio file.
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Tá sé go hiontach!
I’m assuming you know about teanglann.ie and its fuaim function?
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Ar fheabhas!
I was taught to spell “go hiontach” with a hyphen, as in go h-iontach. Maybe I was just a poor student?
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I probably just spelled it wrong. It’s not like h-prothesis is going to be that confusing anyway.
Although I do like the convention that it (and eclipsis) is done in lower case even in all caps: GO hIONTACH!
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Hip? Cats today just aren’t hep.
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On my duolingo Irish course today, I had to translate this sentence…
Cad a deir an sionnach?
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As gaeilge? Níl fhios agaim.
Thankfully there’s a wiki for that 
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DuoLatin has a known thing for drunk parrots. Psittaci ebrii sunt animalia pessima is the canonical example.
And DuoNorwegian is clearly written by geeks: in answer to the Bokmål phrase Alle basene dine tilhører oss, it will accept as a correct translation “All your base are belong to us”.
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Came across this sign on Annapolis. It’s written with ogham characters and says “Go Navy, beat Army”. Clearly as a former soldier I was in enemy territory.
I was disappointed that it wasn’t written in Irish. “An Cabhlach abú! An t-arm a shárú” would be close enough (and rhymes), but makes for a much larger sign.
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Ooh, classical! They’re using the ᚛-ᚕ-᚜ forfeda for “ea”.
I know that character better as “k”, which is only used in the earlier inscriptions in the formula word “koi”, meaning “here (lies)”.
And they use “h” for “y”, which is a more creative choice. I can see why they did it though.
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Looks like they were selective in which ogham alphabets they pulled from to get the desired letters. Cheaters
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An interesting map from 1905 showing distribution of languages and peoples in Europe.
What got my attention is that North Macedonia is rolled up with Bulgarian on this map. This has become a political point of argument in Bulgaria this year. A few years ago my UBER driver was Bulgarian, and I recognized a few words he said and asked him where he was from. When I told him that I recognized the words as Macedonian he got all mad.
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Didn’t you serve over there during the wars?
But of course, since that whole area was once under one empire and then parts under another, people moved around and mixed for years, so you can find pockets of various communities all over the place in the Balkans…
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Indeed I did.
I just pulled out my Macedonia country guide from back in the day. It did have a whole section on cultural identity.
And handy language tips! Interestingly when we were in the western part of the country and lot of the ethnic Albanians spoke decent German.
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Yeah, many people in the Balkans have a long history of multi-lingualism out of necessity, being part of a multi-lingual/ethnic/religious empires… Even at the height of Yugoslavia language played an important role in the balancing act that Tito was trying to enact in the country. I think it probably helped his credibility with many that he was himself a multi-ethnic person and that he successfully pulled together a multi-ethnic group during WW2. I think it helped that he was able to hit on a language that allowed people to come together, too, with his “brotherhood and unity” slogan. But by the time he died, the language problem as reflective of the nationalist problem was starting to rear it’s head again.
A bit off-topic (as it’s culture instead of language, but I guess that intersects) but have you ever seen this documentary?
The director, who I think is Bulgarian (she’s the woman you see asking questions in the clip) attempted to chart to origins of a single song that she and everyone sitting around a dinner table in Greece knew, although they were all from different parts of the Balkans. I think you can get it on Kanopy? But it’s a very interesting look at how culture can be shared and still assumed to have some kind of pure origins (like language itself).
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I was discussing the prevalence of German speakers in Yugoslavia with a guy from Germany back when Germany deployed troops as part of NATO. He casually said “well, and a lot of those areas should rightfully all be part of Germany anyway.”
He backpedalled very quickly after seeing the shocked look on my face.
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Wait, so did they use ogham characters to write modern English? I don’t know ogham but I hate it when people do that with runes.
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