Greetings and Salutations Once More

After an exceptionally long hiatus, I have decided that once more I should probably get around to telling all those semi-dedicated people who for reasons that are beyond comprehension interested in the goings on of yours truly, what I have been up to for the past, uh, well, year or so. I think there might even be some new readers (evidently boredom is now an epidemic and in a last ditch effort to find mindless stimulus, stumbled upon these ramblings in between profile stalking on Facebook and googling their own name), so unlike my other blogs, I have left what I wrote in my previous entries so as to give all those who would be so inclined to rummage among the chaos. So, with no further adieu, I will drive forward, and in several installments over the coming, well, period, I will attempt to catch people up on what has transpired in my humble life.

If you have kept up with my other blogs (I am sure both of you are very grateful that you did), you would know that each time I spent a considerable period of time in a new country, I would remodel my blog and put a new title at the top in the language of the nation in which I would be spending a brief but undoubtedly memorable amount of time in. Now, I happened to just spend six months in Ireland, from March till August, but not only did I not change my blog around, I did not bother to write even a morsel of what I was up to. Why is this? Well, for starters, what language should have chosen for the title? Ireland is officially Irish speaking (according to their constitution) but English is obviously the language for business, daily discourse, swearing, a surprisingly short list of witty remarks, how politicians and specifically the Taoiseach (prime minister) answer questions to a very long grocery list of accusations of corruption and other felony related items, as well as the language that despite its reputation has very less irregularities in it than that most ancient language of Celtic legends and drinking.

Yes loyal readers, Irish is quite possibly the most screwed up language that I have attempted to study. It breaks down like this: I was determined to master at least enough Irish in my time there to talk about the weather, say that Guinness is indeed good, but Murphy's and Beamish kick its ass, make jokes about tourists and plenty of other fun things that you can do when the amount of native speakers of a language numbers the same as inhabitants in my home town. Alas, none of this was to be so. My problems started immediately as soon as I opened my lesson books in Irish, to discover that words such as Oiche (night) and aibhneacha (rivers) were pronounced "ee" and "ownahee" respectively, which not only shows that there seems to be no reason why anyone would even think to devote the time to write words that are five characters long but with a single syllable, but even more annoying to anyone that there is no regular system. For instance, did you notice in both Oiche and aibhneacha there is the letter combination "ch", and did you also notice that they are not pronounced the same? Even in my previous example of Taoiseach (pronounced "teeshuck" for reasons that a congressional hearing would have a field day with) it is pronounced yet a different way. Basically, Irish has more exceptions to the way it writes versus how things are pronounced than how many roads actually have names in the whole country (three at last count). And this is just one dialect. There are no fewer than three major dialects in Ireland, and such a difference that native speakers sometimes find speakers of another dialect so unbelievably incomprehensible, that they just nod their heads and pretend to understand when being spoken to. Compound this with the fact that very few (somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 people) use Irish on a daily basis, and by all evidence is dwindling quicker than you can say Baile Atha Cliath (Dublin in Irish, pronounced "bal a clia" incidentally. Interesting fact that I will put in the middle of this thought: Dublin comes from the Irish "Dubh Linn" which means Black Pool...something to think about).

So, why did I just bring you into the inner workings of a language that needs a tune up more than my rusting bicycle? Basically to explain that no matter my effort, I would just end up in the end learning the phrases in Irish that anyone learns when the have lived there for awhile, namely that something is good "craic" (pronounced crack for ultimate confusion to the average person not aware that it does not refer to the product of a plant manipulated to snort up your nose, rather to good atmosphere or conversation, essentially the word "fun") and possibly most useful of all, "Pog mo thon" (pronounced, surprisingly like it looks, "pog mo hon", meaning "kiss my ass", or "arse" is it were). In end, I never did learn much more of this language, which I find to be a pity, but what I did learn is that I was not alone as so many Irish bemoan the fact that they don't speak Irish, but equally fascinating to find nothing extraordinary in the fact that they devote no time to actually attempting to learn it.

So ends segment one of my time in Ireland. Stay tuned soon for my next installment on how I spent six long and rainy months on the Green Island.