Progressive Gaelic by Moray Watson

Progressive Gaelic

I sometimes think I should write a “gems from my bookshelf” series on this blog. I’ve collected language learning books for years, including the hardy stalwarts like the Teach Yourself and Colloquial series, as well as more off-the-beaten-track, lesser known courses. The latter type often deserve so much more recognition than the mainstream ones, and so it is with the excellent Progressive Gaelic series.

The author, Moray Watson, is a prominent figure in the field of Gaelic studies, serving as a Professor of Gaelic and Translation at the University of Aberdeen for over two decades. That shows in Progressive Gaelic – it comes across as a really comprehensive course that’s been designed to take students from zero to a high degree of competency. Spread across four books, it’s very well graded, too, with a real sense of progression.

One of the best touches is that Scottish history and culture is woven into the material throughout, in the vocabulary and reading passages. It’s certainly not a course that treats language in isolation, but uses a cross-disciplinary approach to set it in context. To back it all up, there’s also a nice set of workbooks to go alongside the course material.

Best of all, they’re really affordable, compared with other courses – you can pick up most of them for around a tenner brand new. And other learners have given their seal of approval – each of the volumes has almost five stars on Amazon. Give them a go – jump in at book 2 if you’re already on your Gaelic journey. They really do deserve some more attention and praise!

The cover of Scottish Gaelic - A Comprehensive Grammar (Routledge)

Scottish Gaelic : A Comprehensive Grammar Released This Week!

It’s a moment Gaelic learners and general language aficionados have been waiting a long time for. Routledge has finally added the language to its Comprehensive Grammar series!

Released this week, the new reference work by Edinburgh University’s Professor William Lamb fills a real gap on the Gaelic bookshelf. Learners looking for a modern guide have had a much narrower choice of much briefer handbooks, such as Michel Byrne’s excellent, but rather slim Gràmar na Gàidhlig. Either that, or explore the  ambitious descriptive grammars of old, like Shaw’s 18th-Century Analysis of the Gaelic Language, which is fascinating, but not particularly contemporary (although you know I love an ancient language manual).

The new Routledge tome weighs in at a hefty 580 pages, and looks to be an exhaustive tour of the contemporary language. It’s also very reasonably priced at around the £30 mark (compare, for example, the price of the Swedish counterpart!). If you’re a student, then you can get an additional 25% off that by buying directly from Routledge via a student discount site like Student Beans.

Suas leis a’ Ghàidhlig!

Nigheanan Mòra by Catrìona Lexy Chaimbeul (2014). Reading target language texts is an excellent way to improve foreign language skills.

Working with Target Language Texts

Eager to push my Gaelic out of the language course box and into the wild, I’ve been working with a number of short texts for intermediate learners lately. Luckily, quite a few readers have appeared in the recent years, including a bunch of fun titles that go beyond the usual ‘Celtic myths retold’ route (not taking anything away from the great series of beginners’ books from Jason Bond).

A recent favourite of mine, Nigheanan Mòra (Big Girls, 2014), was penned by one of the creatives behind recent BBC Alba drama hit An Clò Mòr, Catrìona Lexy Chaimbeul. On the surface, it’s in firm rom com territory, at turns silly, funny and melodramatic. But it’s grown-up enough to feel like you’re reading a real book, and not just an oversimplified, fleshless yarn that trades plot for easy reading. It’s also chock full of colloquial, conversational Gaelic dialogue, which makes for a great living language learning model.

That said, getting the most from a reader takes a bit more organisation than simply starting at page one and ploughing through. Better to have a strategy to maximise both your enjoyment and your learning.

Working With Texts : One Approach

Of course, there’s no single ‘correct’ way to work through target language texts. Through trial and error, I’ve found a way that works for me, which I’ll outline here. It works best with short-ish texts, since it involves two passes in quick-ish succession, but you could also use it with short sections of longer texts.

That’s because manageable chunk size is the key to this method. Often, you won’t need to worry about that with texts specifically for learners. Many books that support learners, like Nigheanan Mòra, already have nice short chapters of 5-10 pages. I find that’s the ideal length to read and digest texts without tiring (because, let’s face it, reading in a foreign language is more taxing). If chapters are much longer, just flick ahead a little way to see if there’s a natural stop somewhere, and make that your goal.

Pass One : the Chill read

After that, it’s time to start reading. The first pass is the no-chill literary gambol. Read for gist and plot, and don’t fret a jot about the odd unknown word. The focus here is on simply understanding and enjoying the story, first and foremost. I like to go full non-study mode at this stage. I’ll pick a cosy reading spot, grab a drink and just try to immerse myself in the story. No dictionaries, no pencils, no interruptions.

After that first reading – maybe 20 minutes or so – I’ll stop, take a breath, and reflect on the twists and turns of the plot. It’s important to take a passive break to cogitate calmly like this, given that our brains work more efficiently with pacing (a trait the Pomodoro technique plays into).

Pass Two : The Close Read

After this brief pause, I’ll then flick back casually through the pages I’ve just read. In particular, I’ll revisit those passages I felt were tough, or noticed myself slow down in during the first pass. For each one, I’ll re-read carefully, this time trying to translate in my head, paying more attention to the grammatical structures. I’ll also spend some time on words I didn’t get the first time round, looking for contextual clues to help guess the meaning (and not reaching straight for the dictionary).

This is the stage where I really prefer old-school paper books to Kindle ones. I’ll have a pencil by me, underlining any turns of phrase that sound really idiomatic or conversationally useful. With a pop-story like Nigheanan Mòra, there’ll be loads of those, thanks to all the snappy dialogue.  They’re the snippets where I’ve realised aha! So that’s how you say X in Gaelic.

Finally, after all that, I’ll spend some time cross-referencing those new structures in grammars and online materials like the LearnGaelic.scot dictionary and Wiktionary. Once I’m sure I’ve understood them, I’ll add the phrases to my Anki deck. Adding phrases is so much more effective that lifting just individual words from texts. We speak in phrases, not lone words, so by the end of this stage I have some truly useful material to drill. This phrase-lifting approach thoroughly mines a text for connectives and sentence frames – the bread and butter of fluency.

Find What Works For You

So there you have it – one way to work with authentic texts. It’s not rocket science or particularly groundbreaking, but it works for me. And it helps, in terms of discipline, to know that I have these regular steps to follow, to give my target language reading some kind of structure.

What I also find invaluable about it, in terms of motivation, is building in a reading for pleasure stage, which includes choosing material I find fun, as well as the time to enjoy it without pressure. Even if that is silly old rom coms.

After all, learning and practising languages shouldn’t just be work, work, work.

There are myriad ways to approach target language texts. What works for you? Let us know in the comments!

Harris, the setting for many Gaelic dramas. Image from freeimages.com.

Waiting for the Gaelic TV Ferry

In Gaelic, they say am fear a bhios fada aig an aiseig, gheibh e thairis uaireigin. The one who waits for a long time at the ferry will get over eventually. And so it is with Gaelic TV. If you wait long enough, another gem will always come along.

It’s a ferry I’ve been hoping to catch for a while now. You see, if you’re looking to create a language learning immersion environment at home, it does help if there’s already an abundance of quality resources.

For some languages, it’s no problem. Greek, Iceland, Norwegian and Polish, for example, have the weight of well-established national broadcasters behind them, and a plethora of commercial channels to boot. There’s such a wealth of output that you just know you’ll find something to watch as gripping as Happy Valley or as fun as Strictly. There’ll be something that ticks off both your learning needs and your sofa downtime.

On the other hand, if you’re dealing with languages that have minority status, it can feel a lot harder. With all the will in the world, it’s been a challenge to replace my everyday entz with Gaelic pop media. It’s thanks largely to the BBC that there are globally available resources, namely Radio nan Gàidheal and BBC Alba. They’re truly wonderful, and the learner community is deeply grateful for them. That said, it’s just a guess, but they’re probably not top of the BBC’s funding list. The result is a lack of variety that leaves learners scrabbling for stuff that grabs their personal interest.

Gaelic Gems

Now and again, though, a gem pops up. BBC Alba is gradually urning its drama arm into a well-oiled machine, evident in the popular, long-running series Bannan. That machine has just churned out an excellent new mini-series, An Clò Mòr, following the trials and tribulations of a weaving mill in the islands. It’s has all the ingredients of a great soap – family psychodrama, wheeling and dealing, guarded secrets – but the gravity of a primetime drama with superb performances from some familiar faces. Add to that the stunning island backdrop, and it’s a real telly treat to curl up on the sofa to.

So, at last, another ferry has arrived. And thankfully, it looks like BBC Alba is becoming adept at launching them out more and more regularly.

Roll on the next one!

Do you struggle to find target language pop culture swap-outs for your everyday media? What gems have you found? Let us know in the comments!

False equivalencies - the equation 1+1=3. Image from freeimages.com.

Equivocal Equivalencies : Avoiding the X=Y Trap in Language Learning

When starting out with language learning, it’s tempting to assume a one-on-one correspondence between your native and target language for everything you come across. It seems like a simple game of equivalencies: X equals Y. But you quickly learn that it’s not always as simple as that. Different languages carve the world up in subtly different ways.

It’s most obviously the case with content words. For instance, ‘sad’ in English covers both the person feeling the emotion, and the situation causing it. In Greek, it’s two words: λυπημένος (lipiménos, the former, with a Greek passive adjective ending) and λυπηρός (lipirós, the latter). Now that would have scuppered Elton John’s sad sad situation.

But function words differ, too. Grammatical categories that have lexically crumbled into each other in English remain resolutely separate in other languages. Take the word where. In English, you can use this as an interrogative:

Where is the bank?

And you can use it as a relative:

I know where you are.

Same word, two completely different functions. It leads English monolinguals to assume that they’re equivalent, identical. For sure, their function is related – both referencing place – but they’re performing different jobs, respectively standing in for missing information and joining two clauses.

False Equivalencies

Something that took me a little time to get my head around was the same situation in Scottish Gaelic. The interrogative and the relative are different words here, càit(e) and far:

Càit a bheil e? (Where is he?)
Tha fios agam far a bheil e. (I know where he is.)

Norwegian behaves in a similar way, although with a further complication. Generally, hvor is the interrogateive, and der the relative:

Hvor er du? (Where are you?)
Jeg vil være der du er. (I want to be where you are.)

But when a question is implicit, the relative is just hvor, as in English:

Jeg vil vite hvor du kommer fra. (I want to know where you come from.)

Incidentally, it’s the same situation with Norwegian then, which is variously når or da, according to the rule above.

Interesting tidbits of language, for a geek like me / us. But they serve as a reminder to delve a little deeper into usage using a resource like Wiktionary when you learn a word that seems to correspond neatly to one in your native language(s).

It may be less than half the story!

Celtic designs on a stone sphere, evoking Old Irish culture. Image from FreeImages.com

Sengoidelc : Old Irish (and More Besides)

I stumbled across a rather special book this week. It’s David Stifter’s very thorough introduction to Old Irish, Sengoidelc, pleasingly still in print, and approaching its 20th birthday.

I sought it out first and foremost as a language-learning gap-filling exercise. I’ve spent some time with Scottish Gaelic, and a bit (well, a lot) less with Irish. Exploring Old Irish seemed like a good way to get to know their common history, especially given how helpful etymological pathfinding can be with multiple language projects. I’ve also come across satisfying snippets of Old Irish writing, like the brilliantly feline Pangur Bán, and hoped it might open the door to similar treats.

Old Irish – and the Rest

What I didn’t expect from an Old Irish primer was the wealth of detail about Proto-Indo-European. It makes sense, of course; for linguists studying PIE, Old Irish is an important source of evidence from a relatively less well-known ancient descendant – at least compared to, say, Greek and Latin. But it’s positively packed with background info on PIE parts of speech, and their development into the Celtic branch. All in all, it’s a fantastically erudite book written in a disarmingly friendly tone, helped along by some very cute cartoons of sheep.

The author even provides plenty of comparative examples in German. That’s perhaps unsurprising, given his connection to the University of Vienna. But the additional language gives a further handle on potentially difficult concepts for those who know a little. It’s the ultimate in triangulation (and you know I love that).

If your language interests intersect in the same way, Sengoidelc is heartily recommended. I’m just annoyed I didn’t find it sooner!

Learning Places : Banff and Macduff Bay

Learning Places

Do you ever find yourself learning the same things in the same places? Not intentionally, but somehow drifting into the same languages, the same subjects, according to where you are?

I’ve been on a well overdue parental visit on the north-east coast again this week after a hectic few months. And I’ve noticed that something of a pattern has emerged. Despite having a gloriously diverse language library to pick and choose from, and well-made general dabbling intentions, I always go for a Gaelic book while I’m staying here.

Ambient Inspiration

Maybe it’s seeing the mountains of East Sutherland far across the water, near which Nancy Dorian researched the sadly moribund local dialects of Gaelic, that prompts me. Or perhaps it’s just that quintessentially Scottish coastal mix of sea, sky and moorland that gets me in the mood. Whatever it is, I’m more likely to settle down with Gaelic here than in any of my other favourite reading places.

Places for learning: Banff and Macduff Bay

Banff and Macduff Bay, across from which the hills of Sutherland can just be made out

There’s a potential downside to that, according to some educational psychologists. Research into context-dependent memory suggests that material learnt exclusively in one environment may be harder to recall in others.

But the flip-side of that is the use of wider memories as triggers for learnt material. In my case, think of home, remember your Gaelic.

The choice of book says a lot, too. As if to match the homely nostalgia, on each trip home I’ve been working my way further into Roderick Mackinnon’s original Teach Yourself Gaelic, 1971 (1992 reissue). A treasure of an old language book, if ever there was one.

Learning places : A copy of Teach Yourself Gaelic in front of a seaside view

An unashamedly posed shot of Teach Yourself Gaelic

 

What languages, books and places go together for you? Do you have a preferred nook or corner of the world to settle down to some study in? Let us know!

The Buntùs Cainte book - a bit of language learning nostalgia!

Brewing Up Nostalgia : Buntús Cainte

My love of old language books is no secret. I’ve been harping on about my single-handed attempt at recreating the language section of my local Waterstones, circa 1993, for ages. So it’s no surprise that I snapped up another old course when I spotted it in a bookshop this weekend.

The only thing is, it’s brand new.

Well, new is subjective. It’s actually a reprint of a decades-old Irish Language course, Buntús Cainte (Foundations of the Language). It’s been a well-selling title for years, not least for the language; people seem to love it for the nostalgia of the original programme as much as the content.

The title was originally a 1960s TV show on Irish state carrier RTÉ. Like other national broadcaster courses such as the Gaelic offerings from the BBC, Can Seo and Speaking Our Language, the show was supported by printed materials that you could pick up at your local bookshop. All of them had a warm, friendly approach to “language learning in your living room”, which is probably why they still stir up such nostalgia.

The book itself is still a great resource for learning basic Irish. It’s straightforward chalk ‘n’ talk if you like that kind of thing, with vocabulary and phrase lists and brief grammar examples. It comes with two CDs of audio materials – pretty indispensable if you’re new to Irish orthography. And at less than 10€, it’s all a bit of a bargain.

Fancy a Brew?

But the loveliest thing about it is that nostalgia it brews. The cover font, still in its groovy 1960s typeface and colour scheme, is a joy, as are the of-their-time stick cartoon illustrations throughout.

Buntús Cainte

It’s a reminder that good language learning materials aren’t a sum of their content alone. They’re about the feelings they inspire, the memories they connect you back to, the vibe you get from them. Clicking with a course is a holistic process. It’s no wonder that it’s still one of the best-selling Irish books.

In a similar vein, there was a heart-warming documentary on the making of Speaking Our Language recently, which has all the same feels. Worth checking out if you want to know how these institutions of educational TV work their way into our hearts.

In any case, it’s great to find an old gem of language learning. Even greater that it’s a fresh, new print that I don’t have to clean upI don’t have to clean up, for a change!

Waves crash against rocks. Over time, contact creates change. Image by FreeImages.com

That’ll Leave A Mark! Language Contact and Change

When languages brush up against each other, they tend to leave a mark. With tongues jostling for existence within the same space, language contact situations serve up some fascinating examples of cross-pollenation.

It’s something that you keep spotting as a Gaelic learner, for example. With clockwork regularity, you come across word-for-word calques, or loan translations, lifted straight from English. You cuir air an telebhisean (put on the television). You cuir dheth co-dhùnadh (put off a decision). And I’ve even seen how you can cuir suas le cudeigein (put up with someone).

Wrapped up in Gaelic lexemes, look indigenous enough. But those prepositions air (on) and dheth (off) are behaving in ways that they might not have done, say, in Classical Gaelic, which might constrain their use more tightly. In effect, English has imported its own phrasal verb construction, which is now becoming an increasingly acceptable category in contemporary Gaelic, too. There’s syntactic change afoot.

It’s gone the other way often enough in the past, of course. The origins of the English progressive (to be -ing) may well lie with the partical + verbal noun structure of Celtic. And contemporary Hiberno-English has a past tense construction to be after doing, roughly equivalent to the perfect tense, which it appears to have nabbed from Irish.

(Un)mutual Contact

But as you might expect, language change through contact isn’t usually happening equally at any one point in time. Many factors, not least social dominance of one language over the other, can make the  transference very lop-sided.

Contact linguist Myers-Scotton makes sense of this by asking where two languages meet, fundamentally: in the minds of speakers who have to use them both. Locating the process within bilingual speakers, and how they switch between languages, is a neat way to expose the front line of contact induced change. For a start, it allows us to evaluate the status of the two parties squaring off. The ‘base’ tongue is the matrix language, forming the main sentence frames of speech. Into that, embedded language – the outside influence – inserts itself to varying degrees, in the middle of it all.

Sometimes this insertion can come in the form of a single word. Myers-Scotton gives one example from Nairobi Swahili speakers: “ku-appreciate hiyo” (to appreciate it). English, the embedded language, contributes the verb appreciate. But it’s the matrix language, Swahili, giving it a regular infinitival marker ku-.

Elsewhere, larger, deeper syntactic structures can be recruited from the embedded language. The results can drastically alter a language’s syntax; the Balkan Sprachbund is a region where neighbouring languages – from completely separate branches of Indo-European: Albanian, Greek and Slavic – have gradually come to resemble one another grammatically. The most likely driver, again, was the bumping together of different peoples, and the necessary cross-linguistic skills and code-switching that required.

The End of the Road?

For some, this kind of change is the thin end of a wedge that leads to total replacement of the less socially secure language. At some point, the matrix and embedded languages will flip. Social pressure might privilege the outside language for a new generation of speakers, who might start slotting just the odd heritage language word in, here and there, as a cultural nod. A generation on, perhaps even that will peter out.

Is that the fate befalling Gaelic, gradually taking on anglicisms to the point of transformation? Actually, I don’t think that’s the foregone conclusion here. Syntactic convergence doesn’t necessarily spell the end for a language. It can be seen as a strategy to support continued bilingualism, for example; if languages share structures, it’s cognitively less costly to maintain more than one at a time. For sure, borrowed syntax is also a crutch that helps the army of new speakers (thanks to Duolingo et al.) feel a little less lost when getting to grips with Gaelic.

No, death isn’t always the end. Contact outcomes are many, and include paths that lead to sometimes surprising, but very much un-dead extremes. Living proof of that, Media Lengua (literally something like ‘between language’), is the outcome of indigenous Kichwa crashing up against Spanish in Colombia and Eduador. The resulting mixed language preserves Kichwa grammar, but has been almost entirely re-lexified with Spanish vocabulary. Deep breaths, purists: Gaelic is a long way off from that.

Oceans Collide

As with all things linguistic, bilingual speakers are just one part of a complex picture of contact change. But running through the countless evidence as above – anecdotal and otherwise – it’s easy to appreciate why they are a particularly active site. Bilingual speakers are the point at which two tides crash up against each other and the waters mix. A sort of linguistic Grenen, Skagen where oceans collide.

It’s also pause for thought for polyglots. What features do we carry over from one language to another? And if we embed into our target language cultures, do we become agents for change?

Scotland's Census 2022 - now including Gaelic as a separate question.

Operationalising Gaelic : Census Questions As A Political Leg-Up

It’s census time in Scotland! Letter are dropping through letterboxes across the land, inviting citizens to submit their details for the national record. And there’s bit of a buzz about a certain question. Gaelic learners are chomping at the bit to answer it.

All respondents will be self-reporting their knowledge of the language across the four skills. It’s a bit of a blunt instrument, admittedly, leaving aside issues of level and competence. But its inclusion carries a lot of significance for the community of speakers and learners. So much so, that there’s been a concerted Tick the Box! drive to encourage skills reporting.

Scotland's Census 2022 and the very welcome Gaelic question!

Scotland’s Census 2022 and the very welcome Gaelic question!

So what is so encouraging about a simple language skills question?

Well, a census is never simply a neutral fact-finding mission. The very act of asking a question about some thing has a power beyond simple information-gathering. It lends political shape and weight to the item under study. Defining something as worthy of counting – and, by extension, of governance – affords it a life of its own, out of the shadows. There’s a Foucauldian underside to that, of course. Shadier concerns have used census-taking to carve up the world better to divide and subjugate it. But, turned on its head, mindful question design can be a tool to shine a light on groups that need support.

Canvassing Gaelic as a special, separate skill anchors it to the ‘set of things that are relevant to Scottishness’ in the public mind, as well as respecting the existence of speakers and learners in Scottish society. As language planners try to shore up and reverse the retreat of Gaelic from public life in Scotland, operationalising the language like this, so publicly, helps to pull it back into general consciousness.

And importantly, this plays out amongst census respondents who might otherwise never notice the presence of the language in everyday discourse.

Shoring Up Gaelic Support

Otherwise, how the census question plays out positively on a wider scale is tied to the eventual number-crunching. For a start, self-reporting second-language speakers add to the numbers of existing native Gaels. After disappointing numbers in 2011, this, we all hope, will give a much sturdier picture of a language in revival (fingers crossed). Whatever part this plays in the debate on native versus neo-Gaelic, a growing community must surely be a good sign.

And numbers matter. They are why, amongst other things, it is far from futile to add to Duolingo’s Ukrainian learner tally right now. Large numbers signify support. And as cynical a view of governance as it may seem, pressure from a supportive public garners actions and resources from power.

A sufficient groundswell can trigger political initiatives such as a recent call for more Gaelic at the Scottish Parliament, for example. Likewise, it can get a ball rolling in terms of everyday, out-and-about visibility. Tesco’s recent promotion of the language to star position on Stornoway store signs is a great example. None of this happens without the prompting of public interest, or the proof that stats provide for it.

In that spirit, I very proudly self-reported my Gàidhlig skills this week. And I hope many thousands of others will be doing the same.