Thread: Ирландский язык плюс как ирландцы говорят по-английски

It's not written there whether he is a native English speaker or not.

He was born in Ireland which makes him pretty much a native speaker, maybe bilingual with Gaelic. And McCormack is a British name, though Scottish rather than Irish. Mc is Scottish Gaelic for "son of", which in Ireland is O' (as in O'Malley).

You have to keep in mind that there is a wide variety to British pronunciation of English, both regional and social. British English has strong dialects and sociolects which make themselves felt even when the speaker tries to speak standard English. You can usually tell an Irish from a Scottish from a Welsh speaker by the way they pronounce words. If they really let fly they can even be mutually incomprehensible.

Here's a very early version of the sketch "The Four Yorkshiremen": YouTube - Original 4 Yorkshiremen Sketch with Monty Python members and Marty Feldman. They are trying for a bit of a Yorkshire accent (for instance saying "tuff" for "tough"). You can compare that to other versions of the same sketch on Youtube. As an aside, I would say that I learned most of my English from Monty Python and from reading books and singing along badly to music. Definitely did not learn it in school, except for the very basics.

As an approximate rule you can say that there is wider variety in pronunciation between two people living 100 km apart in Great Britain than in that of two people of similar social standing living on the East and West Coast of the US respectively.

"Mac" means "son" in Irish too. He was born in central Ireland, so he is probably a native English speaker, but he sounds more Irish than English. I heard English spoken by people from Aran islands. It was similar but not identical to his accent.
Does he pronounce "Лох Лень" like "Лёх Лень" or it seems to me in the second song?

Scottish English does include the /x/ sound which sounds much like Russian х while standard English, which does not include the phoneme, pronounces the originally Gaelic word Loch for "lake" as /lok/.

Irish is only a symbolic language on Ireland. I doubt that it is the mother tongue of anyone these days. If it is, then the person is fully bilingual with English as their second mother tongue, spoken with no accent other than the normal accent that Irish people have when they speak English. I think. I am almost sure that has been the case for 100 year.

There are about 100 000 native Irish speakers now, there were more a century ago, some of them were monoglots.

An Irish person should perhaps answer this but to my knowledge, Irish is only a symbolic language on Ireland. I doubt that it is the mother tongue of anyone these days. If it is, then the person is fully bilingual with English as their second mother tongue, spoken with no accent other than the normal accent that Irish people have when they speak English. I think. I am almost sure that has been the case for 100 year.

The thing that is different is that some Irish and Scottish people speak English with a very strong accent, so you almost think it's a separate language.

But the Welsh, Scottish and Irish languages are kept alive artificially, by people who love them and have strong nationalistic pride, and with national and EU grants.
I have asked Irish people a few times if they can speak Irish, the answer is always "no" only a few words and phrases. Many see it as an inconvenience, because learning the symbolic Irish eats up school time that they could spend on French, German or Spanish.

При чём здесь Шотландия?
Bitpicker, have you read my question? Is his "l" in loch hard or soft? It must be hard.

Originally Posted by Marcus

При чём здесь Шотландия?
Bitpicker, have you read my question? Is his "l" in loch hard or soft? It must be hard.

Oh, I didn't realize you were interested in the /l/ sound. Trouble is, the distinction hard / soft is pretty meaningless to me as a native speaker of German, there is nothing intrinsically hard or soft about them. We speakers of German tend to mistake "hard" vs. "soft" for "voiceless" vs. "voiced", which is wrong, but the distinction "hard" vs. "soft" makes no more sense to us as if you called them "sweet" vs. "sour". "Palatized" is a better description than "soft".

Now the trouble is that my native German does not know any distinction here, I'm more or less deaf to the difference. In English there are different /l/ sounds but they do not distinguish meaning. There are different /l/ sounds in the words "bill" and "laugh", but they do not carry meaning; the sound is determined by the position of the phoneme, there is no word "bill" with the l-sound of "laugh" and vice versa.

However, in the Gaelic languages palatalization also exists and differentiates meaning as it does in Russian. So a speaker of a Gaelic language might palatize the L in Loch intentionally. Loch is a Scottish Gaelic word meaning "lake", that's why I mentioned Scotland.

I heard a man from Aran islands recorded in 1973. He could not pronounce "z" sound and pronounced palatalized consonants before "i"!
There are places in Ireland where Irish is spoken like English in London. Children start speaking Irish before English. People in the rest of Ireland wouldn't learn other languages anyway. I wonder what is so bad in teaching Irish at English schools in Ireland. Probably they use bad method.

It means the same in Irish, "l" in "loch" is velarized, while in "Léin" it is palatalized. It means it must be pronounced "лох ле:нь". If he pronounces these words correctly, he is a native Irish speaker. But I couldn't hear precisely, and I'm not sure. That's why I asked.

According to a biography of McCormack, both of his parents were born in Scotland, so it seems unlikely that he was a native Irish speaker. Of course, if there were a lot of native speakers in the town where he lived as a child, he might have picked up some Irish from them. As to his accent, some aspects of this speech (especially the rolling R) reminds me of some Scottish people I have heard speaking in TV shows. I wish Scotcher were here to tell us if McCormac's accent sound Scottish to him.

I see.

Originally Posted by Marcus

What do you think about his accent?

Don't be afraid, dare! No one will laugh at you.
My Irish poem here Яндекс.Народ

Спасибо, Маркус! As soon as I get ahold of a decent enough microphone I'll post them up here.

I don't know so much about the UK accents as some people here do.. But from my experience, Irish accents tend to use more rounded "r" sounds, and Scottish sharper "r" sounds similar in the latter to Latin/Spanish and somewhat to Russian.. But this also has the sound of a trained accent, to me.. Similar to the America 1940s radio Continental accent.. Anyway, other people on here know more than I do.. =) But it all sounded great to me! =)

Лампада, почему вы изменили название темы? Тему с таким названием можно сразу удалять, так как она полный оффтоп на форуме. Ирландский я привёл в качестве примера, а МакКормака, потому что мне было трудно поверить, что он англоязычный, хотя теперь я в этом убедился. Здесь можно было бы писать не только об ирландском, но и о любом языке.

Это я как-нибудь понимаю, потому что сейчас учу ирландский, мунстерский диалект. Но раньше люди, для которых родной язык ирландский, говорили по-английски с акцентом. я
один раз слышал, как в 70-ые годы говорил по-английски человек с Аранских островов. Но к Маккормаку это не относится.

Лампада, первая ссылка - полное безобразие. Я имею в виду то, что пишет Игорь на том форуме. Это всё имеет к ирландскому отдалённое отношение, ошибок там больше, чем правды.
В ирландском три диалекта, которые звучат по-разному, особенно северный. Я выложил здесь ссылку на стихотворение, прочитанное мною. Выкладываю небольшое видео, где говорит много носителей (западный диалект) и только один неноситель.
YouTube - Féinrial Gaeltachta
К сожалению, большинство англоязычных говорит по-ирландски с акцентом на уровне "фром май харт". Когда я слушаю их, у меня пропадает всякое желание работать над своим английским произношением, так как оно начинает казаться мне идеальным. Особое недоумение вызывает у меня фонемы "р" и "рь": сами носители произносят их по-разному. "рь" на конце слов часто произносится как "зь", "жь", а твёрдое р вообще как английское. Англоязычные всегда произнося англ. ретрофлексное "р", но, по-моему, это всё-таки неправильно. Чтобы в этом убедиться, можете послушать, как говорят люди в видео, на которое я дал ссылку.

Originally Posted by Marcus

Лампада, первая ссылка - полное безобразие. Я имею в виду то, что пишет Игорь на том форуме. Это всё имеет к ирландскому отдалённое отношение, ошибок там больше, чем правды. ...

Игорь, как мне помнится, несколько лет работал в Белфасте.

В Белфасте по-ирландски не говорят.
Записывать ирландские слова русскими буквами можно, если понимать, что под ними подразумевается. Например, что ирландские "т", "п", "к" в отличие от русских придыхательные.

Right then. I'm Scottish, so here's my take:

Firstly, his accent is unmistakably Irish - which you would expect given that he was born and raised in Ireland. Kids adopt the accent of their peers, not of their parents.

Secondly, unless it's recorded somewhere there's no point in trying to guess whether he was a native Irish or English speaker. He was born in the 19th century when there were a lot more native or even exclusive Irish speakers, and a lot more exclusively Irish areas than there are now. The fact that his parents were Scottish is of little help as Scottish Gaelic was similarly more widespread at that time. And that bio says his paternal grandfather was Irish anyway. That said, his parents came from a town called Galashiels, which is in the south east of Scotland and about as far from the strongholds of spoken Gaelic as it's possible to get (and about 5 miles from where I grew up, incidentally), so whilst it's impossible to say whether or not they could speak Irish/ Gaelic, it's almost certain they could speak English.