is maith liom a bheith ag damhsa.

Dia duit, a chairde!  You know, it's funny, really, how blogging works.  It's a little like a routine work-out: tough to ease into at first, fun, and then it becomes a bit of a chore.  Back in the day when I actually cared about my upper-body strength, I used to delegate all the push-ups I didn't do one day onto the next day.  At this point, I've got about 4,815,162,342 to do, so the chance that I'll actually do them, at any rate, is negative.  But, let's not let blogging become like that, shall we?  Only two weekends have passed since my last entry, and I think I an at least let you know how much fun they were, you know?  Because if I didn't provide ample opportunity for you all to be jealous of my awesome adolescent life, I just wouldn't have any morals, you know?

I'll start with last weekend.  We were in Carraroe, aka: part of the Gaeltacht, last weekend to brush up on our language skills.  To be honest, it was a little comical, us being there and barely knowing how to say "hello," "how are you," "goodbye," and "thank you."  But I suppose that's how you learn any language.  No one knows how to say "hi" straight out of the womb.

A scenic fence.

Ah, but I digress.  Irish, as you can see from the subject line, and as you will see in words and phrases throughout this entry, is a funny little language.  Right now, it's about as cute as German was when I first started learning, full of fairy tales and catchy rhymes, children laughing, but that's all before you hit Die Verwandlung and see your entire life reflected back at you in that of a man-turned-Käfer.  Outside of the mind-numbing grammar and vocab work, which was literally like taking a giant ball of fuzz and shoving it into all the cracks of my fat brain, we did a lot of fun rhyming and singing.  Everything is pretty catchy, and here's the thing... Which do you remember more--a commercial with an annoying jingle, or one without?  I can't speak for you all, but the amount of times I've had the number for One Direct Insurance stuck in my head since I've been here is bordering on ridiculous.  (In case you were wondering: 1890 222222.)  Since literacy was (and in some ways still is) an elite movement, a lot of cultures stem from an deep oral tradition rather than a literate tradition, so these Irish rhymes, stories, and songs that can so consume your every waking (and dreaming!) moment hold a greater purpose than letting a bunch of dumb foreign kids pretend to be Irish and have fun butchering the language for a weekend.  They pass histories, customs, morals, heroes, enemies, politics, recipes, whatever down the ancestral lines.

don't believe me?  try listening to this a few times and we'll see who's singing in the morning.

We've been looking into the Irish language a lot during my history class, as well.  It was a came to be a rather intense statement of nationalism to speak Irish, so much that our old friend Jonathan Swift abhorred the language, and English was the language of the conquerors.  Little by little during the 18th Century, the Irish language began to fade (at the very least, it quit growing) as the linguisstic and cultural momentum of English became unstoppable.  Once a Catholic seminary school was allowed in Ireland (Maynooth), priests-to-be were taught only in English, so any attempts to bring Catholicism into the mainstream eventually hurt the language.  It certainly didn't help any that preaching in Irish wasn't even considered as a tactic to Protestantize the native Irish.  There was no niche in print culture either, Irish nationalists having little to no access to traditional printing means--and even if they did, they would have needed a whole other typeface from English, one more complicated and expensive to manufacture.  Irish servants working in English gentry households would need to learn English, naturally, and they would bring that learning (mostly through mimicry) beyond the walls of the plantation.  And beneath all of this ran an intense social discontinuity.  The native Gaelic elite had been replaced by the English, leaving a hefty 50-60% of the population still primarily Irish-speaking, but that 50-60% was not made up of higher-status, ambitious visionaries.  So, as oral culture began to die a largely self-imposed (much to my professor's chagrin) death at the hands of literacy, so too did the old oral Irish language begin to diminish in the face of literacy and modern,sleek, new English...

That was a huge chunk of text.  Here, have some more scenery.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that's what made last weekend so refreshing and fascinating.  I met a lot of awesome people and had an amazing time at An Chistin, I danced a lot, and I butchered the language, but, you know, the fact that every sign in the Republic of Ireland is bilingual, that there is a school in the college dedicated to the language, that there are regions where Irish continues to be the first language is encouraging.  I descend, unfortunately, from a colonizing race of people, dumbly intent on cultural normativity, but to know that cultures oppressed by dumbasses can survive and come back valued and embraced by the community is a nice thought.

These kids were brilliant.  They came and performed traditional poems, songs, and dances for us.  They just blew my mind.

Some phrases for your amusement:
Dia duit! Hello.
Dia is Muire duit! Hello to you, too.
Cén chaoi a bhfuil tú? How are you?
Níl mé rodhona anois.  Not too bad.
Tá mé go maith!  I'm great!
Ta mé tuirseach... I'm tired.
Go raibh maith agat!  Thank you!
Cén t-ainm ata ort? What's your name?
Is maith liom a bheith ag damhsa.  I like to dance.

Okay, well, seeing as it is midnight over here and I am falling asleep at the keyboard, this weekend is going to have to wait.  Sorry, but have a little teaser to hold you over:

I'm on a motte!