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[thefourthvine]

I need translations (in any language - I will totally welcome things like Elvish and Klingon, too) for the following five words:

Welcome

Read

Listen

Create

Explore

Any bilingual/multilingual people out there who like to help me out? You'll get - okay. You'll just get thanks. But they will be very sincere thanks.

Comments

[gurrier.livejournal.com]

Irish:

Welcome: do you mean "Be welcome" or "Welcome someone"? The former is "Fáilte", the latter is "Cur fáilte roimh $person", literally "Put a welcome before $person".

Read: Léigh

Listen: Éist

Create: "Cruthaigh", or "Déan". The first is as in "God created the world", the latter more mundane, like "make".

Explore: "Taiscealaigh", which is exploring on land (you wouldn't use it to explore options, for instance), or "Cuardaigh", which is more just searching.

[epistrophia.livejournal.com]

I am constantly amazed at how much Irish isn't like Welsh...

When my mother (who is Irish) visited us, she was trying like mad to pronounce Welsh words, and to translate them according to what she thought they were, and it is utterly and completely different to Irish.

Welsh is more like Breton, apparently. I think Irish and Scots Gaelic are more similar to each other...

[gurrier.livejournal.com]

The vocabulary is very different, although there are similarities : scoil/ysgol, leabhar/llyfr, abhainn/afon and clann/plant, for instance. In most Irish dialects, the "bh" sound has shifted towards "ow", but it still has a "v" sound in places. Clann/plant is an example of a change the took place over two thousand years ago, leading to Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx being classified as Q-Celtic languages, and Welsh, Breton and Cornish as P-Celtic.

The grammar has a lot of similar features such as the ways words mutate; the use of positive and negative verb forms instead of yes/no; and the way prepositions have personal forms.

So yeah, very different languages, but with a lot of common features - a bit like English and German. On the other hand, Scots Gaelic and Irish are sufficiently similar that I can read Scots Gaelic about to much trouble, although I find the spoken language hard to follow.

This is probably far more than you wanted to know :)

[epistrophia.livejournal.com]

probably far more than you wanted to know

No, no - it's fascinating! I always love it when my Welsh teacher goes off on a tangent about the history of the language or of certain rules. I'm just a language slut, really!

I always meant to learn Irish, but it's hard to find teachers in England, and now that I'm learning Welsh I think I might just get too confused. Plus, even though my Irish family all live in very rural areas, none of them are Irish-speaking. Though most people have enough to get by, in the same way that I have enough French from school to get by, English seems to be the first language. I don't know if that's true everywhere?

Also, does Irish change from area to area - south to north etc? Because North Waleian (sp?) Welsh and South Waleian Welsh is quite different, in pronunciation at least, and I believe that mid-Wales is slightly different also. Most of it can probably be put down to rural accents (the massive difference between, e.g. Anglesey accents and Cardiff accents) but there are instances of completely different words for the same thing...

(This probably is far more than you wanted to read...!)

[gurrier.livejournal.com]

most people have enough to get by

Oh, don't get me started on how well/poorly people speak Irish! Basically, it's appallingly taught at school. People spend 13-14 years "learning" Irish, and maybe two learning, say, French, and come put with far better French.

There are six Gaeltachts, or areas where Irish is the day-to-day language, but three of them are tiny. The other three, in Kerry, Galway and Donegal, represent the three main dialects. They're not hugely different, but Donegal Irish has some grammatical differences that put it closer to Scots Gaelic than the others. I do know some people who claim that when the Irish radio station, Raidió na Gaeltachta, came on air in the 60's, they couldn't understand the northeners at all, but I think it's an accent issue as much as anything else.

Everybody under the age of forty speaks English as at least a joint first language, and it's left changes in the language. The vocative form is dying out - instead of adressing someone as "a Mháire", or "a Sheáin", most people now say "Má'ire" and "Seán" - and the so-called dative form of nouns has disappeared, more or less. Previously you'd say "Chonaic mé an abha" (I saw the river) but "Rith sí chuig an abhainn" (She ran to the river). "Abha" has been replaced by "abhainn" now.

This is a pet topic. You may have guessed.