Dari and Irish

Last week, I mentioned that my plans for Indo-European were to sort of fill in the pieces of the puzzle as I went along. This week, I’ve been working at nearly opposite edges – a couple lessons of Pimsleur Dari and some dabbling in Irish.

Dari
Dari is one of the two main languages of Afghanistan, the other being Pashto. Dari is pretty closely related to Farsi – indeed, it has been called Kabul Persian. If you already speak some Farsi, Dari is pretty easy – much of the vocabulary is similar, if not identical, and the basic grammar is not that different. The main challenge is keeping track of the different locutions, like remembering whether it’s Farsi that asks about your health while Dari just asks how you are or the other way around (it’s the first, at least according to the Pimsleur programs).

Pimsleur Dari is pretty much like all the Pimsleur programs. If you’re going to Afghanistan or just curious about the language, the Pimsleur Basic program’s a good place to start before moving on to more in-depth resources. And if you’re interested in how regional dialects or sister languages can do different things with essentially the same words and structures, comparing and contrasting with the Basic Farsi program is a fun little exercise.

Irish
For Irish, I’ve been listening to Pimsleur’s Quick and Simple program. The first thing that strikes me is just how much the word maith, good, comes up. From “thank you” - go raibh maith agat - to “I would like…” – ba mhaith liom - it seems there’s no end to things being good for you or me, or maybe not so good. The other thing, for which I’ll congratulate Pimsleur, is the ease with which it introduces lenition and eclipsis by way of sentences about understanding. Here are the main sentences used:

Main form: Tuigim (I understand)/Tuigin tú (you understand)

Lenition: Ní thuigim (I don’t understand)
Lenition is a softening of the consonant. In this case, the initial “t” softens to “th,” pronounced “h.” We soften consonants in English too, for example, pronouncing “water” as “wadder” when we’re talking quickly. The tricky thing about lenition is that you usually have to go back to Primitive Irish or Proto-Celtic to find a word ending, now lost, that changed the phonetic environment such that the first consonant of the lenited word got softened.

Eclipsis: An dtuigin tú? (Do you understand?)
Eclipsis means that you add another consonant to the beginning of the word, and that consonant eclipses the first one. In this case, the “d” eclipses the “t” so you pronounce the second word “diggin” with a “d”. In Old Irish grammars, eclipsis is usually referred to as nasalization. This is because eclipsis/nasalization tends to occur when the preceding word ending in “m” or “n” in Proto-Celtic or Primitive Irish. That “b,” “d” and “g” are eclipsed by “m,” “n” and “n” respectively – literally nasalized! – while the unvoiced stops are eclipsed by their voiced counterparts should give a sense of how eclipsis is not really about eclipsing the second consonant so much as adding a nasal character to it to make up for the preceding nasal that has been lost.

How do Irish speakers keep track of all this, by the way? Automatically, I imagine. Little French kids can learn that it’s “des yeux” (day zyeuh) but “des voitures” (day vwah-tur) well before they can read and write; presumably, Irish speakers, too, are aware of their “endings” that change the next word, otherwise initial mutation would have died out long ago.

Now, here’s the nice thing about Pimsleur: They don’t teach you about lenition, eclipsis, the history or Irish or any of the stuff above. They just teach you, as they come up, which words cause the next word to change and which change is caused. When you contrast “go maith” and “an-mhaith,” for example, there’s little fuss about theory, just a note that “m” softens to “v.” Since it’s a short course, they can get away with this, of course, since you only need to know that there’s a system here, not all the details for how it works.

I imagine if Michel Thomas were teaching it, we’d have the zero track – no mutation, the “h” track – words that cause lenition, and the “2” track – words that cause double consonants…

-Now how do you say, “I understand”?
-Tuigim.
-Good, and how do you say, “I don’t understand.”
-Ní tuigim?
-No, no, no, you have to get on the “h” track. Remember, “t” goes to “th,” pronounced as…
-“h”… Ní thuigim.
-Exactly!

For Irish, I’ve also been using Living Language’s Spoken World Irish. It’s not a bad program. You start with key vocabulary, then get a short dialog with a translation, then an introduction to some grammar points, followed by exercises. The audio on the CDs for use with the book is good. There is also a second set of CDs to use after you’ve finished a lesson for review in the car or whatever. These are basic enough that you can follow along and review key points without needing so little concentration that they’re pointless or so much that you couldn’t really use them on the go. My one complaint: the grammar sections are a bit unfocused. It would be more useful if they were either 1) more comprehensive or 2) more specifically geared to only explaining the grammar so far shown in the dialogs. That said, this is a pretty good course and looks a lot less painful than most of the other stuff I’ve seen. If you want to teach yourself a bit of Irish and want to read and write, not just speak, this is where I’d start.