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29 Jun 2011
Though I will admit that learning to speak Icelandic from scratch in one week, well enough to go on an Icelandic TV chat show, is pretty impressive.
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15 Feb 2011
And while we're on the subject of rappers, here's a duel between a speaker of the Queen's English and a colonial upstart.
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16 Nov 2010
Stephen Fry is learning a cúpla focail in order to make a cameo appearance on Irish language soap Ros na Rún. The unusual casting has come about because Fry is filming a new BBC series about minority languages.
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11 Oct 2010
As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, my writing "style" (shut up!) wouldn't win any grammar awards. I start sentences with prepositions all the time. And I use hyphens with wild abandon - I like them. Ditto with brackets. (I like them too). I also Americanize nouns by turning them into verbs. And I like short sharp sentences. But then sometimes I like long meandering sentences that are really crying out to have clauses lopped off them for the sake of clarity if nothing else, but I don't do it because I'm too lazy to go back over it, or more likely, I'm just writing it as I think it or how I might say it and I figure what's wrong with that as long as you get my drift, right? (You do get my drift, right?)
So like Stephen Fry in the animated clip below (taken from one of his podcasts), I hate people who write letters to the Irish Times being snooty about language. As long as people understand you, there is no right or wrong way to write or speak, which is what makes language interesting and alive and vibrant.
The only thing I hate more is the weird almost reverse snobbery of people who write letters to the Irish Times (or articles in papers) slagging off young people who speak with a "Dart" accent. Accents aren't adopted. They arise. Various influences have shaped the accent of a certain kind of middle class Dubliner, and that's how they speak. You don't have to like it, but that's their accent, and it's no less "real", or "authentic", than anyone else's accent. Roight?
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