Irish Class. November 19, 2007.

Checked against Nick’s official notes.

We started with some dictation–seeing if we could write down spoken Irish. Some vocabulary from that:

Is é an leabhar is fearr ná Pride and Prejudice.
Pride and Prejudice is the best book.

Note that the comparative uses bí, while the superlative uses the copula.

Tá an léine sin níos deise ná an ceann eile.
That shirt is nicer than the other one.

(From Turas Teanga, p. 186.)

We then played a game of

Scattergories as Gaeilge. This sort of game is hard enough
for me in English. Typically I freeze when the clock starts and
accomplish almost nothing. Afterwards I feel like an idiot when I
listen to the (obvious in retrospect) answers from the other players.

Last night was no exception, but I went along with it, and I
don’t think I looked quite as much like an idiot as I felt.
Well, that is the way things are. Each of are good at some class
activities and not so good at others. For me, this was one of the
latter group.

We had some pleasant interruptions durings all of this.
Mary’s class had
been sent for on a scavenger hunt, and they came in to ask us about
what we were wearing, and a few other questions, all as Gaeilge.

ordóg, “thumb”, is one of a consistent class of nouns, also
including fuinneog. Nouns
that end in -(eo/ó)g are all feminine, all form the plural by -a
and the genitive singular by slenderizing the final consonant and adding
-e. Genitive+article: na hordóige, “of the thumb”.

Nick said that he wanted to have some kind of class reading project, but was rather frustrated because everything he could find was either too easy or too hard for us. J suggested An Tobar, which is something of a Gaeltacht Minnesota rite of passage. So we will see if we can find enough copies for everybody. I actually have two, so we may be off to a good start.