Re: Anyone conversant in Tagalog here?

On Apr 15, 2:35 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 14, 10:21 am, phogl...@xxxxxx wrote:



On Apr 13, 10:45 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Apr 13, 10:52 am, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 13 Apr 2007 06:00:21 -0700, "Peter T. Daniels"
<gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in sci.lang:

On Apr 12, 11:52 pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 12 Apr 2007 20:20:14 -0700, "Peter T. Daniels"
<gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:1176434414.213517.138180@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:
On Apr 10, 9:13 am, phogl...@xxxxxx wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Have you ever even been in an American bookstore?
I haven't ever even been to America - neither to the United States nor
to any part of the two continents called the Americas - let alone an
American bookstore. But I have been an active member of a mailing list
for learners of the Irish language, and I have gleaned from the
letters of the American members that in big cities with significant
Irish-American population it is relatively easy to get hold of a copy
of "Irish on your Own" or "Learning Irish".-
Of course. But not in a non-specialist bookstore.
I'm reasonably certain that I bought Mícheál Ó Siadhail's
_Learning Irish_ on a whim when I found it in Borders a few
years ago. I will concede that the selection of foreign
language texts in my local Borders has gone downhill in the
last couple of years, and nowadays I'd not expect to find it
in stock.
When I visited Dublin in 1992, I had been commissioned to pick up
Thurneysen's Old Irish for a colleague. It turned out to be so cheap
-- something like 10 Irish pounds (~ $15; it was the first time the
Irish pound had ever been bigger than the pound sterling, and they
were reveling in that fact) -- that I got one for me, too.
I have certainly never seen that book in an American bookstore (even
Seminary Coop), and it certainly didn't sell for $15 when it was
special-ordered.

A grammar of Old Irish and an introductory self-study text in the
modern conversational language aren't exactly comparable.

The former ought to be regularly stocked by a respectable academic
bookstore. The latter can vary with pedagogical faddism.

I fail to see why Old Irish should be that much more important than
Modern Irish. As regards "Learning Irish", it is one of the most
comprehensive textbooks of Irish there is, albeit it only focuses on
Connemara dialect.-

The _language_ is not more important (except to those interested in
Celtic languages and Indo-European generally), but a massive
authoritative reference grammar of an insufficiently familiar
classical language is considerably more valuable than the latest larn-
yerself-Irish book.

Your values are not universal, not even in linguistics. The
orthography "larn-yerself-Irish" suggests a racist attitude towards
the Irish by the way. As regards pure scholarly interest, "Learning
Irish" (first published sometime in the eighties) is not "the latest
fad" in any sense, but in itself a classical (sic!) account of the
syntax of a widely-spoken dialect of Irish. If you knew anything about
Modern Irish, you would know that its syntax has been insufficiently
described. I could elaborate, but I know you aren't interested anyway
- besides, the thread is about Tagalog, or is supposed to be.

The author of "Learning Irish" has also written the immensely
important "Modern Irish - Grammatical Structure and Dialectal
Variation".

.

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