An Spideog

I've been working on this for a good while but it's finally done!!

This can confuse people a lot when they're learning verbs, especially when they're taught with a mix of the dialects but each dialect is quite internally consistent with it.

This also applies to -idh as slender dh and slender gh have merged in every dialect.

In Connacht these are entirely silent, so in an unstressed syllable they're just pronounced like a schwa, a neutral vowel.

Cheannaigh (bought) -> Cheanna

Bhailigh (collected) -> Bhaile

Cuirfidh (will put) -> Cuirhe

Samhraidh (of summer) -> Samhra

In Ulster and Munster, the pronounciation is also a schwa when it is a verb form before a pronoun:

Cheannaigh sé (He bought) -> Cheanna sé

Cuirfidh sé (He will put) -> Cuirhe sé

But, if it isn't before a pronoun then it is pronounced like 'í' in Ulster and like 'ig' in Munster.

Cheannaigh Seán -> Cheannaí Seán (Ulster), Cheannaig Seán (Munster)

Nigh (Wash) -> Ní (Ulster), Nig (Munster)

I'll be there at 5pm (/hopefully)

Like we're just describing that we ourselves are hopeful in asserting that, rather than saying that when we arrive at 5pm we will be there in a hopeful manner.

https://an-chopail.vercel.app/

Just something small I'm working on, ideally this would be integrated into a structured course but at the moment it's more of a proof of concept of the kind of thing that would be useful in an app tailor made for teaching irish.

As far as I know this doesn't happen.

My best guess is that you're getting caught out by Teanglann's strange formatting where it rewrites capital letters and then does the tilde

Which makes it seem like the headword should be written out in full, but it's not.

Ar an A~ is supposed to convey ar an Aoine, just with a capital letter.

I also know that the teanglann mobile app gets this wrong I think? And auto replaces it to be Ar an Aaoine, my browser extension also used to do this but I partially fixed it so with mine you see this now:

(still some bits that aren't fixed there actually, need to change how it deals with the italics, oops)

There's this story I'm researching at the moment called "The Magic Thread" in the Book of Virtues by William Bennett from 1993, and the trail has gone cold.

The book of virtues calls this a 'french tale', and cites an English collection simply called "Fairy Tales", which I don't have access to from 1987, that book seems to be related to the series of books published in German in the 80s which was translated to french here

I've gotten the German book Der Zauberfaden which was seemingly published as part of this series in the 80s (85?) but it has essentially no publication information on it (no copyright page etc.)

And this version mentions the "French" part on the cover, but gives no further information about where the author found the story. Which means it's very hard for me to find anything earlier than this.

So basically, I am quite skeptical about whether this story really is French, but I'm unsure. If Wanner wanted to write his own original fairy tale, why call it French? Other tales listed in the series seem to be real and well attested, if it isn't his own original tale, is there an earlier version than this?

If anyone can find a version of this Magic Thread story (boy finds a thread and can pull on it to speed up his life) that predates the 1980s I would be thrilled to hear about it, regardless of whether it's in French, German, or any other language.

And it will properly explain things like the copula that every other course ignores (crazy) and be customisable to dialect (of course).

Now You're Talking is a great option for beginners wanting to do ulster Irish! It's a video/audio course available completely free online with worksheets on the website too.