Has anyone else noticed how many Irish people drop the four or five foreign words they remember from school into conversations with foreigners? And have you noticed they are always in the wrong language? A German will get bonjour and gracias. A Spaniard will get guten tag and merci. A Frenchman will get hola and danke. Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish - well, they get all of the above and maybe a go raibh maith agat thrown in.
In fairness, the Polish, being here in such numbers, do a little better. They get a cześć sometimes. If it weren’t pronounced chest, it would count as the sole occasion the correct language is used.
I think the Polish barman in my local has gotten used to it now. He’s stopped wetting himself every time a customer says danke. Although it may be due to the owner’s policy that the floor remain dry for safety reasons. I’ll get back to you on this.
Noel was in the pub on Saturday. Now Noel is not one for reading beyond the soccer headlines. His favourite joke is the one about the similarity between a battery and a woman’s butt. (It was funny the first time). He has his talents though - he can wire a plug in 6 seconds flat. Which is a useful skill given that he’s an electrician. He can also do the crossword in The Mirror in less than two hours. That is despite filling in stool for item used by an artist and heffer for young female cow, he manages to make everything fit.
Tadek held his water that afternoon although Noel insisted on paying for his pints with a cheery danke schön, das ist gut. Actually, it was more like tankie shoon, das ist good.
Pubs are like crèches - the conversation can switch from one subject to another in milliseconds for no apparent reason. Someone mentioned Cadbury’s Cream Eggs which led to Ireland’s entry in the Eurovision - They Can’t Stop The Spring, to be performed (in capital letters it would seem) by Dervish. Noel was in his element now. He knows all about Dervish and with beaming pride he explained to Tadek that he shouldn’t worry if he couldn’t understand the lyrics. They are in Irish and no-one, not even the Irish understand them.
Poor Noel not only has a problem with foreign languages, he also seems to have difficulty with the two spoken on this island.
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Understandable really - someone over here thought Dervish were singing ‘They cannot stop the string’. And by someone I might mean me, ahem!
Ah, don’t be so hard on yourself. You Irish are quite fun, really. Terrible to work with but great to drink with.
Conor - Maybe it is string. I have often kicked a ball of same at a goalkeeper and thought that they cannot stop the string. Makes sense.
A Chainteoir - Thanks. At least we are good at something. Quite proud of it myself actually - No matter how bad things get, if you can have a laugh then all is well with the world.
It’s not just Irish people though; English-speakers in general are prone to claiming they can speak ‘a little’ of a language that they possess about five words of. Often this leads speakers of Spanish, Italian or German to converse with them on the understanding that the general sense will be grasped. Speaking ‘a little’ of any language generally demands months of study and is still a long way from a basic command.
But then the Irish are very fond when abroad of claiming that they speak the ancestral tongue when they think there is nobody around to test them. When that fails, they can always fall back on ‘The Fields of Athenry’, that staple of traditional Irish culture, dating all the way back to 1978.
Seanachie - We had the English-speakers topic rolling around here for a while. (It started as a discussion on txt-speak and how it got to this is another story. Well that’s blogs for ya). It was well put by An Cainteoir Dóchais in this comment.
There is a tab above, Mo Rogha, where I declare my favourite blog-post of the week. I don’t have one for my favourite post-comment, but I may have start one - When that fails, they can always fall back on ‘The Fields of Athenry’, that staple of traditional Irish culture, dating all the way back to 1978, has me in tears laughing.