Will's Class

Announcements

Reading Project for winter/spring

There is a classic adventure story for "adult learners", one of the very first written in that genre. This notorious epic is titled Dunmharú ar an DART, and at the Jan 9 class, we agreed that reading that would be a kick for the next couple of months.

For more about this project, including a plot summary in English in case you get behind, visit the "murder page."

New Intro Class

Just a note that Wes will be teaching a new Intro group Jan 23 - Feb 13, and there's a good chance we'll need to help with his students on that Feb 13th date.

Copula Materials

We'll review the copula when we get back, and finish up our exploration of this lovely feature of the Irish language. Here are the handouts in the series:

Two Flavors of Copula Statements. This is just a pattern recognition activity. If you don't see it, think about what kinds of words (part of speech) directly follow the copula (is) in each sentence.
That Is A ... This one introduced one of our "flavors", abairti aicme or classification sentences. These are sentences like "Rover is a dog" or "She is a politician," where the part that says what something is is indefinite (a politician, not the President). (Don't worry, what we consider "definite" is explained in the handout.) The copula is used to categorize the subject as an instance of some class or group or type of thing.
Is vs. Tá, Abairtí Aicme: We did some exercises that showed how similar concepts could be expresses using tá or is. The main goal was to become sensitive to the differences between saying Tá George Clooney go maith and Is aister maith é George Clooney. As with most of these handouts, these are the kinds of drills you can actually do very well, and to great advantage, on your own.
More mixing of Is vs. Tá, this time mostly in the form of question and answer activities.
We got to working with definite predicates, that is, two definite nouns in a copula sentence, with this handout. This is something of the nature, Is é Charlie Sheen an t-aisteoir is fearr.
Just to reinforce good question-answering habits, we did a 'sé vs. 'sea drill, here's the handout for it.
In "To é Or Not To é", I tried to sort out when you need to plug in an extra pronoun, when it isn't needed, where they go, etc.
Basic forms of the past/conditional copula (statement, question, but not relative clauses, etc.)
Summary of how to link nouns with the copula, including my attempt to create a graphic model that captures darned near everything.
"Fronting": how the copula is used, with a clause, to emphasize an element of a sentence. (In Irish, we do not use voice stress as we do in English.
The copula forms for indirect speech and similar structures are pretty straightforward.

And here's where you can find helpful coverage in your textbooks:

Nancy Stenson (Basic, Vol. I): Chapter #17 is the main stuff, with additional uses in C. 18.
Progress in Irish: Present/Future, Chapters 30, 33, 34, 42, 43, past/conditional 60 and 66.
O'Siadhail (Learning Irish): Chapters 11, 12, 20, 31 and 34.
Christian Brothers grammar: chapter 24 covers the copula and other defective verbs.
Nollaig Mac Congáil: I only have the Irish language version of the Leabhair Gramadaí, which covers the copula starting on p. 161. I'm pretty sure the English language Irish Grammar Book, is organized similarly.

Last Time (January 30) (back to top)

Everyone brought a synopsis, in Irish, of the first segment of our Dunmharú novel, and they were excellent. Tweaked a few things here and there, but very good writing in Irish!
Then we did the next little segment (summarized on our "murder page."). This took us through the first few words at the top of p. 11.
From there, we had a little discussion about how people like the hero, Niall. He didn't come off that well, Maureen thought him rather two quick to jump to judgements and complaints, and Johana thought he was lazy. Ruth went for more neutral ground. On the other hand, Niall got some sympathy, Glenn being reminded of commuting on the train in Chicago, and Maureen cutting Niall some slack for not liking being in a classroom with ill-behaved kids!
We finished the night with a good bit of comhrá, everyone had their bit of news to share.

For February 6

Just work on the next section of Dunmharú ar an DART with an aim to reaching the break in the middle of p. 13.

Previous Class (January 23)(back to top)

Most of the time was taken with our first segment of our murder mystery (see the murder page). Our approach was to go through it once fairly quickly to make sure we all understood the action, we all knew what happened, and then we crept through it word by word checking out genitives, verb-preposition combinations, and other odd creatures.
We also had time for a bit of conversation, which went very well.

Comments and questions are welcome via e-mail

(our e-mail address, broken down to reduce spam from 'spambots', is info at gaelminn dot org)