Sober wrote:...that's not the most useful language in the world. Unless you live in a little Irish village in the middle of nowhere, that is.
An unkind person could say the same of the Quebecois dialect of French that many Contimental Francophones seem to find quaint and retrograde.
Irish is a living language; in use daily by tens of thousands of people, known by hundreds of thousands, and being learnt by anything up to a million globally. It is not quantity, but quality, that is the issue here.
The politicising of the language itself, in a modern context, can be laid at the feet of many people, mainly Irish nationalists; but, I restate, it is a living language, not a cultural curiosity trapped in amber spoken only by leprechaun-hunters and wild-eyed hazel-wand bearing mystics. Mind you, there's a few of them about in the language movement. Still...
Learning any language gives the student an insight into the mindset or gestalt of the culture in question. I originally set out to learn Irish purely for the sake of enjoying singing in the language and more fully appreciating the sheer beauty of the tongue. What a long journey of learning and growing it has been over the last ten years... this is definitely a language that has endured deliberate suppression and disapproval, and many efforts made to 'save' it (a confused concept in itself), or at least nurture and sustain it, will often be coloured by a certain misguided 'fanaticism'. Especially when you get governments involved. Anyway, in ainm Dé, I'm going to try and stop foaming now... tá tinneas chinn orm, agus pian i mo chroí. Slán agaibh.