JK Rowling just dropped a big revelation – Hogwarts had a Gaelic Medium Unit

mathan-na-mara:

I have mixed feelings about this. The optimist in me is pleased to have support for GME in such a popular franchise. However, the realist in me is annoyed by the implication that Gaels only were assigned to Ravenclaw. Furthermore, I’m put off by the fact that there were very few known Scots, even less of them Gaels, at Hogwarts. Not to mention Rowling’s anti-indyref stance which naturally goes hand-in-hand with Unionism, Anglocentrism, and anti-Celtic/Gaelic sentiment.

JK Rowling just dropped a big revelation – Hogwarts had a Gaelic Medium Unit

sugarmoonaki:

“I am now 73 years old. I was at Indian residential school from age 11-15. I had to work in the infirmary, where there were many sick and hungry children. I’d steal food like peanut butter and bread to feed them. A lot of kids died there. I had to handle the dead children — wrapping them to be buried. Once I got caught speaking my native language. I wasn’t aware my language was different. My punishment was having four fingernails pulled out. At residential school we all received numbers. I was known as #702. But my name is Sphenia. It’s an Ojibwa name that means ‘on my way’. For many years now I’ve worked as an advocate for abused children. I started a school for indigenous kids in Vancouver called Spirit Rising Cultural Survival School.”

Source

ayeforscotland:

elisedelaserree:

omgscotlandthebestweecountry:

ayeforscotland:

merzet:

thebibliosphere:

trans-sister-radi0:

thebibliosphere:

tienriu:

thebibliosphere:

folly-of-alexandria:

justlookatthosesausages:

This movie already is the most hilarious animated crossover ever made in history omg

@thebibliosphere

Sounds perfectly understandable to me.

She gie’d her mammy a cake, she turnt intae a big bear, and her old yin tried tae dae her in. If that’s no pure mess, I don’t know wut is. Simples.

I’ll be honest, I got the first part of that, and the last part.  But there is an entire sentence in the middle, that evidently is about her father trying to kill her mother, that sounds completely unintelligible to me.  I assumed it was another language – potentially Gaelic but honestly, I’ve never heard that spoken before so I was taking a guess there.

I watched Brave and had absolutely no trouble understanding the entire movie so they’re definitely increasing the accent here for comedic value.  But also it’s not just an accent – that second part of the first sentence isn’t understandable even transcribed.

I’m
a weird one though – I grew up in an asian country (not white), and
somehow despite multi-lingual parents and siblings (as is expected in
that asian country), my only and mother tongue is English.

It’s no Gaelic, it is however Scots 🙂

“Big Yin” is a common Glasgow term, and this is important, cause Billy Connolly who voiced her Da, is from Glasgow. It’s also the name was known by during his rise to fame, and is still affectionately known as “The Big Yin”.

It basically means “the big man” (note: a person does not need to be tall or large in stature to be called the big man, sometimes it can mean something else like “boss” or “strong personality”). So yea. Was a nice wee addition to her dialogue, though they’ve made her more Weegie for sure.

Are you saying “The Big Yin” could also translate into “Big Dick Energy”???

Abso-fucking-lutely.

@ayeforscotland

This is shite patter. The unintelligible accent patter whether it’s a heavy Indian accent, French accent, over the top German or Russian or whatever, it’s completely shite patter.

The BBC had a section asking Scottish people if they understood her accent. They literally were asking Scottish people if they understood Scots.

Get in the fucking sea.

BBC Scotland only did that because it’s heavily populated by people who were sent for elocution lessons to get rid of their accents by their parents, who were afflicted by the Scottish cringe.

The British establishment, as represented by BBC Scotland are at war with Scottish culture, over 300 years they’ve managed to severely curtail the use of Scots Gaelic, they already deride any who speaks Scots as unintelligent.

Here’s an anecdote from my childhood: I hail from Falkirk, born into a traditional working class family who speak predominantly broad Scots. When I started school my teacher told me to stop speaking like that, it’s slang, it’s not proper English I won’t speak to you or listen to you until you speak properly! This upset me, but of course I changed the way I spoke and I began to hate the way my parents and grandparents spoke. Fast forward three years, January 1994, and we’re handed out these sheets by our teacher that have lines of poetry, or so we’re told because I couldn’t make head nor tail of what was written on this sheet. She told us these were written by a very famous Scottish poet (I didn’t realise until this point we were actually Scottish, I thought we were British or English because everything, media, press was so British/English centred). She told us to learn these words and we would be expected to read these at a special school assembly. I was terrified. I’ve never been great with public speaking and I didn’t really fancy making a fool of myself in front of older pupils.

The night before the assembly, my Nan found me at the back of the sofa with this sheet, crying because I just couldn’t understand it. I told my Nan everything, she took the sheet off me and she read it aloud in Scots, not in Queens English and it made sense, I understood it, but I said

“I can’t read it like that!”

“How no?”

“Because that’s slang, not English”

My Nan was livid, she was raging about what they teach at that bloody school. It was my Nan that taught me to love my native tongue and the culture that goes with it, not the education system.

Not only did we have to read poems to the rest of the school but we had to write an essay on Burns and our experiences of his poems. I was quite honest about how big a struggle it was to disypher these poems and surprisingly got an A .

My point is, when I see the BBC Scotsplaining it reminds me of this time. We in Scotland live under a hail of English/British media and reference, we’re always the other, even in our own wee bit hill and Glen!

PREACH

If you can’t atleast take a guess at the slang words then sorry man that’s on you but she’s still speaking English, just in a different accent and this is something that scottish people get made of for a lot

It’s condescending af when you see scottish people on your own national news or whatever with fucking subtitles

Just a heads up, she’s speaking Scots, not English. The issue comes that Scots are continually portrayed as ‘Brutish’ to the point that Merida wouldn’t tone it down.

And for those who say ‘well she’s Scottish and from Celtic Scotland where they wouldn’t have spoken English’, it’s not like they’ve made Belle speak French or whatever.

mailidhonn:

mailidhonn:

Good evening everybody! Just in case you’d all thought I’d had enough and shut up about Gàidhlig I’m here to prove you wrong.

Today Edinburgh City Council posted about Gàidhlig, in Gàidhlig.

This is great and it’s wonderful to see, obviously.

Here are some of the responses.

Obviously there were Gàidhlig responses and several supportive English responses too. But I want to highlight some of what Gàidhlig speakers are subject to when the language is even used in a public sphere. Even just *seeing* it seems to set people off.

This has a very real impact on people, don’t think that it doesn’t. Someone please tell me why a language and culture deserves this much hatred on a regular basis? Do the native speakers of this language really deserve this being thrown at them?

Scotland’s a progressive and left wing nation, it welcomes all peoples, cultures and languages!

domhnall-na-feannaig:

domhnall-na-feannaig:

kyliaquilor:

If your language lost, it should die with dignity, not be put on artificial life-support because ‘reasons’

#Sorry but I have no sympathy for that fight#let the dead languages be dead#grumping#controversial opinions#because people always get annoyed with me when I say this#but Gaelic (for example) shouldn’t still exist

———–

Gaelic hasnt been lost.  It’s never died or been brought back.  There’s an unbroken line of native speakers going back to the beginning of the language.  That doesn’t seem like a ‘lost’ language to me.  Furthermore I’m not sure what ‘artificial life-support’ means in this context.  Gaelic is given funding for schools because there’s still native speakers of the language.  It’s no more artificial than money being given to schools for English language lessons.

If anything is ‘artificial’ its the imposition of a foreign language
(English) into a Gaelic majority zone and native speakers having to
fight for decades to be able to be taught in their own language.  Native speakers being forced to learn English to exist within their own regions because a central government would not allow services to be given in a people’s own language.

But then the clock only goes back so far with people who wish that minority languages would just die.  There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?

Don’t neglect the UK’s indigenous languages

elnas-studies:

viresqueacquiriteundo:

opalgemblog:

Signal boost for this! It’s the same in France. Most of french people don’t even know that their country is originally – and still is – a multilingual country. 

Yes,  Occitan, Catalan, Breton, Gallo, Flamand, Picard, Basque etc are still spoken. But France refuses to sign the European charter for minority languages. Good job destroying the cultural patrimony that we are so proud of.

“To say there is no worth in learning a language that isn’t economically
useful is like saying there’s no point in being friends with somebody
unless they’re going to help you get a better job. It’s a spectacular,
cynical miss of the point.
It’s also inaccurate.”

Don’t neglect the UK’s indigenous languages