Post by Darren Kearney in Welcome to PROCJAM 2019!

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Darren Kearney5 years ago (8 edits) (+2)

For Procjam, I am making a scripting language that uses the language of Irish (Gaelige) for it's reserved words, and support for unicode characters in identifiers. I have named it Cód (sounds like "code", and handily means the same thing, probably one of those "new" irish words :P). I can already feel the heritage coursing through my veins, some spirit of ancient Gaelic folklore is being channeled through me, into my laptop and now into your face.

You may ask, why bother making a new scripting language?
I'll answer with a spicy-hot take of a question: Why bother speaking Irish?

The reason for making this language is personal - I was born and grew up in Ireland, and have a strange relationship with the Irish language. I learned Irish at school (very poorly, never having actual conversation in class, only rote learning and studying prose, boring!) though I never used it in real life in Ireland - because everyone around me in my life speaks English.

Where can you find people who speak Irish?

The Irish language is mostly kept alive in rural parts of Ireland called the Gaeltacht, which are designated by government as Irish-speaking regions, and you must speak Irish to live there. Some school children travel there to learn Irish for two weeks over the summer, and report that they have a great time while actually learning Irish properly for the first time in there lives as they are immersed in the language for the first time.

Is the Irish language an endangered language?

Irish is an official language of the Republic of Ireland, so the government is forced to produce a copy of everything it does through Irish and English (also an official language), and have some government staff that speak Irish. There are also initiatives to fund projects that have something to do with the Irish language, mostly television/radio/animation/theatre. There might be some Irish language computer games out there, but at the moment at least they are unlikely to have been funded!

I don't have any interest in being a politician or working in education, so the Irish language has no economic impact on my life really. If I may be lucky enough to live to old age, I could live each day through all of that time without speaking Irish or knowing Irish and that would have no affect on my life. This, to me personally, is very sad. While it seems, to me at least, that the Irish language may be gaining a little popularity in recent years (with language learning apps and better education techniques), I would label it's vitality as being a language on life-support. I do not like that.

So I asked myself this question: "What would make Irish relevant for me?" and the answer is simple, use it as a means to learn more about game development and computer science in general. What better way to do that then create an Irish programming language? (If you can think of another way that is better or easier, please let me know!)

While I learned some Irish in school, I've mostly forgotten them, and whatever I think I remember is probably wrong anyway. There are some concepts that I think are unique to the Irish language that I would like to try and translate into some concepts in the scripting language - like when a person describes that they feel an emotion, the literal translation of the Irish language equivalent makes little sense in English because you have the emotion "on" you. The way people speak English in Ireland actually has a bunch of these concepts borrowed/inherited directly from Irish, which makes sense because they are the same people who were forced to speak English. Some academics even study these linguistic differences and have termed the English dialects spoken in Ireland as Hiberno-English .

By making Cód, my first time making programming language and having Irish syntax, I get these two benefits:

I will learn a good deal about how programming languages work. Fantastic.
I will be forced to learn at least a few Irish words and phrases that convey programming syntax; things like functions, loops and conditionals.

There is also a slight chance that somebody else on this planet may find it entertaining, if not useful, to use Cód to learn some Irish, or have practical use for the Irish language, like me. Time will tell!

If you are interested in following this project, or my other projects, you can get updates sent to your inbox. No spam. Only little letters to you about what I'm up to. http://eepurl.com/gINKQj

Schmidt Workshops5 years ago

Sounds like a really cool project! The idea of a language on life support does indeed make me feel sad. Although, so far, it has not effected me enough to do anything as an English speaker of German origin, I don't feel even enough connection to German to really learn it any deeper than I already do. I suppose it might be different if I was one of a few remaining Germans or something...

Darren Kearney5 years ago (3 edits) (+1)

Ah ye. That's the way we're collectively headed I suppose. English is the language of trade in the "west" and also the language of technology. My view of the language being on life support is likely uncomfortable and inflammatory to a lot of folks in Ireland and abroad who speak it. If you look at the census data from 2011 you will see that while the majority of the Republic of Ireland report to have some knowledge of Irish, only a small minority report to using Irish daily. I think it tells you a lot about the attitudes - people like to think they know Irish when they don't really. Only a few thousand people filled in their census for using Irish. The Bank of Ireland offers Irish as a language for their ATM's, and report less than 1% usage of this feature. I know I used it out of curiosity a few times, but I didn't understand it - I used my memory of the English version UI to actually get cash out.

It is a sensitive topic in Ireland. The Irish language is wrapped up in Irish identity. During British occupation the language was made illegal. This obviously had a terrible effect of the language. Coupled with the economic incentive of speaking English and you get the destruction of the native language pretty quick. A lot of effort has been put in to preserve the Irish language since the establishment of the Irish state, with varying degrees of effort and success.

Opinions that express any negativity towards Irish or it's demise are often taken as an attack and can cause a defensive reaction in native speakers. I expect that my words here would be hurtful to many though I feel like I'm laying out the state of the language in the country in a real way, at least for millennial folks, and my gripe is mostly that the curriculum in compulsory Irish education failed me. I didn't speak Irish in Irish classes - I wrote it, and made a half-arsed attempt to learn the rules, but was never in a situation where we would be having a chat in Irish. For my Irish oral exam on the Leaving Cert, I took grinds outside of school where I prepared a few paragraphs of fluff about my life and interests and some vague notions about current affairs and simply learned it rote. When the examiner asked me a question I just paused for a moment, then continued on my rant. I passed the exam. I can probably order a cup of tea in Irish and say that it's raining outside, apart from that my Irish is non-existant.

There's a lot of baggage, things are looking kind of bleak for it's future if you peal back a layer of politeness about it, and the government heads like to stick their fingers in their ears and shout "THIS IS FINE!" to any narrative that says otherwise.

For example, the minister for the Gaeltacht (or maybe the previous one?) did not speak Irish so had to learn it (sometimes they said things that were unintentionally hilarious to Irish speakers!). They also would not accept the realities faced by the language, they only ever painting a positive picture - as if that would somehow make things better. A politician or two called this out regularly with the facts, but were always met with a sort of "I don't know what you are talking about, it's all doing fine, great even!" - so no real action could be ever be taken. Eww, politics. My heart goes out to anyone who is wrestling to make changes within this political system, it's gravity setting is way too high.

I would say that there is a cohort of people who speak Irish with strong nationalist identity or patriotism, and feel hard done by having to speak English in their own country to their own people in order to be understood. I'm not a native speaker, though I clearly have an interest in the language I am quite embarrassed by not being able to speak it. People are very quick to remark if you are incorrect, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can feel like a gate-keeping thing. For example, native Irish speakers can easily detect if someone has learned to speak Irish in school - because the person who learned it in education will have learned a sort of "standardised" Irish (even though they study three different dialects), they will not have common slang, and will often resort to direct translations of English phrases into Irish, that don't really make sense in Irish (Béarlachas). So you see, I find it quite intimidating to speak to a native speaker; I feel like a cringeworthy yuppie who's crashing a party trying to be cool, earnestly saying all the slang words wrong.

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