Polyglot keeps endangered tongues flapping

By Stephen McKinley

You’ve had your fill of Guinness and you’ve been to Gaelic Park. You’ve tracked down a steady supply of soda farls. You can find live traditional music, seven nights a week. Is that as Irish abroad as you can get?

You could always become a G’ilgeoir — an Irish speaker. There are many opportunities for picking up some Irish in and around New York, not least in the comfort of Rocky Sullivan’s, where you can pick up conversational Irish with Derry’s own Liam MacNiallais, or through the Echo’s own highly regarded Macallai column, written by Barra O Donnabhain.

If you want to continue to stretch your Gaelic learning, then a good bet is probably Alexi Kondratiev, whose name suggests that he’s most definitely not from Derry.

Although he was born in the United States, Kondratiev has a Russian father and a French mother, and grew up in several parts of the world. His schooling was mostly in French, but as a teenager in the 1960s, he lived in the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking part of Ireland, mainly on Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands.

The experience gave him a passion for Irish that has strengthened over the years, and he has been teaching Irish at the Irish Arts Center since the mid-1980s.

"I also teach Celtic mythology," the Brooklyn-based Kondratiev said, "and early Celtic Christian history."

Language is clearly something he relishes. He reveals that he also speaks Welsh and Scots Gaelic. And Manx, the language peculiar to the Isle of Man, and also Cornish and Breton. Add in Russian, English and French, and a few other European languages, and you’re well past the 10-language mark.

Modestly, he admits that he knows a few more. Native Indian languages from both North and South America, all of them self-taught. Then there are some languages of the Pacific Islands, such an Hawaiian and Maori, that he knows as well.

"Their situation is very much like Irish," he said. "They are languages that are in danger. They are shrinking, in many ways." It’s true, he admits, he has always had a flair for picking up languages.

As a result, his preferred method of teaching is a very precise one. At the Irish Arts Center, he offers four levels of classes, from beginners upward, in eight-week cycles.

"A lot of other methods can teach you expressions and sayings, but it is still difficult to put together a sentence in Irish," he said.

Using Progress in Irish, an authorative textbook first published in the 1950s in Ireland, Kondratiev says he prefers to teach slowly and methodically.

"If you learn this way, you learn the langauge at a very deep level," he said.

He freely admits that while the interest in learning Irish in New York is consistently high, many people are daunted by the initial difficulties they face, with a langauge that is profoundly different from English.

"A lot of them get scared at the early stages, and much of a teacher’s talent is getting around that fear," he said.

It has been said that the Irish language, depending on how you look at it, is frustratingly oblique or refreshingly different from English. Kondratiev prefers that latter view.

"There is no verb for ‘to have,’ " he said. "You have to say things are ‘at you’ or ‘on you’ for some experience or feeling of which you have no control. ‘With you,’ means something that is part of your tastes and personality."

One of the first hurdles he guides pupils over is Irish spelling, which "is very arbitrary, but it is, however, completely phonetic. Learn the letter combinations, and you have it."

It was the famously peculiar spelling that attracted another non-Irish lover of the language in New Yorker, Deborah Peetz.

"When I saw that ‘bh’ was pronounced ‘v’, I was fascinated," she said. One terrible winter several years ago, she was trapped inside because of the weather and saw the president of New York University announcing the opening of Ireland House — "one thing led to another, and soon I was practicing my Irish with the gay Irish group, the Lavender and Green alliance," Peetz said, laughing.

Peetz and others say that it is the practicing that matters, once one has struggled to master the basics and gained some fluency. Kondratiev says the main problem is finding opportunities to use and practice your Irish. It’s a problem that other Irish teachers, including Liam MacNiallais, acknowledge.

"It’s most definitely true, if you don’t use it, you lose it," MacNiallais said.

Luckily, Kondratiev says, there are immersion weekends where "G’ilgeoirs" can spend a few days speaking nothing but Irish.

"The difficulty is finding venues and contexts in which to use it," he said.

What happens, however, if you want to tell your fellow Irish speakers that you work in information technology, or that you’ve just bought a microwave oven, or use some other 20th Century word for which there may be no equivalent in Irish? Kondratiev isn’t fazed.

"There are commissions [in Ireland] for terminology, who come up with translations for new, technological words, which have been gradually integrated into Irish dictionaries," he said. Of these, the most comprehensive and authoritative is the O’Donnell dictionary.

Out of the 20 or so pupils Kondratiev has in each new class, most, he says, are Irish Americans. He has also had some Irish-born pupils who are picking up the language or brushing up their knowledge, then sometimes non-Irish people who simply want a new and different challenge.

He has even had some Afro-Carribeans who may have had an Irish ancestor or two, such as Monserratians — Monserrat has been called the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean. With this diversity, Kondratiev and other teachers tend not to focus on perfecting any kind of standard Irish accent — after all, there isn’t one.

The story is told of the Irish missionary from Belfast who arrived in Venezuela in the 1950s without a word of Spanish. As quickly as he could, he found someone to teach him the language — a Dublin-born priest, as it happened.

Years passed by before a colleague plucked up the courage to tell him that despite his fluency, he’d been speaking Spanish all that time with . . . a Dublin accent.

For Irish learners in New York, rest assured — it won’t matter if your copla folca comes with a delicate hint of Russian.