Well there is the metric ton of recordings and written material housed in UCD's folkloric archives.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

If one could get access to all the material collected during the start of the last century that is held by government departments, some old dialects could nearly be reconstructed.

However they're still digitising the material from the National Folklore Collection on http://www.duchas.ie/ga so we could be waiting a few years yet before the older collections see the light of day.

From an archaeological perspective there is a lot to be said for leaving things as they are, rather than tampering with historic records and finding out later that you've inadvertantly destroyed some of the content.

Noise reduction technology is evolving constantly. Sometimes it works better to clean from a reproduction of the originals than to "reclean" something that has been "cleaned" by an older technology.

We should be thankful that we have now have this technology literally at our fingertips. There's no longer any excuse not to get in and do it yourself (and hopefully upload it for the benefit of others) instead of complaining about how someone didn't do all the hard work for you.

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[hr]Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher[/hr]
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

I agree with you completely Breandán. These resources are priceless artefacts of our heritage and should be well looked after. However, forgive my ignorance, but would simply digitising the records damage the physical records?


That said, I'd rather my taxes were spent making use of these recordings than translating Legalese documents into unreadable Irish for no one to read.

No, of course not. Digitising the records will preserve them - the physical tapes will degrade over time. But as An Lon Dubh says there is a mountain of material. It is a mammoth task on its own (I know I have a cassette collection myself and I tried digitising one album and it took several hours.)

We should be thankful if they get even some of the physical records transferred over to the computer before they get irretrievable lost.

Decisions have to be made as to what format to convert them to - different formats will become obsolete or even incompatible over time.

So, even after they digitise them, they will have to redo them in future as computers evolve. It will be an ongoing process.

Think of what happened to floppy disks, cassette and video tapes. These themselves have become museum pieces. Some of the older technologies like wax cylinders and steel tape will actually outlast the latter day plastic media.


Granted, this is a much better use of funds. In fact, even without cleaning the recordings, it is clear a lot more funding needs to be made available to get the job done before we lose the recordings altogether.

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[hr]Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher[/hr]
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

Go raibh míle maith agat as do fhreagair a Bhreandáin.

I can understand the huge task of digitising them, sure even trying to scan a few old photographs into a computer can be frustrating, never mind trying to digitise a huge amount of old recordings and trying to get information about the speaker on each one. As learners of Irish we should be very grateful for the Doegen site. Compared to ten years ago, there is now a wealth of Gaeilge on the internet, the majority of it free to access. You're right, we should focus on the facilities available to us online rather than giving out about what's not there.

Funnily enough, something I think is cool, is that if society was wiped out, the last human recordings to survive would be Sumerian* clay tablets. All computer records would last no longer than roughly a 1,000 years (maximum ideal lifetime until the magnetic energy responsible for the hard drive states is lost).

*Even the later Akkadian tablets would be slightly more shortly lived, since they were baked and imprinted on differently.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

Still, getting all the stuff done would be a very important milestone

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__̴ı̴̴̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡*̡̡ ̴̡ı̴̴̡ ̡̡͡|̲̲̲͡͡͡ ̲▫̲͡ ̲̲̲͡͡π̲̲͡͡ ̲̲͡▫̲̲͡͡ ̲|̡̡̡ ̡ ̴̡ı̴̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡̡.___