Here's How ::: Ireland's Political, Social and Current Affairs Podcast

Peter Boland, as well as running Cases.ie is the director of the Alliance for Insurance Reform. ***** There’s a lot of people talking about the other thing, but I’m sure you’ve heard enough about it by now, and there’s nothing extra that I can say that hasn’t already been said, so let’s talk about something […]

Michael O’Regan is journalist and former parliamentary correspondent of The Irish Times. He says he doesn’t have a book for me to plug, ‘yet’. ***** I managed to grab an interview with Sinn Féin’s Aengus Ó Snodaigh at the election count in the RDS. To put this in context, Aengus Ó Snodaigh got one of […]

Colin Harvey is Professor of Human Rights Law in the School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, a Fellow of the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, and an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Irish Studies. In November, his group, Ireland’s Future sent a letter to An Taoiseach calling for […]

Seán Fleming, currently Fianna Fáil TD for Laois, if the gods of the ballot box smile on him he might become the Fianna Fáil TD for the reconstituted constituency of Laois Offaly. He’s been a TD since 1997 and for 15 years before that he was Financial Director of Fianna Fáil at national level. Gavin […]

Steve Garner is a researcher at the department of Social Science at Cardiff University. The BBC Anylisis programme that he appeared in is available here.

*****

You're used to me

spouting on here based on not much more than my own prejudice, but here’s a

topic that I am actually qualified to talk about. I studied linguistics, and I

have quite a bit of experience in language learning.

And anyone who has

learnt a second language – I’ll even count National School Irish in there –

anyone who has learnt a second language will know that the words and phrases in

one language often don’t map exactly to the ones in another. A language is a

complete speech convention, it’s not a code. Things work differently from one

language to another. Some languages have several non-interchangeable words

where another language has just one or maybe none, and this can make problems

for a language learner who hasn’t grown up with the experience of knowing when

to use which word.

And this means that

people familiar with language learners will quickly learn to spot what is the

native language of the learner by the mistakes that they make in their target

language, the language they’re learning. There’s even a name for it, it’s

called native language interference.

Believe it or not, this is useful when it comes to understanding the comments

in the Daily Mail.

The comment was from

someone with the username DMreader and gave their location as Lovely England,

it was on an article about a request from a Russian-backed separatist in

Ukraine to Nigel Farage to support his cause.

Articles, in case

you’re not a linguist, are words like a

and the. Actually, if you remember

any of your Irish, you will be familiar with this. Irish has a definite

article, an, the equivalent of the, like we say ‘An Taoiseach’. But Irish has no indefinite article, no equivalent

for a or an. So, if you want to say ‘I

ate the apple’ you say ‘D'ith mé an

t-úll’; but if you want to say ‘I ate

an apple’ you say ‘D'ith mé úll’.

There is no translation of a or an, you just leave it out.

It’s easy to leave out

a word that you don’t have a translation for, but if you’re an language

learner, it’s much trickier to work out when to use words in your target

John McGuirk is the founder and editor of Gript. John referred to the cost of building passive homeshere. In our discussion I mentioned an article falsely claiming that hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia showed scientists ‘plotting to manipulate data, … suppress evidence … and boycott … divergent […]

Paul Murphy was an MEP for the Socialist party, since then he’s been elected and 2014 and 2016 as a TD for what became the Solidarity party. He has now founded the party Rise. In our discussion he mentioned the book The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation […]

Paul Cullen is the Health Editor of the Irish Times. His article headlined Almost 70% of cyclists without helmet at time of head trauma, appeared on the front page of IT last month. The article was sharply criticised in online discussion, including in this article by Cian Ginty. In our discussion, I mentioned a number […]

The Social Fabric podcast is created by Andrea Splendori, and I’m sharing it in the Here’s How feed to give you a chance to hear a sample episode. If you like it, you can subscribe on his website here.

Dr Katherine O’Keefe is an author, and the director of training and a management consultant with Castlebridge, a data privacy and information governance consultancy. Our discussion referred to a twitter thread by Katherine and another by solicitor Simon McGarr. ***** It’s probably just dumb luck, but I made two pretty accurate predictions about the byzantine […]