“Fhir a' bhàta, na hóro eile…”, - “Oh, well, what else could it be?!”, you might say now…or you might not, since I myself have heard not so many stories of getting acquainted with such a lad, as Scottish Gaelic, the language my sad love story to which I'd like to tell you about in this post.
Love at first hear
One fine day I was surfing the web when those heavenly melodious sounds flew from Caren Matson's mouth right into my ears , and I realized - that was it, I could not restrain, I let my guard down and somewhere in my knee-cap sounded "Alba gu bràth!".
What is it like? I want to know everything!!!
From that day on my obsession with Gaelic showing itself in maniac downloading texbooks, listening to folk-bands singing in Scottish Gaelic and a non-closing tab of a page full of a little insane out of date dialogues in Gaelic broke out. I'd been digging so deep, that it ended up on history of Picts!
A thousand and one fact about Gaelic
Have you ever known there is a language in which there are no words for "Yes" and "No"? Yes, it's Gaelic! It may seem to be puzzling, but the equivalents do exist - affirmative and negative forms of verbs. But this is not the only surprising peculiarity of Scottish Gaelic, and now I'm not talking about spelling and phonetics according to which in a 12-letter word only may be pronounced only 5.
First contacts
Having learned the ropes of reading in Gaelic by the sweat of my brow, I went looking for Gaelic lovers floating around the Internet. Imagine my surprise, when I learned that a little more than 92 000 people in the whole world! speak Scottish Gaelic, and each time I tried to speak it with Scots, the reaction to it was like, "What the...?".
"You've never been so nuts about a guy, you wanna laugh, you wanna cry..."
Like a schoolgirl having a crush or like a widow unable to set her soul free from feelings to a beloved man, dreaming is what I had left for me. Dreaming about silent, breathtaking, striking with the beauty of their severity landscapes; about women with ringing voices covered in long tartan cloth and lion-hearted men dancing to the merry sounds of fiddles and pipes - " 'Si Mórag, 'Si Mórag, 'Si Mórag a rinn a 'bhanais...", played in my head; dreaming about a tiny village where no one speaks English and where I might find a place for me and, finally, someone to speak Gaelic!..
The lonely swan in a pond of love
So here I am, floating on the surface of my unshared admiration... A sad story it was, you say? I say, it was a story of exploring a new world, a new language, paradoxically tender for its origin, of course only by means of books and articles, but all that triggered an extremely wide range of emotions in me - I'll never forget myself weeping because of the feeling like songs are streaming right into my soul.
For some Scotish Gaelic may sound odd in a speech, but in a song it sounds like a love confession.
So what if my love to it is unshared. Is fheàrr Gàidhlig bhriste na Gàidhlig sa chiste.
