Home sweet Ballinafil…
The girls are nearly home, and this chapter is near its end. Please call back next week for the last page of this chapter.
Bata Neart
Irish Magical Girls!
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Home sweet Ballinafil…
The girls are nearly home, and this chapter is near its end. Please call back next week for the last page of this chapter.
“Nope! But we’ll have fun trying.”
What a perfect way to sum up Aoife. ^_^
Ha! Amusing Captcha: R6D4 But I needed a protocol droid!
Ahhh, Aoife, how positive you are! At least Ashling isn’t asking about how much trouble they could end up in. She’d probably like that answer even less.
@Kessy: I was hoping people would react that way 😀
Originally I was going to write: “Nope! But we’ll have fun failing!” I changed it because that seemed too negative for Aoife to say 🙂
@Jen: I think Ashling dreads dealing with it, and therefore doesn’t. Far less painful to walk for hours back to the school than to try and explain Aine to her mother 🙂
Why not just…. Call her to say they’re ok? 😮
@ Hector: They know that Ashling’s mom is going to rip their heads off the next time they talk to her. A lot of adults would deal with that by just avoiding it as long as humanly possible. They’re teenagers.
@ Rawr: “Nope! But we’ll have fun failing!” also sounds like something Aoife would say, but I think that “trying” is better than “failing” here because I think Aoife would only say “failing” if it was really certain they were going to fail.
Ah, but would Aoife ever really be certain they would fail? 😛
@Hector: Pretty much as Kessy wrote, they’re teenagers and they want to avoid the unpleasantness as long as they can. I’m an old dog now, but in the 10-15 years since I was a teenager myself, I can still remember how I’d react in situations like this, and I think I’d probably do the same 🙂
@Kessy: Aoife probably would say both, but I don’t think she’d like the idea of failing Áine. She doesn’t want to leave her alone to deal with the modern world, and so failure isn’t really an option. She does however expect that they won’t do this very well 😀
@Azrael: I think Aoife’s general approach to life is to go with the flow, so I don’t think she’s ever certain of anything 😀
Well, I was thinking that Aoife would say something like that in a different situation where you could be more certain about the outcome and there weren’t terribly bad consequences to failing. Like if Ashling asked her if she thought they could finish a quest in a video game or something.
Although I get the impression that Aoife tends to look at most things in life that don’t have grave consequences as a game. Like, “A Distraction! By Aoife ^_^”
Well, if you can’t be reassuring, at least you can be honest.
I look at the second panel & see Aine’s face. Let’s face reality: she’s beginning to experience panic & great fear. She’s realizing she’s not in her time but Al she has seen is that she is NOT in the Ireland of her time but a completely different time/place.
Seeing absolute wonders such as the changed scenery, the strange new roads & sidewalks, the bus, different kinds of lights to the distance: all this I see in Aine’s face.
Would I feel the same? Well.. …..
Jim
Also….I believe it’s on the girls’ best interest to find a confederate who is fluent in Gaelic such as their coach or Aiofe’s mom to help cumin are with Aine.
J
….communicate with Aine…..
(Oops! Stupid autocorrect!)
Jim
@James: Interesting auto-correct indeed 😀 I’m glad you spotted Aine’s expression in Panel 2. That pretty much what I was going for 😉
Poor old Aine is in for a rough time while she transitions into the 21st Century, but at very least she already has a pair of new friends that will help.
Sharon Conners is more likely going to be suspicions of this new ‘student’ than help be a translator for a pair of her more difficult students. Luckily the girls have friends to call on for help. All of this will covered in the next chapter.
As for Rebecca Connolly….well….I haven’t really decided what her level of Irish ability will be. So that is still in the air…
@melaredblu: …and in Aoife’s case, be brutally honest with a smile 😀
@Keesy: That distraction earned Aoife 200XP…which got her to Level 21! With each level she gets a new bandau in her cabinet 😀
Well, let’s look at the facts: Aoife has a fairly decent knowledge of basic gaelic…enough to communicate with Aine.
I can’t picture Sharon not having regular ability with the old tongue if her daughter’s semi-fluency is any indication.
In a recent Father Brown mystery one episode showed a women who couldn’t read English nor write it, only speak it. This episode was portrayed as occurring in the early/mid-1950’s.
Of course, Mark, you’d say (along with the rest of your Irish readers) that Mr Ryan’s great great grandson / Mr Roney’s g-g-g-great grandso should’ve seen to’ve retained some knowledge of Gaelic…..well, I remember my granpa’s shaleighly there on his ranch….
BUT most folks here in the US don’t keep tabs on their ancestral tongues. However, I’ve heard that in many countries there ARE a great many who are trying to revive knowledge, spoken & written, of the old tongues.
Personally, I’d be in a quandry because due to the multiplicity of countries/ethnic groups from 4 continents, which one do I learn.
;-D
Anywho…..just my thoughts on the communication issue.
Jim
@Jim: I haven’t revealed any details of Aoife’s family yet. So far I’ve only shown Ashling’s mother 🙂
Coach Sharon is not related to the girls, but is Colaiste Muire’s main PE instructor who also teaches Maths and Biology. She’s also a resident prefect and will often take charge of the school’s security. In the fine tradition (or trope) of having a burly PE teacher in a high-school setting, Sharon currently serves as an antagonist to girls, and will be trying to thwart their magical hi-jinks. Thus she’s not going to be all that helpful at the moment 🙂
That Father Brown mystery you mentioned reminds me of various rumors and half-legends of contemporary mono-lingual Irish speakers in Ireland. Right up to as recent as the 1970’s there has been some evidence to suggest that there were some people on the Aran Islands who could only speak Irish, and had no knowledge of the English language. This is incredibly rare to find today, and is likely impossible now. Rumor has it that the last mono-lingual Irish speaker died in the 1980’s.
This was made possible by the fact that pockets of western Ireland, known as the Gaeltacht, have Irish established as the primary language. English signage is usually removed entirely in favor of Irish-only information. The rest of Ireland has dual-lingual signage as required by law (very similar to Canada’s regulations regarding French signage). In practice however, the Gaeltacht is dual-lingual as it is impossible in today’s world to isolate any part of Ireland from the English language. Thus, mono-lingual Irish speakers don’t really happen anymore.
That brings me to a plot issue with Aine. She is a mono-linigal Irish-speaking teenager, which although possible in modern Ireland, is so astronomically unlikely that it may as well be counted as impossible.
If you do decide to take up Irish, you might be surprised to learn that a very large percentage of active Irish speakers actually live in the Eastern US. So there might actually be a chance that you’d find someone to use your ‘cupla focal‘ with 🙂
Probably to be ignored for story convenience, but languages do drift. While Gaelic has not been as influenced as other languages, it still had a thousand years of English influence as well as other tongues, and back in the old day, there were loads of varieties of Gaelic. Since we are apparently dealing with the losing side in an old Irish battle, their particular variety of Gaelic likely died out long ago.
Of course, we want the girls to be able to talk, so we have to reject any inconvenient facts that make that impossible, but some miscommunication might be story useful.