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chowmama

(983 posts)
Wed Dec 24, 2025, 10:07 PM 2 hrs ago

This links into the 'offbeat Christmas carols' thread

but doesn't quite go there.

The Twin Cities in Minnesota has a very active Irish language club. I and a singing group I was in had a lasting effect on the beginners' class with a Christmas carol.

Irish has a process called 'eclipsis' which, under the right grammatical circumstances, substitutes consonants at the beginnings of words. It's important to know when this happens and what letter replaces which (and which letters are left alone). One of the teachers does rapid-fire drills in this, using Irish words, English words, nonsense words, anything, to help remember the correct replacement on the fly.

We wanted to tweak him a little at the annual Christmas party and decided to eclipse a carol - Twelve Days of Christmas. Every single word that begins with a consonant, grammatical placement be damned. And we worked on it till we could do it really fast.

There were three groups at the party - the teachers, the students, and the students' plus ones. The teachers were all laughing uproariously. (The one from the U of MN was standing at the bar and had to hang on to keep from hitting the floor.) The different levels of student had increasing looks of anxiety. The plus ones all thought we were drunk.

The Eclipsed Twelve Days is now a permanent method of teaching eclipsis in the Twin Cities. If you can do this at speed, eclipsis no longer holds any fear for you. But you'll still have to explain it to the plus ones.

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