Jason Bond
£8.50
This novel is part of the Arcos Series of Gaelic folk tales for beginning and intermediate language learners. Contains an extended and optimized Gaelic-English glossary.
In stock
Arcos Publishing, 2023. 82 pages.
A short novel for Gaelic learners.
Calum is a fisherman, but he earns hardly enough to make a living for himself and his father, let alone to pay the loans for his house and boat. When he meets a man who makes a lot of money from the sale of seal skins, he decides to become a seal hunter too. All seems to go well, until one day, a seal disappears, with Calum’s knife still in him.
Seonag Monk
In 1940, in Barra in the Outer Hebrides, an 18-year-old woman, Flòraidh, is persuaded to leave her island home when she learns that her stepmother intends to marry her off to the local shopkeeper. She follows her enigmatic friend Lavinia to the city and changes her identity to Laura, like a butterfly, leaving her chrysalis behind, as they join the war effort.
£9.99
Michael (verified owner) –
A follow-up to the first volume ” Ròna agus MacCodruim “.
A great book for beginners. A simple text in big characters of the traditional ” selkie ” story. Words and expressions are repeated to allow them to ” sink ” into the memory, but somehow without the story seeming repetitive !
It might be an idea to start with ” Ròna… ” for the sake of story / plot following / understanding, but it is not necessary, especially not for the level of Gaelic, as this book assumes no / next to no previous knowledge ( see below ).
There are as embellishments a few black and white pictures.
There are explanatory notes at the bottom of the pages of the more difficult expressions, with translations.
Also at the back is an extensive glossary including all the words, even the simplest grammatical words in all their forms.
Well worth getting, even for the ” not quite starting / intermediary level reader.
The other book by Jason Bond “Deirdre agus an Rìgh ” is both more advanced, with some missing vocabulary in the glossary, and the story is not related to these two volumes but is separate.
>>> I went through the process of ” ignoring ” my Gaelic, and taking the arduous role of checking ( nearly ) every word in the glossary, I think every word from the most basic to more advanced ones are included in all their mutated forms: consonnant lenition, ” h-… ” initial aspiration, ” t-… ” form and near end / end syllable slendering.
>>>It is a tribute to the popularity of this book that it is, for the third time at least, at the present time, out of stock. May it come back soon!