Joe,

My posts are never for the purpose of blowing my own trumpet and that 'smack on the wrist' hurts. You seem to imply that I use multiple posts for some nefarious purpose such as to stir things up or for the sake of keeping an argument going. But when I multiple-post to any thread I don't pretend to be different people. My purpose is always to get the truth out there as I see it.

Sounds to me like you have convinced yourself that Irish is a nuisance and ought to be stamped out. Many have been calling for that for a few centuries now and every now and then some brash young academic with a reputation to advance predicts that the language will be dead in 5,10, 20 [take your pick] years. But it still survives.

Fact is Joe, Irish uses one accent only, its for lengthening the vowels. It also sometimes leaves out a letter and indicates this by an apostrophe. But if 'diacritical marks' and 'the need for a standard transliteration' etc, is such a problem why not ban the use of the Irish language from the mudcat? In fact the French and German and Spanish and many other languages use more of that stuff than we Irish do, and so could also be banned?

Those of us who happen to love folk songs in several languages thought [mistakenly it seems] that the mudcat was the one-stop-shop for us. Of course, we can easily turn to websites in other language(s) but the people who usually post to the mudcat asking about Irish or 'Gaelic' songs are people who don't know the language very well so its they who would be disadvantaged by any bans.

People like me are merely trying to help out and if in doing so we advance the cause of our own language among people who have shown good will toward it, thats great.

Chris