Category: Irish (Gaeilge)

Sonic the happy Manx hedgehog

By Simon

Arkan sonney (hedgehog)

Arkan sonney is a Manx expression I came across today that means hedgehog, or literally “happy sucking pig”. Arkan is a diminutive form of ark (piglet), and sonney means ‘affluent, lucky, fortunate, happy’, and sounds a bit like sonic, hence the little of this post.

Another Manx word for hedgehog is graynoge, which is related to the Irish and Scottish Gaelic words for hedgehog: gráinneog and gràineag. The root of these words is gráin (abhorrence, disgust), so they mean ‘the abhorrent/disgusting one’. The Welsh word for hedgehog, draenog, possibly comes from the same root.

According to Wikipedia, arkan sonney, means literally ‘lucky urchin’ or ‘plentiful pig’, and in Manx folklore it refers to a type of supernatural creature that looks like a long-haired pig. It was said that if you caught an arkan sonney or ‘lucky piggie’, which tend to run away from people, you’ll be lucky and will find a silver piece in your pocket.

Sources: On-line Manx Dictionary, Irish Dictionary Online and MacBain Dictionary

Yn Chruinnaght

By Simon

Tomorrow I’m off to the Isle of Man for Yn Chruinnaght (‘the gathering’) – a celebration of Manx and Celtic music and culture featuring performers and participants from the Isle of Man, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. I’m really looking forward to it as it’s a great opportunity to see old friends and make new ones, and to hear, speak and/or sing in quite a few different languages – last year at Yn Chruinnaght I heard all six modern Celtic languages being spoken and sung, and spoke in four of them, and also in French and English.

I’ll be in the Isle of Man for a week, then I’m off to Gleann Cholm Cille in Donegal in Ireland for a summer school in Irish language and culture.

True sisters

By Simon

The word for sister in Irish is deirfiúr /dʲɾʲəˈfˠuːɾˠ/, and it has always puzzled me why this word is so different from the words for sister in the other Gaelic languages: piuthar /pju.ər/ in Scottish Gaelic and shuyr /ʃuːr/ in Manx.

Yesterday I discovered that deirfiúr is in fact a combination of deirbh /dʲɾʲəv/ (true) and siúr /ʃuːɾˠ/ (sister). The word siúr originally meant sister in Old Irish, but came to mean kinswoman. To distinguish sisters from other female relations, deirb (true) was added to it, so the Old Irish word for sister was derbṡiur, which eventually became the Modern Irish deirfiúr – the s at the beginning of siur became f after mo (my), do (your) and a (his), and this mutation became fixed.

In Scottish Gaelic the word for sister came from Old Irish as fiur, which became piur and eventually piuthar.

The Old Irish word siur (sister) comes from the Proto-Celtic *swesūr, from the Proto-Indo-European *swésōr, which is the root for the word for sister in many European languages.

The Irish word for brother, deartháir /dʲɾʲəˈhaːɾʲ/, has a similar history: it is a combination of deirbh (true) and bráthair (brother) and used to be written dearbh-bhráthair or dearbhráthair. It comes from the Old Irish derbráthair, from the Proto-Celtic *brātīr, from the Proto-Indo-European *bʰréh₂tēr. In Modern Irish bráthair means brother as in a male member of a religious community or monk. In Old Irish it meant brother, kinsman or cousin.

Sources: Blas na Gàidhlig: The Practical Guide to Scottish Gaelic Pronunciation, by Michael Bauer
and Wiktionary

Press

By Simon

One word for cupboard used mainly in Hiberno and Scottish English is press. When I encountered it in one of my Irish courses as a translation of the Irish word prios it puzzled me somewhat as I’d never come across this word used to mean cupboard before. Today I spotted the term linen press in a book I’m reading and thought I’d find out more about this word.

According to the OED, a press is a large cupboard, usually with shelves, especially one that lives in a wall recess, and is used to store such things as linen, clothes, books, crockery and other kitchen item. It is sometimes referred to as a clothes-press or linen-press. It comes from the French word presse, which originally referred to a crowd or crush in battle, and by the 14th century also meant a clothes cupboard.

Do you call cupboards presses, or have you heard anybody doing so?

Obrigados / Obrigadas

By Simon

According to someone who wrote to me today, the words obrigados/obrigadas are only used in Portuguese to mean ‘obligated’, and are not used to thank more than one person. However, according to João Rosa, who wrote the article Obrigado – how to express your gratitude in Portuguese, these words are used to mean ‘thank you’ when talking to groups of people.

Can anybody throw any light on this?

In the Gaelic languages there are different versions of thank you for singular and plural:

Irish: go raibh maith agat (sg), go raibh maith agaibh (pl)
Manx: gura mie ayd (sg), gura mie eu (pl)
Scottish Gaelic: tapadh leat (sg), tapadh leibh (pl)

The plural forms in Manx and Scottish Gaelic are also used when thank one stranger.

Zulu, Swahili and related languages have different forms of thank you for singular and plural, e.g. Ngiyabonga kakhulu (sg) Siyabonga (pl) – Zulu.

Do other languages have different forms of thank you that change depending on who you’re thanking?

Jeepers!

By Simon

While listening to Raidió na Gaeltachta (Irish language radio) today I noticed much use of the word “Jeepers!“. It’s not a word I’ve heard much before so it caught my attention.

According to the Free Dictionary, jeepers is used to express surprise or annoyance and is a euphemism for Jesus. A variation on this, “Jeepers creepers!”, is apparently used mainly in the USA and Canada. Another related expression is “Jeez!”.

Do you use any of these words? If not, what (non swear) words do you use to express surprise or annoyance?

Hunting haggis

By Simon

I’ve just finished a new video using Xtranormal – it’s in Scottish Gaelic and features Hamish and Helen (Seumas & Eilidh). Hamish is from Harris in the Hebrides and hunts haggis as a hobby with his haggis hound Hector (who doesn’t appear in the video), and also farms ostriches. Helen is a translator from Beijing who lives in Glasgow and translates between Scottish Gaelic and Chinese. Subtitles are available in English, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Manx and Welsh.

I wrote the dialogue in Scottish Gaelic using basic phrases, plus a few more complex constructions, and translated into the other languages as I went along. While there’s no mention of hovercrafts, or even eels, there is some discussion of whether the haggis is a real creature or not. I also recorded the dialogue as Xtranormal doesn’t support text-to-speech in Scottish Gaelic.

I plan to make similar videos in the other Celtic languages I know, changing some of the details but keeping the same basic structure.

One question that puzzled me somewhat while making this video was what is the plural of haggis? Is it haggis, haggises or even haggii?

Wikitionary gives the plural haggises.

The Haggis Hunt states that the plural is “haggii, although under certain grammatical circumstances it can be haggises or even ‘wee yins’.”

This blog gives the plural as haggis.

Collins English Dictionary gives haggises as the plural.

So it seems that there is no general agreement on the plural – I know not all these sources are equally reliable, but the less than reliable ones are interesting.

Another question is the etymology of the word haggis. The OED states that the origins of the word are unknown. In Scottish Gaelic the word for haggis is taigeis /tagʲɪʃ/, which becomes thaigeis /hagʲɪʃ/ in some contexts. This comes from the Scots word haggis, according to MacBain’s Etymological dictionary – I thought that the Scots word might come from Gaelic, but it seems not.

Without one red halfpenny

By Simon

When putting together this week’s French words and expressions from the French Conversation Group today, I discovered some interesting French and Welsh equivalents of ‘(to be) broke’.

In French the equivalent of broke (penniless) is fauché or if you’re really broke fauché comme les blés (broke like wheat). To be broke is être fauché and to go broke is faire faillite. Synonyms for fauché include:

– abattu = downcast
– besogneux = hard-working
– chipé = pinched
– coupé = cut
– démuni = destitute
– désargenté = impoverished
– misérable = miserable
– pauvre = poor
– ruiné = ruined
– tondu = chopped / shorn
– volé = robbed

In Welsh there are quite a few different ways to say that you’re penniless:

– heb yr un geiniog = ‘without a single penny’
– heb yr un ddimai goch y delyn = ‘without a single red halfpenny of the harp’
– heb gragen i ymgrafu = ‘without a shell to rub’
– heb yr un ffado = ‘without a ?’
– heb yr un ffaden beni = ‘without a ?’

There are also quite a few ways to express the same meaning in English, including:

– broke / stony-broke / flat broke
– skint
– bankrupt
– bust
– cleaned out
– without a penny to one’s name / a red cent
– on one’s uppers
– penniless
– stony-broke
– strapped for cash
– without two pennies/cents to rub together
– boracic / brassic = boracic lint* = skint (rhyming slang) – I knew that word boracic meant penniless, but never realised it was rhyming slang until now.

* According to Wikipedia, “Boracic lint was a type of medical dressing made from surgical lint that was soaked in a hot, saturated solution of boracic acid and glycerine and then left to dry. It has been in use since at least the 19th century, but is now less commonly used.”

Sources: Reverso, L’Internaute, Geiriadur yr Academi, Wikitionary.

Do you use any of these, or do you have other expressions for being skint?

Fá dtaobh de

By Simon

The Irish expression fá dtaobh de means about, as in tá mé ag cainnt fá dtaobh de (I am talking about it). It is most commonly used in Donegal in the northwest of Ireland, where it’s pronounced something like /fa’duːdə/. In other parts of Ireland it would be pronounced something like /fa.d̪ˠiːv.dʲe/, though other words are generally used: faoi or ina thaobh.

I’m familiar with the Dongel version of this expression, as I’ve been going to Donegal to speak and sing in Irish every summer for the past 8 years, but I’d never seen it written down before so didn’t know how to spell it. I came across it today in a spoof article in the Donegal Dollop, in which a Donegal man discovers that ‘faduda’ is not a real Irish word. The article mentions a number of other Donegal expressions, such as “mashadahollay” (más é do thoil é = please) and “cateeya” (cad chuige = why). These ‘phonetic’ spellings give a better idea of the Donegal pronunciation than the standard spellings.

Students of Irish often struggle with is spelling and pronunciation – when you hear Irish words spoken and compare them to their written versions it can be hard to make connections between the two. Irish does have a regular spelling system, but it is quite complex – many letters are not pronounced, or are pronunced in unfamilar whys – e.g. bh & mh = /vˠ/ or /w/, and words run into each other and bits fall off. For example, thank you is go raibh maith agat – pronouncing the syllables separately you get something like /go/, /ɾˠɛ̝̈vʲ/, /mˠa/, /agˠət̪/, but in normal speech it’s more like /gˠərˠəmˠagˠət̪/, at least in Donegal.

Pronunciation can take quite a while to get to grips with, even with languages with relatively straightforward spelling systems and phonologies like Spanish and Italian. There are many subtleties of pronunciation that can only really be acquired with a lot of careful listening and mimicing.

Irish

By Simon

According to the 2011 Irish census, the number of people who use Irish in Ireland as their everyday language outside school is 82,600. Many more speak it, but only in school, or rarely, This compares with 119,526 people who speak Polish at home and 56,430 who speak French. The census also found that just 35% of people in the Gaeltacht areas use Irish on a daily basis outside the education system. These are areas where Irish is the main language, in theory.

Source: BBC News

According to the Irish Times:

… there was a 7.1 per cent increase in the number of people who said they could speak Irish from 2006, giving a total of 1.77 million people in the Republic who indicated they speak Irish. Of those, 77,185 people speak the language daily outside the education system; 110,642 say they speak it weekly, while 613,236 said they spoke it less often. One out of every four say they never speak the language.

The census returns give no indication of the proficiency of these Irish speakers – some might only speak a few words, while others are fluent. It’s interesting that a quarter of people who can speak Irish never do so. I wonder why.