Téacschaint

In my Irish language class this morning we learnt some of the abbreviations used in texts messages in Irish.

Here are a few of them:

grma = go raibh maith agat (thank you)
cgl = ceart go leor (ok)
n8 = anocht (tonight)
7n = seachtain (week)
R y leat = ar mhaith leat (do you want)
a #ce = a thaisce (my darling/dear)
9l = níl (not/no)
sgf = slán go fóill (goodbye)

There are some more here.

I’m not a big fan of such abbreviations in Irish, English or other languages, but do quite like the inventiveness of them.

14 thoughts on “Téacschaint

  1. that quiet reminded me of some fashion that spread for some time here … where young people … exchange part of their family name with an icon of something representing the phonetics of this part and complete then the name with letters normally. They used to make it as stickers for cars mainly.

    Example: the family name of Kennedy, can be represented as -> [map of Canada]+y

    sounds a bit like kanji and hiragana to me!

  2. Japanese has something called gyaru mozi (ギャル文字) mean girly letters, sometimes called 下手文字 heta mozi, or poor letters.

    To take an example from wikipedia, it looks something like this
    キょぅゎ、1囚τ”行カヽ世τ㊦±ぃ。

    You can see in general letters which can be typed smaller are, katakana replaces hiragana, and kanzi are used for their reading without regard to their meaning as in 世〒 or for their shape as in 囚.

    That sentence is read きょうは、1人で行かせて下さい。 kyou ha hitori de ikasete kudasai “let me go by myself today”

    http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%AE%E3%83%A3%E3%83%AB%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97

    Personally I don’t like gyaru mozi, they may be legible but it takes longer to type them than to type normally so I don’t see the point.

  3. How do you pronounce the 25th letter of the alphabet in Irish? It looks like one of the abbreviations anyway (R y leat) is based on the English sounds of the letters, or is that just a coincidence?

  4. In Polish certain words and phrases are often truncated in text messages and communicators (though it happens in speech too):

    cześć > cze ‘hallo’
    na razie > nara ‘see you’
    jak się masz > siema ‘how are you?’

    etc.

  5. There’s hundreds, if not thousands of those words in Dutch. Just go and check out this website. the ones I use the most are:

    mss > misschien ‘perhaps’
    iig > in ieder geval ‘anyway’
    zgn > zogenaamd ‘so-called’
    idd > inderdaad ‘indeed’
    evt > eventueel ‘possibly’ (not eventually, which is ‘uiteindelijk’ in Dutch)

  6. ” How do you pronounce the 25th letter of the alphabet in Irish? It looks like one of the abbreviations anyway (R y leat) is based on the English sounds of the letters, or is that just a coincidence? ”

    Like ‘yay’ (IPA /je/) but here like ‘y’ (IPA /waI/) in English. It’s not a coincidence because the letter ‘y’ is only a fairly recent addition to Irish and only occurs in loans.

  7. Interesting that the Irish for ‘my darling/dear’ is ‘a thaisce’. The first time I was in northern Skye, I heard people using that word all the time.

    In Lewis Gaelic we never use it, in fact neither myself nor my wife had ever heard the word before. We have loads of other words that mean the same thing (a ghraidh, m’eudail, mo luaidh etc). I had always been curious as to where this Sgiathanach word came from.

    Tha sin inntinneach!

    Tha mi’n dochas gu bheil thu ag ionnsachadh torr.

  8. interesting that 7n = seachtain (week) in the same way,
    week – is 8nos or 8n (eight nights, for some reason, Welsh thinks of a week as having eight not seven nights)

    weekend is p8n (penwythnos)

    Ti (you) is just t

    Fi (me) is v

  9. Sion, that reminds me of the French expression for two weeks: quinze jours (= 15 days). Strange huh?

  10. Mae’n od nawr dwi wedi sylweddoli taw Wythnos Wyth – Nos a dim jest gair yw e

    Now i’m noticin that Wythnos is a conjugate(is that what it is haha)

    Well p8n braf i bawt

    7n go maith??

    Slán go fóill

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