![\"S\u00fail\u00edn\u00ed\"](\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/blog\/suilini.gif\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I discovered an interesting word in Irish yesterday – s\u00fail\u00edn\u00ed<\/strong> [\u02c8s\u02e0u\u02d0l\u032a\u02b2i\u02d0n\u032a\u02b2i\u02d0] – which is a diminutive form of s\u00fail<\/em> [s\u02e0u\u02d0l\u032a\u02b2] (eye) and means literally “small eyes”, and actually means eyelets, an aperture-sight, or bubbles. For example, uisce gan s\u00fail\u00edn\u00ed<\/em> is still water (“water without bubbles”) [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n More common Irish words for bubbles are bolg\u00e1n<\/em> and boilgeog<\/em>.<\/p>\n The word s\u00fail\u00edn\u00ed is also used in Hiberno-English to mean “bubbles of fat floating on top of a stew or clear soup”, and is also written sooleens [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n The word s\u00fail<\/em> (eye) comes from *s\u016bli<\/em>, an alteration of the Proto-Celtic *s\u016ble<\/em> (suns), the dual of *s\u016blos<\/em>, which is the genitive of *s\u0101wol<\/em> (sun), from the Proto-Indo-European *s\u00f3h\u2082wl\u0325<\/em> (sun). Apparently in Irish mythology the sun was seen as the “eye of the sky”, and the word for sun came to mean eye [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n The words for sun in other European languages come from the same root, and most start with s, e.g. sa\u0169le<\/em> (Latvian), sol<\/em> (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese), Sonne<\/em> (German), etc. There are some exceptions though, including haul<\/em> (Welsh) heol<\/em> (Breton), howl<\/em> (Cornish) and \u03ae\u03bb\u03b9\u03bf\u03c2<\/em> (\u1e17lios – Greek) [source<\/a>].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I discovered an interesting word in Irish yesterday – s\u00fail\u00edn\u00ed [\u02c8s\u02e0u\u02d0l\u032a\u02b2i\u02d0n\u032a\u02b2i\u02d0] – which is a diminutive form of s\u00fail [s\u02e0u\u02d0l\u032a\u02b2] (eye) and means literally “small eyes”, and actually means eyelets, an aperture-sight, or bubbles. For example, uisce gan s\u00fail\u00edn\u00ed is still water (“water without bubbles”) [source]. More common Irish words for bubbles are bolg\u00e1n and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,94,97,100,104,107,116,127,10,31,41,45,64,67,77,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breton","category-catalan","category-cornish","category-danish","category-english","category-etymology","category-german","category-irish","category-language","category-norwegian","category-portuguese","category-proto-indo-european","category-spanish","category-swedish","category-welsh","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}