{"id":7032,"date":"2012-05-22T11:30:02","date_gmt":"2012-05-22T11:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=7032"},"modified":"2012-05-22T11:30:02","modified_gmt":"2012-05-22T11:30:02","slug":"hunting-haggis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=7032","title":{"rendered":"Hunting haggis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just finished a new video using Xtranormal &#8211; it&#8217;s in Scottish Gaelic and features Hamish and Helen (Seumas &#038; Eilidh). Hamish is from Harris in the Hebrides and hunts haggis as a hobby with his haggis hound Hector (who doesn&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/F6hV6cIE_no\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;t support text-to-speech in Scottish Gaelic.<\/p>\n<p>I plan to make similar videos in the other Celtic languages I know, changing some of the details but keeping the same basic structure.<\/p>\n<p>One question that puzzled me somewhat while making this video was what is the plural of haggis? Is it haggis, haggises or even haggii? <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/haggis\">Wikitionary<\/a> gives the plural <strong>haggises<\/strong>. <\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/haggishunt.scotsman.com\/haggisclopedia.cfm?part=2\">Haggis Hunt<\/a> states that the plural is &#8220;<strong>haggii<\/strong>, although under certain grammatical circumstances it can be <strong>haggises<\/strong> or even <strong>&#8216;wee yins&#8217;<\/strong>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/azgiles.blogspot.co.uk\/2012\/01\/hebridean-haggis-hunt.html\">This blog<\/a> gives the plural as <strong>haggis<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/dictionary.reverso.net\/english-cobuild\/haggis\">Collins English Dictionary<\/a> gives <strong>haggises<\/strong> as the plural.<\/p>\n<p>So it seems that there is no general agreement on the plural &#8211; I know not all these sources are equally reliable, but the less than reliable ones are interesting.<\/p>\n<p>Another question is the etymology of the word haggis. The <a href=\"http:\/\/oed.com\/view\/Entry\/83228?redirectedFrom=haggis#eid\">OED<\/a> states that the origins of the word are unknown. In Scottish Gaelic the word for haggis is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.faclair.com\/Listen\/taigeis.mp3\"><em>taigeis<\/em><\/a> \/tag\u02b2\u026a\u0283\/, which becomes <em>thaigeis<\/em> \/hag\u02b2\u026a\u0283\/ in some contexts. This comes from the Scots word haggis, according to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ceantar.org\/Dicts\/MB2\/mb37.html#MB.T\">MacBain&#8217;s Etymological dictionary<\/a> &#8211; I thought that the Scots word might come from Gaelic, but it seems not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just finished a new video using Xtranormal &#8211; it&#8217;s in Scottish Gaelic and features Hamish and Helen (Seumas &#038; Eilidh). Hamish is from Harris in the Hebrides and hunts haggis as a hobby with his haggis hound Hector (who doesn&#8217;t appear in the video), and also farms ostriches. Helen is a translator from Beijing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,127,10,23,56,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-irish","category-language","category-manx","category-scottish-gaelic","category-welsh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7032","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=7032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7032\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}