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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26192 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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Fair enough. How do the Irish say again? "Don't say 'here chick chick' to the bird until he's hatched from the egg" or something to that effect.

I've never heard of this expression or anything like it.

I confess my Gaelic is very rusty, how would you literally translate "na h-abair diug a choidhche ris an eun gus an dig e às an ugh"?

Going by the orthography and the slant of the síneadh fada, I think that is Scots Gaelic rather than Irish Gaelic (Erse) and so the saying is Scottish rather than Irish. The two languages are somewhat similar, allowing for drift in dialects over the centuries, but changes (as e.g. the revision of spelling* in the late 50s for Irish) means that they are not really mutually intelligible anymore.

*For example, "Seán" used to be spelled "Seighean", which makes it a lot easier to see why older Anglicised versions of the name were "Shane" rather than "Shaun").

That's more Irish than I expect any of us here know! For example using Google Translate I discovered that 'ugh' is a valid way to spell 'ubh' and the same for 'eun' and 'éan', if you have the source I wonder if it's an old Irish text (the spelling has changed a lot over the years)?

That's more Irish than I expect any of us here know

Labhair don tú féin!

An bhfuil ceannaigh mé dul go dtí an leithreas! (I checked after I wrote this and it was even worse than I thought).

The one sentence every six year old learns (my father taught me it before I started school)

"An bhfuil cead agaim dul amach go dti an leithreas?"

Literally "Is there permission with me go out to the toilet?" or "May I go to the toilet?"

Your version is "Is there I bought go to the toilet?" Well I don't know, did you spend a penny?

Rinne me rud isteach sa leithreas, an bhfuil tú ag iarradh é a ceannaigh?

Best I can do without looking it up.

Is fíor go bhfuil daoine ag díol agus ag ceannach san leithreas gach oiche!

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Only two words wrong 😅

I went to an Irish primary school, it seems like the years of coasting on that have finally caught up to me.

I think this mystery made me learn something new about my own library.

On my travels to Ireland I once brought back this Gaelic dictionary as a souvenir, felt appropriate you know? And that's what I just reached for. It's an old edition of Edward Dwelly's The Illustrated Gaelic-English Dictionary, and it has this proverb in it as an equivalent to "don’t count your chickens before they come home to roost".

The definitions looked right from my cursory knowledge of Gaelic, spellings have changed a lot over the years and it is an old book, I never thought to look into the background of the author. But it turns out he's a scholar of Scottish Gaelic. Close enough at a glance, but definitely wrong and in particular about idioms.

So in my hubris I have committed the ultimate insult of confusing the Irish and the Scots. That's what I get for trying to look worldly. I guess at least I just got a free funny story with that souvenir. Maybe next time I'll go to Scotland and buy a proper Irish dictionary.

Ah well maybe that's why we just call it Irish, 'Scottish-Gaelic' and 'Irish-Gaelic' can get confusing.

Maybe next time I'll go to Scotland and buy a proper Irish dictionary.

One of the best books I've read on Irish culture (the one that died in the 17th century) was originally written in Welsh (excerpts 1, 2, 1000 years of the poets being on icy terms with the Irish kings and then the English), I'd imagine any Scots-Gaelic or Welsh scholar will have some good books on Ireland too.

'Scottish-Gaelic' and 'Irish-Gaelic' can get confusing.

It would be easy if they were spelt Galic and Gaylick, though the former would cause confusion with the French and the latter would cause confusions best not discussed on a family-friendly forum.

The family friendly form would be gwaylge (gaeilge), I'm not sure if gaelic is an anglicisation or just an old word but gaeilge is the name of the language in Irish.

And going by Google Translate it's "Do not tell the bird to sleep before it hatches from the egg".

"Na h-abhair" is clear enough "don't say/don't tell". "an eun" is "an éan" in Irish, "the bird". "Ugh" and "ubh" is "egg". But yeah, grammar is different.

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