Irish Language Blog

(le Róislín)

In the last blog, I raised the question of how many professional thatchers are out there, curious as to whether the trade growing or declining.  Trying to search for numbers of thatchers in the US, Canada, and Australia proved a bit time-consuming.  Computer searches mostly ended up giving me results for “dethatching” services, particularly as geared toward golf courses and fine lawns.  And no, “dethatching” doesn’t mean removing thatched roofs from cottages — it means, bhuel, ag baint féar marbh ó fhaiche (chun an ithir a aerú).  A “gluais” for that phrase is below, btw.   I don’t see a single word definition for “dethatching” in Irish anywhere, otherwise I’d have used it.

So I’m just giving some results for Irish and British thatchers here.  Maybe at some future point I’ll check further into the North American and Australian scene.

Cad a shíleann tusa?  Cé mhéad tuíodóir atá ag obair inniu?  Deichniúr?  Caoga?  Céad?  Míle?

The site “Buildingsofireland.ie” lists 77 thatchers in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, many of whom may work in teams or with small crews, so I’d estimate that there are at least double the number of people actually working: http://www.buildingsofireland.ie/Resources/ThatchinIreland/Thatchers%20(27.10.2011).pdf

For England and Wales, http://www.nsmtltd.co.uk/ (National Society of Master Thatchers) lists 140 thatchers.

For Scotland, http://www.yell.com/s/thatching+services-scotland.html  lists 36 roofers offering thatching services.  Many of them seem to offer other roofing services as well (unlike the English/Welsh and Irish listings above, which are specifically for thatching) but some do appear to just do thatching (like Hebridean Thatching Services, http://www.highland-thatcher.co.uk/, whose website also offers some interesting videos and a blog of projects undertaken).

As for a more comprehensive number, thatcher Leo Wood, commented in an interview by David Ross for Britain Express:  “When I started in1963 around 200 full time thatchers were left, this is now around 2000 and has been so for five or six years.” (“Life as a Thatcher,” http://www.britainexpress.com/History/thatching-interview.htm).  I couldn’t find a date for the article, but assume it was sometime in the last 10 years.

That’s actually more that I expected but it’s encouraging in terms of keeping the tradition alive.  Hmm, now I’ll have to re-run my search for “yelmers.”

A side benefit of raising this query is looking at the basic structure of the question: Cé mhéad tuíodóir?  You might have noticed that “tuíodóir” stays singular here.  This is true whenever you ask “How many?” of something in Irish.  Additional examples would include: Cé mhéad bliain?, Cé mhéad coileán?, Cé mhéad míle?

It may seem unusual, from an English perspective, to keep the noun singular, but it follows the pattern that’s also used in Irish for “cúpla” and with numbers: cúpla bliain, trí choileán, srl., lit. “a couple of year” ” three puppy.”

Ar aon chaoi, tuíodóir ar bith ar an liosta?  Má tá, bheadh sé go deas cluinstin uait!  SGF, Róislín

Gluais don fhrása “ag baint féar marbh ó fhaiche (chun an ithir a aerú)”:

aerú, to aerate

faiche, lawn (as in yards, gardens, etc., not the fabric, which as it happens, is “péirlín,” for those of you in Downton Abbey garb)

féar marbh, dead grass, “thatch,” i. gais mharbha, riosóim mharbha, stólain mharbha, fréamhacha marbha agus duilleoga marbha.  NB:  see how important the síneadh fada is in the word “féar“?  “Féar” [fayr] is “grass.”  “Fear” [far, with the "a" like US "bat" or "cat"] is “man.”  “Man” … “grass” … two words we don’t want to mix up, especially if one or both are “marbh” ([MAR-uv] dead).  And hopefully, we’ll always know whether we are removing “féar marbh” or a “fear marbh” from the lawn, unless, of course, the “fear marbh” has been fargoized.  Ach sin scéal eile.

NB also what has happened to the adjective “marbh” when modifying the plural nouns above.  The plural ending is “-a,” giving us “marbha” [MAR-uh-vuh], as used with “fréamhacha” agus “duilleoga.”  “Marbha” changes to “mharbha” [WAR-uh-vuh] after the nouns “gais,” “riosóim” and “stólain” because of their slender ending (“i” + final consonant). This is the same rule that gives us “fir mhóra” and “báid bheaga” but “buachaillí móra” and “naomhóga beaga.”

ithir [IH-hirzh], soil, earth (in an agricultural context)

Gluais don ghluais: duilleog, leaf; fréamh, root; gas, stem; riosóm, rhizome; stólan, stolon

(le Róislín)

uaine nó glas?

Our last blog primarily covered the actual history of St. Patrick and his name.  This blog will take a lighter-hearted look at some St. Patrick’s Day imagery, namely the much-maligned-but-nevertheless-consumed green beer.   I’m refraining from value judgments on the topic (unlike many of the online commentators!), but am primarily interested in whether people say the beer is “uaine” or “glas,” two different Irish words for green, “uaine” usually for manmade things and “glas” for things in nature.  Soon I hope to probe the depths of green bagels (mostly limited to the New York metropolitan area) and green rivers (found in various locations in the United States, most famously Chicago, but also San Antonio, Texas, and Tampa, Florida).  For both of these, I’ll also search online for a future blog to see how much cibearbhús they have attracted.

Ar aon chaoi, in this blog, we’ll look at the terms “beoir uaine,” “beoracha uaine,” “beoir ghlas,” and “beoracha glasa,” to see what kind of cibearlorg each one leaves.

a) beoir uaine: I got a grand total of 80 hits, of which many (21) were advertisements for t-shirts, beer steins, or other products with “beoir uaine” slogans on them, mostly “Ní ólfaidh fíor-Ghael beoir uaine.”  Most of these sites translate the phrase as “Real Irishmen don’t drink green beer.”  Which is more or less correct, except that the slogan is written in the singular and uses “Gael,” not “Éireannach.”  And it’s written in the future tense, not the present habitual.  So it really translates to “A true Gael will not drink green beer.”   But the sentiment is the same and the grammatical differences are relatively minor.

I suppose “the real men” trope stems from the “Ní itheann fíorfhir quiche” phenomenon started by Bruce Feirstein in 1982.  Of course he started it in English.  I simply translated it here to add to the Irish mix.  There could be a slight Celtic connection if Feirstein was inspired by the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, which dates to at least 1975 in Andrew Flew’s classic, Thinking about Thinking.  But pursuing that is definitely ábhar blag eile, and perhaps beyond even the scope of this blog go ginearálta.  Maybe more relevant to some sort of a “guy thing” blog.  Ní i mo “bháillcheantar” atá sé sin.

Out of the 80 hits, another 8 are basically tangential sites that just seem to use the phrase “beoir uaine” to generate web traffic.  From the looks of most of them, I don’t even dare cliceáil on them, since they look pretty bogus.  Another couple are simply very passing references in a long thread about drinking in general.  Interesting to note, but not particularly insightful.  Then we have a healthy 35 links to the Transparent Language Irish blog, many of which are cross-references in a side bar column at The Hidden Ireland (http://galltacht.blogspot.com/).

Some of the 80 are hits for the St. Patrick’s Day blog on www.transparent.com dating back to 2009 (Yay!).

So overall, we could say that there aren’t that many hits in general for “beoir uaine,” and of them, only about half of them shed any real insight into how people use the word.  Of course, these results only reflect what Google shows me, but I think they do establish a useful pattern.

b) beoracha uaine (“green beers”): I tried “beoracha uaine” as well, even though the phrase wouldn’t typically be used (in favor of “piontaí beoir uaine,” “ceaigeanna beoir uaine,” or perhaps even “oigiséid beoir uaine“).  I was a little surprised that my search yielded absolutely no results, not that I expected much.  Even “beoracha” itself, never mind the “green” part, only yielded a paltry 6 hits.  But again, the whys and wherefores of “beoracha” vs. “beoir” will have to remain “ábhar blag eile.”

c) beoir ghlas: I changed the adjective to “glas,” (usually referring to green growing things) and modified it to “ghlas” to match the feminine noun.  This got a total of 8 hits, 6 if we eliminate two that are simply quotes or duplicates of other hits.   Not a big number, but, interestingly, most showed the phrase used in realistic contexts, albeit mostly brief, like chat forums, and also mostly negative, like “Is fuath liom beoir ghlas” (I hate green beer).

And then, I tried, for thoroughness’s sake, a search for “beoir” followed directly by “glas,” as such, i.e. without the agreement of “beoir” (a feminine noun) and “ghlas” (a feminine form of the adjective “glas“).  So, yeah, I searched for an incorrect grammatical form, just to see what it would yield.  An pota óir — 83 amas.  So much for grammar and for gender agreement, is dócha.

So, 83 hits, for the grammatically incorrect form!  Actually the top of the list started out, probably unintentionally, with “glas” modifying “lá,” which would be ceart go leor de réir na gramadaí.  But it looks like the author intended to say “Green Beer Day” so “Lá Glas” doesn’t really make much sense.  The adjective almost always follows the noun in Irish, so for beer, “glas” should change to “ghlas,” bringing us back to “beoir ghlas.”

Another interesting twist is that occasionally (in at least one of these hits) we can have “beoir” followed by “glas.”  That is when “glas” is a predicate adjective, not part of the noun phrase.  So “duchessinaustin” is correct when she says “Níl beoir glas” (Beer is not green;  http://twicsy.com/i/4scFrd)

But most of the other 83 hits fell into the typical trap, look up “beer,” look up “green,” force them together regardless of word order, gender or tradition in the language.  But that got the most hits <osna!>.

d) beoracha glasa: This search (the plural), got me no hits, though it sure made eBay and Etsy try to sell me some beach glasses!  Must be the “minus o, minus r, add ses” algorithm, or however they intuit what they think you meant to say.  I’m somewhat comforted that I also got no hits for some searches with deliberately incorrect spellings with “beoracha” followed by “ghlas,” “glas,” or ghlasa.”

So what does all this tell us?  Probably that “glas” is more widely understood as the Irish word for “green,” and that a lot of people try to use it to say “green beer.”  A handful get it correct, and actually have something to say about the topic.  “Beoir uaine” is also used, although it is more often channeled into commercial applications or cibearbhruscar (*bruscarlíne, if I do say so myself).   The plural, using “beoracha,” just doesn’t seem to be happening.  In fact, “beoracha,” as such, without “green,” only got 6 hits.  But then we are more likely to use the word “beoir” in the singular, even if the quantities imbibed are plural.  Because we pour it into containers (piontaí, gloiní, ceaigeanna, oigiséid, srl.), which can then be plural, even though the word “beoir” stays singular.

For what it’s worth, the English search, “green beer,” generates 1,830,000 hits but the plural, “green beers,” drops significantly to about 79,300.  The plural introduces also the idea of “green beers” meaning beer produced in an ecologically friendly manner, as in “8 Great Green Beers: Eco-friendly brews that won’t turn your tongue green,” by Maryse Chevriere (http://www.thedailymeal.com/great-green-beers)

And a final note, even the people who do talk about green beer doesn’t seem to like it much.  I found a fitting “focal scoir” from Beauregard in Gaeltacht Minnesota (https://twitter.com/AsGaeilge/status/181107959907106816, dated 3/17/12): Beoir uaine a ól, d’anam a dhíol don Diabhal, which translates to “To drink green beer (is) to sell your soul to the Devil.”  Which should put the kybosh on the subject for now!

Next up, béigil uaine (or “ghlasa”) and aibhneacha uaine (or “glasa“).  SGF, Róislín

Gluaisín: ceaig, keg; oigiséad, hogshead; pota óir, jackpot, pot of gold.  Also, my newly coined contribution to Irish portmanteaus, bruscarlíne, from “bruscar” (rubbish) + “ar líne” (online)

(le Róislín)

So, Irish has lots of ways to say “I love you,” but most of them don’ t involve the verb “to love.”   How is that supposed to work?  Bhuel, with lots of téarmaí ceana (terms of endearment)!  In other words, you mostly use nouns to say that someone is your sweetheart, your darling, your pulse (yes, it gets rather anatomical), your heart, your snookums.  Um, let’s backtrack.  Quit while we’re ahead.  I don’t there’s really an Irish equivalent to “Snookums.”  Sweetheart, darling, dear, love, love of my heart — that’s more the Irish style.

In case you’re wondering about the verb that would mean “to love” (I love, I loved, I will love, etc.), it does exist and was discussed in a previous blog in this series, “An Briathar “Gráigh!” (Love!) i nGaeilge,” posted 14 Feabhra 2011 (http://blogs.transparent.com/irish/an-briathar-%E2%80%9Cgraigh%E2%80%9D-love-i-ngaeilge/).   But as you’ll see from that blog, the verb “to love,” as such, is almost exclusively limited to Biblical or very formal usages, such as: “Óir ghráigh Dia an domhan chomh mór sin gur thug sé a Aonghin Mic uaidh i dtreo  …”.  You might recognize that as coming from Eoin 3:16.  (Aistriúchán-1 thíos / translation-1 below).   And, of course, there will always be some Google search results with the verb “gráigh” (gráim, gránn, ghráigh, gráfaidh, srl.) from people using machine translation, or just translating word for word from a dictionary and then posting the result.  But that doesn’t mean such phrases are really used.

Anyway, getting back to what people actually do say as an equivalent to “I love you,” here are some possibilities.  We’ve seen some of these terms in previous blogs, but mostly in direct address (a stór, a chroí, a chuisle, a thaisce, srl.).   Here, we’ll put them into short sentences, with the basic structure of “You are my darling” or “sweetheart.”   In most cases, words like “darling” and “sweetheart” are interchangeable as translations.

1. Is tú mo stór.  You are my sweetheart.

2. Is tú mo stóirín.  You are my (little) sweetheart (the “-ín” element is diminutive, but if anything, it just makes the term even more affectionate; it’s not demeaning or “babeifying”)

3. Is tú mo ghrá.  You are my love.

4. Is tú mo chuisle.  You are my pulse (remember, “cuisle” which literally means “pulse,” is a term of endearment, as seen in the anglicized forms “acushla” and “macushla“)

5. Is tú mo mhuirnín.  You are my darling.

6. Is tú grá geal mo chroí. You are the bright love of my heart.

So that’s six.  We’re doing ten, remember?

Another approach to saying “I love you” involves leaving out the verb altogether.   So we have a verb-less phrase functioning just fine as a complete sentence (no “is,” no “love” verbs).  The following example is actually probably the most widely used in Irish and is recommended for inscriptions  (on jewelry, for example) or tattoos:

7. Mo ghrá thú!, lit. my love you, i.e. You are my love.

Of course, saying that one aloud involves the voiced velar fricative sound, represented phonetically by the gamma sign /ɣ/.  This throaty sound is not in English but it is found in Scottish Gaelic, Aleut, Yemenite Hebrew, Arabic, and Klingon, where I think it exemplifies the gutturality of that invented tongue.   You can hear the sound at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative (cliceáil ar an gcomhad fuaime).   For that matter, you can also hear it at http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/klingon.php if you click on lupDujHomwIj luteb gharghmey.  In Klingon, as in Irish, the sound is written with “gh,” so the last word is where you’ll want to focus your attention.  As for what that phrase means, here’s the Irish, “Tá m’árthach foluaineach lán d’eascanna” (as listed by http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/irish.php).  I give the English below (aistriúchán-2) but not right here, just to avoid the temptation for readers to use the translation instead of working it out.  Eyeball-motion tracking and all that.  For even more on velar fricatives and saying “I love you,” you might want to check out this previous blog: http://blogs.transparent.com/irish/saying-i-love-you-in-irish/

I suppose, come to think of it, for a tattoo, at least for one that’s visible to the public, you might want to add the loved one’s name, as in “I love you, Mary” or “I love you, John.”  So you’d add the name in direct address (Mo ghrá thú, a Mháire! or Mo ghrá thú, a Sheáin! ).  For the inside of a wedding ring, presumably, only the intended would see the inscription, so adding the name would be optional — but a nice touch!

And finally, here are three more options, bringing us up to deich (10) ndóigh le “I love you” a rá:

8. Tá grá agam duit (I have love for you) OR Tá grá agam ort (I have love on you), or, very literally, “Love is at me for you / on you”)

9. Táim i ngrá leat OR Tá mé i ngrá leat (I’m in love with you); pronunciation tip: for “i ngrá,” let the two words run together, like “ingraw,” with the softish “ng” sound of English “singing” (not like “finger”).  Since this phrase refers to being “in love” (i ngrá), it’s meant for one’s significant other, spouse, etc.

10. Tá mo chroí istigh ionat (My heart is within you), or more literally, “inside in you.”  In Irish, the “in” element gets repeated with phrases for “inside” something (istigh sa teach, inside the house, lit. inside in the house; istigh sa siopa, inside the shop, lit. inside in the shop).  The word “ionat‘ comes from the preposition “in” and literally means “in you,” the “-t” ending signifying 2nd-person singular.

As for “snookums,” and its cohorts “diddums,” “huggums,” and “sweetums,” I really don’t know of any Irish terms that convey that certain endearing but sometimes infantilizing je ne sais quoi!

If you’re looking for even more phrases to talk about love and related, um, functions, you might enjoy the recently published book, Cliúsaíocht as Gaeilge, by Rossa Ó Snodaigh (of the band Kila)   I’ll let you figure out the most relevant meaning of “cliúsaíocht” and its “agent” term, “cliúsaí,” (the person who does be “ag cliúsaíocht“).  Suffice it to say, it’s apropos to a téama Vailintín.  For a quick answer, you can also find the English subtitle by checking the link: http://www.coisceim.ie/cliusaiocht.html  The book has general information about the Irish language, including greetings.  The basic ones (Dia duit, Aon scéal, etc.) are a good first step if you want to eventually move on to the more advanced topics, like discussing círíní cluaise (aka maotháin chluaise) and loig bhoilg (aka imleacáin).  Not to mention ranna eile an choirp.

The text of Cliúsaíocht does get pretty explicit and the illustrations keep pace, so it’s definitely meant for the mature reader.  In keeping with its subject matter, anything goes.  So, forewarned is “four-armed.”  Which is probably all the more useful since the couple depicted on the cover not only sport four arms, reasonably enough (and very sporting arms they are!) but they also have six legs between them.  Well, not “between” as such, there’s not much “between” them at all at all.  As intertwined bodies, I think we can also safely say that the couple have created the “two-backed” beast.  All nicely incorporated into some clever Celtic knotwork-style artwork, provided by Frantisek Valouch.  Food for thought for new ways to count, séimhiú, and all, in Irish (dhá dhroim, ceithre lámh, sé chos)!  Bhuel, sin é don bhlag inniu.  SGF, Róislín

Gluais ghinearálta: círín chluaise [KEER-een KHLOO-ish-uh], lobe of ear; imleacán, navel, bellybutton (ach gan fachtóir na gleoiteachta a bhaineanns leis an bhfocal “bellybutton”); log boilg [log BWIL-ig], bellybutton, navel; maothán cluaise [MWEE-hawn KLOO-ish-uh], lobe (lit. soft spot) of ear; roinn, pl. ranna, part.

Nóta faoi na focail “log boilg” agus “imleacán”: First, pronunciation: “log” is with the Irish short “o,” as in “pota,” not like the English lookalike, “log” as in “tree.”  Also, “boilg,” like “bolg,” has two syllables, with the “uh” sound between the “l” and the “g.”  As for the literal meaning, “log boilg” is “hollow place of belly.”  It does have a friendlier sound, at least do mo chluas féin, a little more “bellybutton-ish” rather than “navel-ish.” “Imleacán” (navel) is a more formal term and it’s actually a cousin of the Latin word “umbilicus,” which in turn is related to “omphalos (ὀμφαλός)” as in all that world-navel Delphi and Joycean Martello Tower stuff.  “Imleacán” is used for various medical terms, such as “bindealán imleacáin” (umbilical bandage).

Aistriúchán 1 (Eoin 3:16, Óir ghráigh Dia an domhan chomh mór sin gur thug sé a Aonghin Mic uaidh i dtreo  …): And God loved the world so much that He gave from Him His only begotten son so that ….  Gluaisín don aistriúchán sin: domhan [DOH-wun], world; chomh [KHOH], so; thug [huhg, silent "t"], gave; aonghin [ayn-yin], only-begotten child; uaidh, from him; i dtreo, so that, lit. “in direction”

Aistriúchán 2: Tá m’árthach foluaineach lán d’eascanna.  Omniglot translates this as “My hovercraft is full of eels,” and this is one of the delightful phrases translated into many languages on the site (www.omniglot.com).  A mionghluaisín for this sentence is: árthach [AWR-hukh], vessel, ship; eascann [ASK-un], eel; foluaineach [fuh-LOO-in-yukh], hovering, fluttering, flying, etc.  “Árthach foluaineach” is the Irish for “hovercraft.”

As for the Klingon, níl mórán Tliongáinise agam (yet!), but I can tell you that “gharghmey” is used here for “eels,” with “-mey” being the plural suffix.  So if you want to practice the voiced velar fricative some more, you can also try the singular, “ghargh.”  As I understand it, “ghargh” is actually “sea worm,” but it appears to be close enough for this catchphrase.  Practicing Klingon is actually a good way to master the velar fricatives you need for Irish!  Comments welcome from any saineolaithe Tliongáinise.