Irish Language Blog

(le Róislín) Intriguingly, Irish has quite a few words for water-lily.  For water-lilies in general, we have bual-lile, bior-rós, duilleog bháite, and póicín locha.  More specifically, for distinct types, we have bacán bán or duilleog bháite bhán, for the white, and cabhán abhann, duilleog bháite bhuí, and liach-loghar, for the yellow. With compound words like…

(le Róislín)  Lately we’ve been writing about hamstair (hamsters) and specifically the Irish words for different foods that they eat.  Now we’ll check out their digs — a “cás hamstair” and its typical “troscán.” This will also be some practice with matching up Irish nouns and adjectives and using numbers to say how many of…

(le Róislín) Last time we looked at different foods (bianna éagsúla) that hamsters can and can’t eat and practiced the Irish vocabulary for 35 different edible items (nasc thíos/link below). This time we’ll look at those same foods and determine if they are “Neam-neam!” or “Uch!” Of course, there could be a third category, foods…

(le Róislín) Cúpla bliain ó shin scríobh mé blagmhír faoi sheirbil agus hamstar, iad ag cur síos ar a gcásanna agus ag rá an raibh ámóg nó caochóg nó tigín nó rudaí eile mar sin acu.  Ar ndóigh, beagán antrapamorfachais a bhí ann.  (Nasc thíos) A few years ago, I wrote an Irish blogpost about…

(le Róislín) A few years ago, we did a few blog posts on Irish proverbs (seanfhocail, lit. “old words”; naisc thíos / links below), which are always a popular language learning tool. The seanfhocail not only teach vocabulary and sentence structure, but they’re often also fun (Ní hé lá na gaoithe lá na scolb), pithy…

(le Róislín)   Nautical terms have always intrigued me, including such colorful ones as “scuttlebutt” and “three sheets to the wind.”  So today I thought I’d cover a few of the most basic terms pertaining to parts of a boat or ship.  If there’s interest, perhaps we can cover more such terms in the future…

(le Róislín) Cá bhfuil an tsráid seo?  Where is this street?  Perhaps you recognized it, Lombard Street in San Francisco.  Not quite the steepest residential street in the word — that honor belongs to Baldwin Street, Dunedin, NZ — but certainly one of the steepest  (ar cheann de na sráideanna cónaithe is géire ar domhan)…