Irish Language Blog

(le Róislín) As far back as 2009, many people noticed that the Oxford Junior Dictionary, a monolingual English dictionary for children seven years old or thereabouts, dropped approximately 50 words about nature so they would have room for more 21st-century tech-oriented words.  While I can sort of understand the logic, I wonder if perhaps hundreds…

(le Róislín) graphic: A Kemp’s ridley sea turtle nesting on the berm section of the beach, beyond can be seen plant debris in the wrack line, http://www.nps.gov/pais/naturescience/Nesting-Kemps-ridley-Sea-Turtles.htm (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach#/media/File:Kemp’s_Ridley_sea_turtle_nesting.JPG ); public domain; téacs Gaeilge le Roislin, 2019   In the last blog, we looked at some terms for the four main sections of a beach (crios slaparnaí, urthrá, líne raice…

(le Róislín)   It may seem like a simple thing to just say you’re going to the beach (or “the strand” or “the shore”), but in reality, there are many zones or parts to a beach.  They have interesting names in English and so, there’s also a slew of interesting Irish vocabulary words to match. …

(le Róislín) Our most recent post showed some amazingly large water-lilies and looked at the terminology for them.  Researching that, I also found the amazing illustration above.  Who could resist turning this into a teachable moment – how to say  “girl,” “standing,” and “on a water-lily” in Irish? For the second part of today’s blog, we’ll…

(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…