Irish Language Blog

(le Róislín) “Catkin” — now there’s a word I don’t use very often in English and I’m tickled pink to be writing about it here, in a blog for Irish language learners.  The other “c-anna” words for today’s post are a little more basic: cauliflower, chestnut, clover, conker (not “conquer” as such!), and crocus. Anybody…

(le Róislín) Continuing our list of nature words in Irish, today’s blog will cover the following: blackberry, budgie/budgerigar/parakeet, and buttercup, with a nod back to “bluebell,” which was the first subject treated in this series.   Is é sin le rá, déanfaidh muid na “b-anna.”  Tá “acorn” (dearcán) agus “almond” (almóinn) déanta againn cheana féin.  BTW…

(le Róislín)   Recently, we’ve been looking at the nature words stricken from the Oxford Junior Dictionary [English] about 10 years ago.  As you may recall, words like “acorn” and “almond” were removed from the dictionary and replaced by tech terms like “analog” and “MP3 player.”  I’ve posed the question several times now in this…

(le Róislín) Can you imagine a dictionary without the word for “acorn”?  And, in particular, can you imagine an Irish dictionary without the word “dearcán” (acorn)? And now that Dublin’s Phoenix Park has the larger-than-life “Dearcán na nDaoine” near “Áras an Uachtaráin” (the President’s residence) it’s even harder to imagine removing the word “dearcán” from…

(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. …