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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25535 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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To be pedantic it hasn't toppled the government (yet), assuming they can find a successor he or she will have a year before the next general election.

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"?

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)?

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.

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