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Jan. 5th, 2007 01:43 pmfascinating article about a guy who tries speaking solely Irish to people in Ireland. Comes with bonus Irish phrase guide at the end.
true story, apparently
Dec. 27th, 2005 11:08 pmas related to me over dinner some time in the past few days, and I believe it's attached to one of the Flickr pictures that's tagged "youghal": two american tourists enquired of a local, "how do you pronounce the name of this city?" The local responded, "it's a town, actually". The tourists enquired, "sorry, how do you pronounce the name of this town?" The local replied, "it's not much of a town, either".
The answer they sought - and eventually received - is "Yawl". The "gh" isn't an Irish artifact, either - the Irish name is "Eochaill" (possibly with an acute accent on the o) which means "Yew Forest".Part of the other side of the river, where I grew up, is called "Ard Sailleach" or "Tall Sallies". Not Little Richard's ones, but rather yet more yew trees. Apparently they used be pretty common in those parts.
The answer they sought - and eventually received - is "Yawl". The "gh" isn't an Irish artifact, either - the Irish name is "Eochaill" (possibly with an acute accent on the o) which means "Yew Forest".Part of the other side of the river, where I grew up, is called "Ard Sailleach" or "Tall Sallies". Not Little Richard's ones, but rather yet more yew trees. Apparently they used be pretty common in those parts.
no sex, please, we're Irish
Mar. 13th, 2005 10:35 amThere's no Gaelic word for "sex", apparently. Or maybe we have a lot of them. (via funferal, whose post on the subject is itself worth reading.) Despite being a poor Gaelgóir (as illustrated by the fact that I've probably spelled that incorrectly) even I knew gnéas, although my recollection is that it's sex-as-in-gender rather than sex-as-in-horizontal-mambo. Also, focáil looks suspiciously like a borrowing from English, since the pronunciation would be not particularly different from "fuck all", and even among us non-speakers there's a tendency to create Irish words by taking an English verb and applying the suffix "áil" to it - it's akin to verbing a noun by adding "ing".
