Tag Archives: irish

Monday Night Irish Class, August 4, 2008

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Irish Class, August 4, 2008

Irish Class, August 4, 2008

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Fadas: áéíóúÁÉÍÓÚ

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Nick had spend much of July at an advanced Irish course in Dublin,
and tonight he gave us a couple samples of what he had learned.

Old Irish

This was a gloss in the St. Gall Priscian 9th
century codex mss in Switzerland, as printed in Thurneysen’s
Old Irish Reader. There some web formatting issues with the notation. It does not display correctly in all browsers. FireFox 3 is fine, but IE 6 and the version of Opera on the Nokia 770 have problems.

A Stormy Night
Is acher in gaith in-nocht
fu.fūasna fairggæ findḟolt:

ni.ágor réimm Mora Minn
dond láechraid lainn ūa Lothlind.		 The wind is rough tonight
tossing the white combed ocean.
I need not dread fierce Vikings
crossing the Irish Sea.

The translation is from The Forgotten Hermitage of Skellig Michael.
The monks of Skellig Michael certainly would have appreciated the sentiment of “A Stormy Night”,
even though the author may not have been one of them.

Notes and vocabulary

A note on classical literary Gaelic/Early Modern Irish

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In last Monday night’s Irish class we talked about Classical Gaelic Poetry from the
early modern (1200-1650 AD) period. I mentioned that I had run across a description
of some of the rules. I found it in

Gàir Nan Clàrsach – The Harps’ Cry: Anthology of 17th Century Gaelic Poetry. The
book is about Scottish Gaelic, but this form of poetry, and the language was common to
both Gaelic Scotland and Ireland in the period. The poets who produced these works had been trained in the genre for years. Their work was aimed at the Gaelic elite, and traditionally they were supported as court poets by the clan chiefs and great lords. Here is a verse from Niall Mòr Mac
Muireadhigh’s Do Ruaidhri Mòr, Mac Leòid (“To Ruaidhri Mòr”), followed by the analysis in the
introduction to the book.

Fiche meisge linn gach laoi –
nochar leisge linn ná lé;
fiú i neart ar mbeathaidh do bhí
ceathair, a trí, a seacht le sé.

Description of the rules as applied to this verse

My odd interests–as Gaeilge

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One of the bloggers at Agus Araile has a series of posts called Wes’s words you may never or hardly ever use. I commented on one of them today, which comes from a part of Irish history that particularly interests me. Tonight I went through all the words he had posted. Far from being “words you may never or hardly ever use”, over half of them are relevant to one or another of my active interests.