response 26 of 69:

Oct 8 21:09 UTC 1996

 <cormac breaks out his wonderfull dictionary>  O.K... As regards #23. My
dictionary says gadhar means; a hound, hunting dog; beagle, dog, mastiff. and
it gives madra as a dog or mastiff but says use madra when describing wild
or stray or savage type dogs.  I always thought gadhar was just the word they
preferred in Munster. Perhaps gadhar specificly refers to domesticated dogs?

I first started learning Irish when I found a very old book of my Aunts in
my attic. It wasn't written in the roman alphabet, that's how old it is.
This book gave me the word cu/ for dog. Teach yourself Irish said this word
means greyhound. Lets see what this dictionary says.......... O.K. Cu/= a dog
a hound , a greyhound, a hunting dog.  But get this! it also means a hero or
a champion.gee.... I wonder where that came from ;)

Last night before I got cut off I was going to raise a point. It seems that
these words don't have the meaning we think they do. They pack all those
different meanings into the one word. But perhaps the dictionary writers give
us all those different deffinitions to point us in the direction of the
meaning as the Irish speakers understand it. Perhaps their concept of a
greyhound carries with it a sence of superiority to other dogs because of its
champion shadings. And a champion would ( in their minds) have stunning speed
and singleminded purpose that the greyhound has.

response 28 of 69:

Oct 9 12:54 UTC 1996

Re 26 "...these words don't have the meaning we think they do...":
In all (natural) languages, single words are used in a fairly wide variety
of ways, often related but often not *simply* related.  Those uses
determine the meaning.  Even in quite closely related languages, the range
of uses (meanings) is usually not exactly the same.  The real problem is when,
in looking at another language, you try to gloss a word with a single word
in your own language.  (Or vice versa, of course.)

But of course you're right that the way we think about a word in one context
is often influenced by other uses of that word.  It's easy to go overboard
on that kind of thing, but important to recognize that it does happen.

response 30 of 69:

Oct 13 00:40 UTC 1996

Oh by the way Kami, The Irish for otter is Madra uisce, as you may have
surmised.

response 32 of 69:

Nov 11 20:28 UTC 1996

In case any body reads this... re #9: Gallego, of northwestern Spain, is a
Romance dialect, close to Portuguese. Breton, Cornish and Welsh are very
closely related, and are called the Brittonic or Brythonic languages, from
Welsh Brython "Briton, Welshman" or its ancient equivalent. Nobody has spoken
Cornish natively in centuries; there is some medieval literature. Breton and
Welsh are going strong. Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic are descendants of
Old Irish and very close, but not so close to Brythonic. Irish and Scottish
Gaelic use variants of the same, quite old spelling system; Manx of the Isle
of Man, now extinct, used a crazy one. The oldest, coolest literature is in
Old Irish; the Britons were Christian from Roman times and wrote a lot of
Latin, but there is plenty of Old Welsh poetry. The Arthur legends, and other
medieval romances com from Brittany, but they may have been written down in
French. I only know a little Welsh, unfortunately.

response 34 of 69:

Nov 13 16:17 UTC 1996

Where does Provencal fit in, in these language families?

response 36 of 69:

Nov 14 19:15 UTC 1996

And I didn't mean Provencal anyway <gracel slaps herself on the head, to
readjust memory cells> I meant Catalan, I think.  

response 38 of 69:

Nov 25 03:56 UTC 1996

>Here's something really cool on the evolution of Gaelic, esp. Irish, from
>Alexei Kondratiev, one of my favorite Celtic scholars:

[I'm re-posting this message because I think most people didn't receive it]:
 
M/aire wrote:
>>>WE translate Tuatha De/ Danna/n into
"people of the goddess Danu" but it may have simply meant "people of Danu"
and the term goddess didn't exist.<<<
 
Actually, we can be pretty sure that 'Tuatha D/e Danann' means "Peoples of
the Goddess Danu". In the oldest forms of the name the second word appears as
'D/ee', with a second /e/. This is because it contains the remnant of a
feminine genitive ending. We have plenty of evidence that in Old Celtic the
word for "god" was 'd/euos' and the word for "goddess" was 'd/eu/a'. The
genitives of these words were 'd/eui' ("of-god") and 'd/eu/as' or
(proto-Goidelic) 'd/eui/as' ("of-goddess"). So the whole name in Old Celtic
would have been 'Tout/as D/eui/as Dan/onos'. As Old Celtic evolved into
Irish, some final syllables were regularly lost. If we had had "D/eui=of the
God", the final syllable would have dropped off altogether. But because the
feminine ending was long, the vowel was preserved. However, Old Celtic /u/
disappeared between vowels in Irish; and since adjacent vowels in Irish
always merge, you eventually got the single form 'd/e' to mean both "of the
god" and "of the goddess". Later Irish got around this by adding the feminine
prefix 'ban-' to mean "goddess". But there's no ambiguity about the original
form 'D/ee'.
Le gach deagh-dh\urachd,
Alexei

response 40 of 69:

Dec 4 07:57 UTC 1996

the final e is pronounced in Irish, sometimes lightly, as a "shwa", sometimes
as almost a long a.  So it would be more like nah-vey.  Cute, though, Albaugh.

response 42 of 69:

Dec 8 04:32 UTC 1996

Not criticizing, Kevin, just trying to keep discussion going.  Languages and
comparing them is always interesting.

response 44 of 69:

Dec 9 03:34 UTC 1996

Oh.  That means holy or sacred.  As in Talamh Naomh--sacred ground.
I'd love to see more of those swear words.  They're funny.

response 46 of 69:

Dec 9 20:20 UTC 1996

No criticism taken!  :-)  But to spoil an anecdote with accurate facts... ;-)

response 48 of 69:

Dec 12 03:20 UTC 1996

sooooorry! <g>