Irish Words and Phrases As Gaeilge — What They Actually Mean

Some Irish words do not come across. You can put an English word beside them and the sentence will function, but something has been left on the far side. Grá is love. Sláinte is health. Both are true and both are thin. What follows is the longer answer — the words people most often look up, the seanfhocail that have outlasted everyone who first said them, and the one mark of punctuation that changes a word into a different word.

The words people look up

Grá — love. A masculine noun of the fourth declension, four letters, no cognate in English to lean on. It carries romantic love and the other kinds without changing shape.

Sláinte — health. Feminine, fourth declension. It is raised as a toast because the toast is the shorter form of a wish for someone's health, not because the word means cheers. That is a translation of the gesture, not of the word.

Fáilte — welcome. Most often met in céad míle fáilte, a hundred thousand welcomes, which is not hospitality inflated for a tea towel so much as the ordinary Irish habit of counting warmth in large round numbers.

Féileacán — butterfly. Masculine, first declension; the plural is féileacáin. There is nothing hidden in it. It is simply the word, and it happens to sound about as light as the thing it names.

Bród — pride. Masculine. Irish has several words here and they are not interchangeable: bród and mórtas are the pride you would want to feel, while uabhar is the pride that comes before the fall.

The fada is not decoration

The accent leaning over an Irish vowel is a síneadh fada — a long stretch. It marks the vowel as long, and leaving it off does not produce a casual spelling of the same word. It produces a different one.

The standard demonstration is a set of three. Sean is an adjective meaning old. Seán is a man's name. Séan is a sign or an omen, and as a verb, to deny. Three words, one letter apart, and the only thing separating them is where the mark sits or whether it is there at all.

So gra is not grá, and slainte is not sláinte. When a word is going on a wall it is worth getting the mark right.

Seanfhocail — the old words

Seanfhocal is sean and focal: an old word. The plural is seanfhocail. It is a flatter, more honest name than proverb, and it describes what these actually are — pieces of ordinary speech that survived because they were compressed enough to carry and true enough to keep being said.

• Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin — there is no hearth like your own hearth. Usually given in English as there's no place like home, which loses the fire.
• Ní neart go cur le chéile — there is no strength without unity. Still quoted at union meetings and in GAA dressing rooms.
• Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí — praise the young and they will flourish.
• Is maith an scéalaí an aimsir — time is a good storyteller. The nearest English is time will tell, which is flatter.
• Is maith an scáthán súil charad — a friend's eye is a good mirror.
• Is fearr an tsláinte ná na táinte — health is better than herds. The old measure of wealth was cattle, and the proverb still counts in them.
• Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine — people live in each other's shadow, or shelter. It is the one most often reached for when someone means we get by on each other.
• Giorraíonn beirt bóthar — two people shorten a road.
• Is binn béal ina thost — a silent mouth is sweet.
• Tús maith leath na hoibre — a good start is half the work.

Note what is not in that list: almost none of it is advice. The seanfhocail are mostly observations, and the ones that last are the ones that stayed true after the world they described had gone.

The ones about the language itself

Irish has a set of proverbs about Irish, which is not something most languages need.

• Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam — a country without a language is a country without a soul.
• Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste ná Béarla cliste — broken Irish is better than clever English. An argument about who the language belongs to, settled in seven words.
• Beatha teanga í a labhairt — the life of a language is in the speaking of it.
• Labhair í agus mairfidh sí — speak it and it will live.

The last two are instructions rather than observations, and they are aimed at the reader. That is unusual, and it tells you something about the century in which they were being repeated most.

Getting one on a wall

The phrases above are typeset in Irish and English and printed on 250gsm archival matte paper in the seanfhocail collection. The single words — grá, sláinte, fáilte, féileacán, bród — are in the As Gaeilge collection, framed or unframed, and several of them are on t-shirts as well.

Whichever you choose, check the fada.