lesbiassparrow

Having recently suffered through some very interesting subtitles I was thinking about translation and how insane it gets if people try to do it literally. I was reading through a modern Irish comic book version of The Táin (the most famous Irish epic) with someone to help out with their Irish and we had some odd moments. Such as when they translated this phrase 'dar m’fhallaing' as 'by my dressing gown,' which I guess it literally does mean in modern Irish, but it's really a sort of very archaic mild oath. And then there was the whole issue of how Irish doesn't have a verb to say 'I have'; you have to say that something is 'at you' or 'on you.' Nor do we have an all purpose useful word like 'hello' which is annoying if you answer the phone a lot.

Irish doesn't also have a word for yes or no: you just say either the positive or negative form of the verb back at someone. I've always wondered how many other languages don't have a word just to say yes/no. Latin doesn't really (though I guess people always say you can use 'itaque' for 'yes' but it doesn't really work.

Um. That's it.

ETA: As an update on the bunny front, here's an Irish saying:

Is fearr greim de choinín ná dhá ghreim de chat

Literally it means 'one bite of a bunny is better than two of a cat' - in other words that it is better to eat a little bit of rabbit than a lot of cat, or quality is better than quantity. I don't know why people say this as I don't think cats were ever on the menu in Ireland. Maybe it's just that a huge amount of Irish sayings involve cats.

How you write Irish has notoriously little to do with how it is pronounced; it takes people forever to really, truly believe that you don't pronounce F most of the time (and never in the centre of a word!). I was trying to explain this to someone and then came across this, which is the Gettysburg Address as it would have to be written in Irish to get that pronounciation. Some of the words are coincidentally Irish, most are not.

Fómhar scór aind saibhin iars agó, ár fómhar fátars brat fómhart an tios cantaineant uan néisean, consaoibhd en liobartaí, aind dedicéatad tú de propasaisean tait ál mean ár criaétead íocual.

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