Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Colourful Irish Phrases
    Colourful Irish Phrases
    Colourful Irish Phrases
    Ebook71 pages46 minutes

    Colourful Irish Phrases

    By Micheál Ó Conghaile

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The Irish language has made a huge contribution to the English language as it's spoken in Ireland and beyond. Micheál Ó Conghaile's 'Colourful Irish Phrases' is a small compendium of characteristic phrases that will alert the reader to the unmistakable difference between our native language and English. Even the most basic words are expressed so differently. Please in Irish is más é do thoil é (if it is your will), and thanks becomes go raibh maith agat (may you receive good).

    There are many phrases that when translated, word for word, they sound different, unusual and sometimes funny. But above all, they are rich and deeply rooted. Visitors to Ireland who want to get some notion of our native identity will find these phrases both instructive and revealing.

    Topics covered range across subjects as diverse as insults and put-downs, being human and the gift of the gab.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMercier Press
    Release dateMar 16, 2018
    ISBN9781781175569
    Colourful Irish Phrases

    Related to Colourful Irish Phrases

    Related ebooks

    Humor & Satire For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Sorrows Of Spike Island

      Dec 5, 2019

      The Sorrows Of Spike Island
      11 min read

    • Article

      Harrying England

      Oct 4, 2018

      Harrying England
      3 min read

    • Article

      Let’s Get Physical

      Mar 21, 2024

      Many stories of tactile ghosts are recorded across the years from séance chambers and haunted houses – entities that stroke, caress, tap, grasp, poke, pinch, punch, push, pull, scratch, slap, beat, levitate and even on occasion take intimate libertie

      9 min read

    • Article

      Elizabethan Espionage

      Aug 13, 2022

      Elizabethan Secret Agent: The Untold Story of William Ashby 1536-1593 Timothy Ashby Scotland Street Press, 2022 429 pages Hardback, £24.99 ISBN: 9781910895597 Spying on one’s neighbour, by any standard, is an unfriendly act, though now taken as neces

      3 min read

    • Article

      Pond-hopping

      Feb 11, 2022

      Pond-hopping
      4 min read

    • Article

      Sinking And Salvage

      Jun 10, 2023

      Sinking And Salvage
      14 min read

    • Article

      The Search For Untold Treasures

      Aug 13, 2020

      The Search For Untold Treasures
      9 min read

    • Article

      SPOKEN Like A LOCAL

      Mar 1, 2024

      The Yorkshire Dialect Society was formed in 1897, out of the ashes of the Yorkshire committee of the English Dialect Society. The latter had decided to wind up after the culmination of work for the English Dialect Dictionary, which was edited by York

      2 min read

    • Article

      On The

      Aug 1, 2021

      On The
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Science Of Accents

      Apr 4, 2021

      The Science Of Accents
      5 min read

    • Article

      The fantastic Mr Fox

      Dec 3, 2019

      Fast away the old year passes’, so the lyrics from an old Christmas carol go. And over 150 years later, it’s still true. In keeping with this sentiment, I thought it might be apposite to address some of the various questions that the fox shooter ofte

      3 min read

    • Article

      Letter Of The Month

      Dec 20, 2021

      The ‘30th Anniversary Issue’ (October 2021) brought back tramping memories. I recalled an exhausting tramp to Kapakapanui on which we almost succumbed to heatstroke; I remembered my late dad’s fondness for Cone Hut and my first multi-day tramp. My th

      3 min read

    • Article

      Town & Country Notebook

      Nov 2, 2022

      1) Which great physicist was born at Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, in 1642? 2) Which English county has two separate coastlines? 3) How many species of deer live in the wild in Britain? 4) The Victoria Cross was first established to recognise bravery

      4 min read

    • Article

      Town & Country Notebook

      Jul 31, 2024

      1) Anne of Bohemia was married to which English king? 2) What word can refer to both a horse’s colour and a loading area? 3) Which is the hottest planet in our solar system? 4) What did Old Mother Hubbard find in her cupboard? 5) The name of which bo

      4 min read

    • Article

      Readers' Letters

      Jul 26, 2023

      SIR: I have just celebrated my 80th birthday and been much acclaimed by my family and friends. Even the government has got in on the act, as it has increased my state pension by 25p a week. Unfortunately, my village shop has hardly anything to offer

      5 min read

    • Article

      The State Of It

      Sep 12, 2021

      The State Of It
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Modest Man

      Oct 17, 2019

      The Modest Man
      5 min read

    • Article

      The State Of It

      Sep 12, 2021

      The State Of It
      6 min read

    • Article

      It Takes A Village

      Dec 11, 2024

      It Takes A Village
      4 min read

    • Article

      My View...

      Jul 21, 2022

      My View...
      2 min read

    • Article

      Ireland’s Knight In Shining Armour

      Jun 26, 2024

      When Tony O’Reilly died in May aged 88 - he had once been the wealthiest Irishman - he was accused by the Irish Times of having ‘Anglophile tendencies’ and holding Winston Churchill in great esteem. When he became the first Irish citizen to be knight

      3 min read

    • Article

      Recollections Of The Crooked House

      Nov 14, 2023

      Email [email protected] Write to WDYTYA? Magazine, Eagle House, Bristol BS1 4ST STAR LETTER WIN an AncestryDNA test kit from ancestry.co.uk WORTH £79 The writer of our star letter wins an AncestryDNA test worth £79 – so drop us a line an

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Colourful Irish Phrases

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Colourful Irish Phrases - Micheál Ó Conghaile

      MERCIER PRESS

      3B Oak House, Bessboro Rd

      Blackrock, Cork, Ireland.

      www.mercierpress.ie

      www.twitter.com/IrishPublisher

      www.facebook.com/mercier.press

      © Micheál Ó Conghaile, 2018

      Published in association with Cló Iar-Chonnacht

      ISBN: 978 1 78117 555 2

      Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 556 9

      Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 557 6

      This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

      Introduction

      I remember not being able to speak English. Growing up in the 1960s on a small island, Inis Treabhair, off the Connemara coast, Irish was the everyday language of its dwindling population of about forty people. Six households in all. The reason I remember so clearly not being able to speak English is the summer visits when our first cousins from London and Galway city would come to spend a few weeks with us. I must have been three or four years old at the time. As kids, they spoke only English. I spoke only Irish. But we got along and played together, communicating with each other as children from different backgrounds do. I picked up some English from them and later learned English at school, where every subject except English was taught through Irish. When I entered the island’s national school in 1966 there were twenty-one students enrolled there; when I left in 1975 the number had dwindled to five. The school doors were locked for the last time in 1980, the numbers having fallen to two.

      The same fate awaited life on the island. In the 1870s when its population peaked, 171 people lived there. A couple of years ago the last native islander, Patsy Lydon, left the island to live with family members on the mainland, bringing an end to island life which had gone on unbroken for at least 200 years.

      So much dies with the death of island life. Even in the future, if other people go to live there, the chain or the link to the original inhabitants will be forever broken. It was the islanders and their forefathers who named and knew every field and hillock on the island; its strands, inlets, shores and rocks; the surrounding tides and currents and waves they had to navigate in all sorts of weather; the joys and pains of hundreds of years of continued life; the local lore, songs, poems and stories. And the language – the language that brought everything to life. In this case it was Irish.

      The Irish language phrases in this book are ones that I mostly grew up with. Others I picked up over the years. Most of them were part of what we were, of our daily speech and lives. Perhaps some of them originated on the island. Most of them can be heard from native Irish speakers from all Gaeltachtaí in Ireland, still very much alive and in use. We don’t know for sure how old they are. Some of them may have been used for over 1,000 years, originating in Old Irish before the ninth century, living through Middle Irish, 900–1200, through Classical Irish, 1200–1600, and still to the fore in Modern Irish, surviving through the Great Famine of the 1840s and the decline of the language in most parts of the country. We know for sure that one of them, the phrase Fáilte Uí Cheallaigh, the O’Kelly welcome, is nearly 700 years old

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1