A few Irish words

‘Listening to’ in Irish is ‘ag éisteacht le’. It reminds me a little of German words like that for ice cream and day. The Irish words for ice cream, uachtar reoite, is great, as is the Irish word for day, lá, but so is the Irish word for evening, tráthnóna.

Sometimes Irish reminds me of one of the romance languages closer to Latin as when I hear the Irish madra, dog, and sometimes it feels like a whole bunch of things I love in languages happening all at once with all sorts of cool new things too like lentition and mutation of nouns that change their spelling practically on whim but actually with some really clear rules. It is different enough from German that I can appreciate the parts that sound like and remind me of German in a new way.

When I closed my eyes and thought of the Irish word for milk, bainne, which includes one of my favourite things about Irish so far, the ‘yuh’ glide after a slender consonant that has the sound of the Spanish ñ, I realise I pronounce bainne (i.e. I mean ‘bainne is pronounced’ but you can never say definitively how a word is pronounced in Irish because every dialect seems to differ in some way or another on pretty much every word) like bahnyuh or baña which to me sounds like barnyard and then I had no idea how I forgot the word for milk even once with that association. Another word that I like with a y glide which I like even more because of the vowel combination oi which is pronounced i like tin (I just like when oi makes an i sound) is gloine, glinn-ya, glass.

The Irish word for dictionary is pronounced a lot like the English word folklore: foclóir. Some seem to think foclóir sounds kind of naughty but I think it sounds like folklore and there are plenty of other Irish words that sound kind of bad if that’s what you’re after.

Stay is fan, staying is ag fanacht. You want your fans to stay. That is how I remember. Irish was way ahead of the 21st century in that the word for ‘fan’ is basically follower: is leantóir U2 mé. The verb for follow in Irish is ‘lean’ which I remember because when you follow something you lean in that direction.

…..

I don’t really know what I need that I don’t already have in order to do a fairly decent job translating from Spanish to English. There are so many resources like dictionaries and even automatic translators that it kind of amazes me that people pay for this kind of thing, and what am I contributing that couldn’t be provided by a machine interpretation? That is kind of hard to figure out. How valuable is, and when do I use my, intuition as far as what words to use when translating from Spanish to English? Could I take on a translation project right now? What do I need that I don’t already have? So the translation will take me a little longer now than it might with a little more preparation but I’m still capable of it. I would like someone to hire me to do something like that.