Irish of the week

[kaberett]

North: tuaisceart. South: deisceart.

Left: clé. Right: deis.

Because if you are facing the rising sun, the south is to your right.

I'd been really struggling to remember the cardinal directions; I was very pleased that when we were introduced to relative directions, I went "hold on a sec--" and was completely correct. It feels like I really am learning a thing.

(Clé, it is asserted by FutureLearn Irish 101, is an archaic term for north. I am not managing to immediately find more detailed or referenced etymology.)

Similarly, east and west derive from terms for "in front" and "behind".

Comments

[angelofthenorth]

Cledd is old Welsh for North (hence Gogledd, or gogs)

De is south,

Chwith is left, De is Right.

And for similar reasons to yours.

[lebannen]

Deis as in deosil/deasil = clockwise?

Replying to this comment specifically because then does chwith lead to widdershins?

... why yes I get my knowledge of Celtic languages from fantasy novels (and occasionally roadsigns).

[cjwatson]

Thanks, this is useful!

Wiktionary has an entry for clé giving an etymology that (clicking through) it reckons has lean/bent/crooked/inauspicious kinds of root meanings.

[khronos_keeper]

Oooh, thanks for this! I've recently been doing Irish on Rosetta Stone, so this is really fascinating :)

[kaberett]

\o/! How are you finding it? I've never used Rosetta Stone but am doing a slightly weird Duolingo + FutureLearn mash-up... (So far they seem to be compensating for each other's inadequacies fairly well, which is nice!)

[khronos_keeper]

Really interesting! I'm better with grammar when it's taught explicitly so the conjunctions and pronouns were weird until I reverse engineered the sentences with google translate. I'm kind of a mynah bird, so I'll be walking around and randomly hear myself parroting words I learned the previous day. "Ceapaire :P"

I had never heard of FutureLearn, so I might look into that!

One of the really interesting things I learned was how much Irish sentence structure influenced English-speaking Irish people. As a result, I could see how much my hometown was indirectly influenced by the Irish settlers who settled there from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s, and the ethnic divide in my hometown between English settlers and Irish settlers from their speech patterns. Really fascinating stuff. (I'm from NY, so we have a massive history from indentured servitude and the potato famine.)