how the irish invented slang

conchubhar1

flicked through it and some of them seemed highly stretched

but im no linguist


what are your opinions?

Coriolanus

Haven't read it but heard the author on one of the magazine shows on newstalk.

Wasn't exactly impressed and that's with him most likely cherry picking the best of the book for airing on the radio.

hullaballoo

Em, well, if you understand linguistics, you'll know that there are a very many words that the Irish could have claim to; on the other hand, you'll know that a lot of words have a deeper etymological meaning.

E.g. the Irish seem to have been responsible for the word 'brogue', which would correlate to 'bróg', from the Irish for the same word. However, the Viking word for the same thing is 'brōk' in which case I don't know to whom it should be attributed.

E.g. take the Irish word, 'síbín', which describes an undesired and unfavourable joint in which people drink. There's hardly anything to refute that this comes from Irish, hardly anything at all. However, you're more than welcome to dispute this.

I hope this is helpful.

oscarBravo

hullaballoo wrote: »

E.g. the Irish seem to have been responsible for the word 'brogue', which would correlate to 'bróg', from the Irish for the same word. However, the Viking word for the same thing is 'brōk' in which case I don't know to whom it should be attributed.

I have suspected for a while that a fairish chunk of Irish is inherited from the Vikings. Another example is the Irish word 'asal' - donkey - which in modern Danish is 'æsel'. It makes sense that things brought to Ireland by the Vikings would get Viking names - the question is, were there shoes and donkeys in Ireland pre-Vikings?

hullaballoo

oscarBravo wrote: »

I have suspected for a while that a fairish chunk of Irish is inherited from the Vikings. Another example is the Irish word 'asal' - donkey - which in modern Danish is 'æsel'. It makes sense that things brought to Ireland by the Vikings would get Viking names - the question is, were there shoes and donkeys in Ireland pre-Vikings?

It's likely that there were shoes in Ireland pre-Vikings, and possible that there were donkeys, but I'm unsure of the facts of it.

However, what's important to remember is that a lot of the words that we imported from the Vikings were to do with marketable goods e.g. shoes (see above), buttons (cnaipe/knap) etc. Imported words from other languages had different emphases e.g. Latin had a big influence on nouns (proper and improper). My sig has an example of this - the word in Latin for harlot/slut/whore was carnæ which is identical (at least in terms of spelling) to the coeval Latin term.

Coriolanus

hullaballoo wrote: »

Em, well, if you understand linguistics, you'll know that there are a very many words that the Irish could have claim to; on the other hand, you'll know that a lot of words have a deeper etymological meaning.

E.g. the Irish seem to have been responsible for the word 'brogue', which would correlate to 'bróg', from the Irish for the same word. However, the Viking word for the same thing is 'brōk' in which case I don't know to whom it should be attributed.

So pretty much some of the words in common could, rather than imported from one culture to another, be sort of from a common ancestral language instead?
Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick?

Ron DMC

Nevore wrote: »

So pretty much some of the words in common could, rather than imported from one culture to another, be sort of from a common ancestral language instead?
Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick?

No, certainly not a common language that ties them. Just one word surpassing another for certain things. In this case due to the language barrier in trading (Viking example by hulla), and the latin example may simply be people using latin terms because they're popular.

Looks at nowadays. Loads of words come from other languages even when there's perfectly good words already. These words may eventually take over and the original language words for those things be forgotten.

brianthebard

I thought it was a pretty interesting book, he focuses on words that have an uncertain origin or which have a etymology that makes little sense. Stuff like Baloney coming from the phrase Béal Onna (ónna?) makes much more sense to me than coming from an Italian meat of some sort or something to do with the bottom of a ship. Jazz is probably the most contentious word that he claims to have Irish origins, so he devotes a whole chapter to making the argument about it. Its not definitive but a lot of it makes sense imo.