Thirty-Two Words for Field

A love song to the Irish language. Magical. And controversial.

Kaleidoscope, p 1

I asked [my grandmother] one day what the word for a hole was. She replied ‘Do you mean one dug into the ground by an animal? That's an uachas. Or one made by fish in a sandy riverbed for spawning? That's a saothar. Or if it's been hollowed out by the hoofs of beasts and then filled with rain it's a plobán. Or if a lobster is hiding in one it's a fach. Or if it's been created as a hideaway by a wild beast it's a puathais’
[Abstract means abstracted from something, from embodied]

Losing a Word, p 46

Beneath the language's seemingly disordered patterns and patchwork is a silent substratum of folk thought, which serves to maintain an unbroken link with its roots, from which arises our most fundamental systems of thought.

p 51

I was aware of the word díláthair, which meant absence — but not the absence felt by an early riser or distant lover or anything of that kind. Instead díláthair referred to the absence felt when something or somewhere has been depopulated or destroyed by other human beings. It is the feeling the next generation will experience in a world without coral reefs or glaciers. It is also the feeling our descendants may have when they realise that we willingly chose not to pass this language on to them.

Island Sanctuary, p 52

The word breacadh can mean the picking of a millstone, the act of explaining something, covering a paper with writing, or the dawn of a new day.

p 53

Thomas Davis wrote that a people without language of its own is only half of a nation. A nation should guard its language more than its territories — 'tis a surer barrier, and more important frontier, than fortress or rivers.

The Wave, p 79

Many inhabitants are descendants of the original settlers who arrived in one of the numerous waves of migration since Ice Age. We've been working the same land and speaking the same language for thousands of years.

p 80

Christianity arrived here only in the fifth century, and many of these words and tales are far older than that.

Land, pp 122-123

Colpa is a word that describes a certain amount of it [...] It was carried into Hiberno-English as ‘collop’ [defined] as ‘the old count for the carrying power of land. The grazing of one cow or two yearlings heifers or six sheep or twelve goats or six geese and a gander.’

Place Names, p 141

In Co. Mayo there's a little inlet in Killary Harbour with a name simply too evocative to even attempt to decipher: Cuainín Ais-Sciorradh go hIfreann (Cooneenashkirrogohifrinn), which translates as ‘the little harbour going back to Hell’.

p 145

Many Irish place names have been so corrupted by their enforced anglicisation that it can be hard to make sense of them, and they have been rendered into garbled and discordant forms: Ballymunterhiggin, Aghayeevoge, Ballywillwill, Treantaghmucklagh. These linguistically insensitive transliterations were done by scholars employed by the British Ordnance Survey during the 19th century, in the course of a programme to make improved maps as a way of reinforcing control of certain territories. It was a military strategy, a form of desecration — another violation heaped on the other humiliations inflicted on local people.

Arabic, p 202

It now appears that the people who built the passage tombs at NewGrange, Knowth and Dowth were not us.