Slogans Galore!: Gaelic words in English

By George McLennan

A handy reference guide to Gaelic-derived words and expressions in common usage in English. Like George McLennan’s previously successful book “Scots Gaelic - An Introduction to the Basics”, “Gaelic and English - Their Common Origins” and “A Gaelic Alphabet - A Guide to the Pronunciation of Gaelic Letters and W

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Argyll Publishing
• Release date: Oct 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781907165337

George McLennan

George Robert McLennan (MA Hons, PhD) was born in 1945 and studied Classical Languages at St Andrews and McMaster Universities and Birkbeck College. In addition he obtained three post-doctoral posts at the Universities of Bonn, Urbino and Nsukka (Nigeria). After returning to Scotland, he studied Scottish Gaelic and settled in Argyll with his family. Through the encouragement of his students, he began writing and started a small publishing company and in total wrote six popular books on Scottish Gaelic, its history and its links to other languages. George McLennan died suddenly in 2021 and Scottish Gaelic and its European Cousins was his final work and is published posthumously.

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Slogans Galore!

Gaelic words in English

George McLennan

© George McLennan

First published in 2010 by Argyll Publishing

This edition by New Argyll Publishing 2018

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under the copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission.

For permission requests, please contact

www.newargyllpublishing.com

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-907165-33-7

Preface

For most of the words in the word list below I have added a few remarks of a historical, grammatical etc nature. The following points, however, should be noted:

• I have not attempted to give any pronunciation guidelines for Gaelic words. Many other books and dictionaries deal with this, and readers who are interested may find A Gaelic Alphabet¹ helpful in this regard.

• I have given very brief explanations of features of Gaelic grammar such as lenition, eclipsis, spelling etc as they occur. Since the book deals with Gaelic words this is desirable for a fuller understanding of a particular word or point. Readers who want more information on these matters can consult any grammar book or language course, for instance Scots Gaelic, an introduction to the basics². Indeed, I hope that readers who do not know much about Gaelic may be stimulated to have a closer look at this fascinating language. Features of Welsh grammar are also mentioned from time to time where they enhance the discussion of a Gaelic word.

• Many of the Gaelic words mentioned below also occur in some form or other in placenames and personal names. Since many readers will be quite familiar with these I’ve added examples where appropriate. The same goes for quotations from poetry (English and Scots) which may recall a half-forgotten word. Placenames are generally those of Scotland, but occasionally I’ve cited instances from England, as a reminder that a Celtic language was spoken all over England before it was gradually ousted from the fifth century a.d. onwards by Anglo-Saxon and other later forms of English. I refer to this language, which was like early Welsh, as Old British.³

¹ New Argyll Publishing ISBN 978-1-907165-34-4

² New Argyll Publishing ISBN 978-1-907165-36-8

³ This is a convenient term which, like Old Prussian, need not imply a later version of the language.

Introduction

For many reasons, including its status as a world language and because of its history as the language of the British Empire, the English language has been steadily enriched over the centuries by the inclusion of words from other languages. There are apparently words in English which have been borrowed from over 500 different languages throughout the world, from Aboriginal (e.g. boomerang) to Zulu (e.g. impi). Amongst these languages is Gaelic.

Gaelic words begin to appear in written English and Scots from the 9th century a.d. though they would presumably have been in circulation orally before this. They are found in ecclesiastical records, land documents and other official records. At that time there was no separate written Scottish Gaelic – or at least none has survived – but there was of course written Irish. Gaelic speakers in Scotland had come from Ireland in the 5th century, or perhaps even earlier. This written Irish was the form used in Scotland up to about the middle of the 17th century.⁴ It is often referred to as Classical Irish, or Classical Common Gaelic, and all relevant borrowed words of this period are in the word list below. Since the same Gaelic was written in Scotland and Ireland it seems reasonable to include a word even if it has a strong Irish connection; it’s still Gaelic and we can’t assume that a word could be used in Ireland, but never in Scotland – or vice versa – during this period.

It is important to stress that it was the written language which was common to Ireland and Scotland. This did not apply to the spoken languages, and Scottish Gaelic gradually moved away from its Irish parent over the centuries and would have sounded quite alien to many Irish speakers by the 17th century. So for centuries there were two forms of Gaelic in Scotland, the learned written one and the unwritten vernacular, the latter finally gaining acceptance as a written language with the 1767 Gaelic translation of the New Testament, although alterations to the orthographic conventions have continued since then. It’s rather like modern colloquial English compared with biblical English of the 17th century bible, the latter continuing in use in certain circumstances, but having vanished from everyday use. Other European languages provide parallels; there is quite a difference between colloquial spoken Welsh and standard written Welsh, the latter also biblical based. The best example is probably Greek, where the archaic katharevousa (pure) form of the language is still used in official documents. Modern Greek, known as demotic (popular), the everyday spoken language, has moved away considerably in grammar, vocabulary, and especially pronunciation from the katharevousa form, (although Greeks of today understandably tend to pronounce katharevousa following demotic speech).

A word borrowed into English may be described as Irish rather than Gaelic, but for reasons mentioned above I have included it in the word list. What I have not included are words from Irish which entered English from the later part of the 17th century to the present day, and which have obvious Irish associations, as leprechaun (‘an elf’) or Dáil (the Irish Parliament). Sometimes, however, a word from this period is described as Irish, but has the same form in Gaelic. An example would be sluagh ‘a large number’ (see under slew). Such words have been included.

The following have also been excluded:

a) old words belonging to the general Celtic language stratum, such as druid ‘priest’, dun ‘hill’, sock ‘ploughshare’, brock ‘badger’; such words cannot be regarded as specifically Gaelic.

b) words which have a fortuitous similarity of sound to Gaelic but are otherwise unconnected. A frequently cited example is smashin(g) which is thought to be from Gaelic ’s math sin ‘that’s good’. In fact smashin(g) is from the verb to smash by way of extensions such as smash hit, smasher (of striking appearance) and has nothing to do with Gaelic math. The idea of vigour is also found in Scots where smashing means ‘strapping, vigorous’. Compare the word dashing (striking, showy) from the verb to dash. Such folk etymologies are an occasional feature of languages and sometimes stick: Gaelic buntàta ‘potato’ is a compound based on the fortuitous fact that bun means ‘root’ and a potato is a root vegetable. Contrast the Irish práta. Sometimes, too, the fortuitous similarity between words in different languages can have the opposite effect, as Gaelic na big ‘the little’ (ones i.e. children).

Some readers may be surprised to find that words such as tartan are not in the word list. There are in fact quite a number of words with Highland / Gaelic associations which have nothing to do with Gaelic; dram, heather, Jacobite, kilt, peat, pibroch, skirl (of the pipes), mod and tartan are some which come to mind. Their origins are Greek (dram), English (heather), Latin (Jacobite, pibroch), Norse (kilt, skirl, mod) and Old British (peat), which provide a good illustration