Ceist/snaidhm fogharach

Discussion in 'The Lounge Bar' started by Red Goblin, Oct 25, 2020.

  1. Red Goblin

    Red Goblin Senior Member

    Well, "Hiberno-English" site:bl.uk at DuckDuckGo shows their predictable NI bias though "Irish Gaelic" site:bl.uk at DuckDuckGo turns a new leaf to Shelta - a tinker/traveller language which "originated in Ireland and comprised a sub-stratum of Irish Gaelic mixed with English and Romani." The snag is that I have yet to find a dictionary of it though a search for one serendipitously led me to this verb - LEDDER @ The Dictionary of Cork Slang, by John Beecher which does, at least, 'smack' heavily of a punishment to be feared !

    PS: Ah, of course, Shelta - Wikipedia links to this archived Shelta to English Lexicon
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2021
  2. Red Goblin

    Red Goblin Senior Member

    Well, that Shelta lexicon didn't help and I'd be very surprised if sailors' Italian-based Polari lingo would instead - but anyone is welcome to prove me wrong on that presumption.

    Incidentally, re populist red herring, this 2yo Irish Times article states;
    Although leprechauns appear in little Irish mythology,
    their international reputation as being intrinsic to Irish folklore
    was solidified by the 1959 Disney film Darby O’Gill and the Little People
    and, of course, by Jennifer Aniston’s 1993 movie debut,
    in the horror film
    Leprechaun, tag line “Your luck just ran out."
    Was it naming of the wee king after a real one - Brian Boru - mere coincidence? At any rate, the film seems to have failed in England as I'd never even heard of it - I wouldn't know about Scotland, what with Connery in its cast though, but that was before his rise to 007 fame and you have only to skip to the 'Reception' section of Wikipedia's article to see how he was basically panned for much the same reason ex-model Lazenby was when tried out in 007's shoes - the key derisory term then being "clothes horse" IIRC.
     
  3. Red Goblin

    Red Goblin Senior Member

    FWiW, I finally broke through Auntie's stupid web obfuscation to find its page here c/w script including these 3 key paras which had caught my still-dozy attention;

    I went to see the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.
    When I ventured that Jews might begin with Genesis he stopped me.

    No, James.
    That’s a very Christian way of reading the Bible on this subject !


    No’, he repeated,
    we start in Deuteronomy
    with God’s instruction to Moses
    that as they entered the Promised Land
    they were never to destroy a fruit bearing tree.
    ’​

    This search then gave me 20:19-20 as its chapter & verses - anyone interested is welcome to look up on the obscure likes of Bible (King James) Deuteronomy (Wikisource). But it all too soon becomes allegorical with "fruit" then being variousy interpreted as dates, figs and even men & corn which didn't literally grow on trees the last time I checked !

    All I really knew about Moses before this, TBH, was the old schoolboy one-liner - And The Lord said unto Moses, "Come forth", but he came fifth and lost his beer money ! :D
     
    Last edited: Apr 29, 2022
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  4. Red Goblin

    Red Goblin Senior Member

    I found a coincidental reference, yesterday, to garthornes as another name for Cornwall's better-known gnomish mine knockers. Garthorne confusingly also happens to be a Northumbrian surname but my main point is the extra silent 'e' which, like Brown vs. Browne in surname terms, would have naturally gone unnoticed by the interpreting diarist as possibly relevant here.
     
  5. Quarterfinal

    Quarterfinal Well-Known Member

    A friend from the land of small folk has advised he has taken his sign down for today, in light of the occasion …..
    upload_2023-3-17_12-30-34.jpeg

    I always wondered what céad míle fáilte meant ….
     
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  6. Quarterfinal

    Quarterfinal Well-Known Member

    After my slightly frivolous offering above, perhaps one better aligned to the thread's phonetic puzzles (and WW2). I had forgotten how tricky it is being 8 years old.

    Grandson No 2 was visiting and I had taken him to see cousins in York. Returning him home afterwards, we went via the Humber Bridge (to pick up Granny) and en route I sequentially pointed out where wartime RAF bases at Elvington, Pocklington, Holme on Spalding Moor, Brough, Elsham Wold, Kirmington, Hibaldstow, Kirton in Lindsey, Hemswell Cliff, Cameringham, Scampton, Dunholme Lodge, Waddington, Coleby Grange, Wellingore, Cranwell, Barkston Heath, Spitalgate, Colsterworth and Woolfox Lodge ........etc were, with a few bon hommes of what sort of aeroplanes and such.

    Only 8, but soaks up information. After a short pit stop, we resumed our journey and he asked me if that was why the road was called Airmen Street?

    I gently explained that it was not, that where we had travelled was indeed the route of an old Roman road called Ermine Street, but that the Romans never called it that. I sensed cogs clunking, understandable confusion, a lot of questions looming and imminent difficulties in explanation.

    North of Lincoln, Ermine Street is often called ‘the Ramper’, a nickname likely based on the raised banks and side ditches of the former Roman road that became Ermine Street and which still has elevated sections above the fields on both sides. Others assert, tongue in cheek, that the term is more modern, when 50's bikers used its straight lines to ‘ramp’ their oil leaking machines up towards the ‘ton’. Anyway, it is (sort of) on part of this stretch near Scampton that Guy Gibson's dog met its fate and 2 miles north scenes like this once went on only 25 or so yards away:
    upload_2023-3-17_22-39-7.jpeg

    Most locals thereabouts think of it as the A15 or Ermine Street, but in this context, ‘Ermine’ has nothing to do with stoats or ceremonial attire. It is also not a Roman or even earlier Celtic name, but is believed to be a corruption of a name from Anglo-Saxon times.

    Usual received wisdom asserts that it derives from ‘Earninga Straete’, after the Earningas, a Saxon group inhabiting an area in Cambridgeshire through which the road passed, later referred to as the Armingford Hundred. Others have disagreed, suggesting a link to Arminius (or Hermann), a hero in Saxon and Germanic history.

    Neither is convincing. More recently, some historians have suggested the name came from Angles settling in Lindsey possibly referring to the route as the ‘here mann straete’ or the ’road of the army man’. Indeed, it has also been suggested that an earlier name for Spital-in-the-Street may have been ‘Herwik’, or ‘Army Camp’ in Old English.

    Across the Humber is the village of Airmyn, almost certainly a mix of the ancient ‘Yr’ and the Anglo-Saxon ‘myn’, being where the Aire has its ‘river mouth’ and joins the Ouse before flowing into the Humber. A link to this is very improbable.

    Another offering threads the name to Winteringham, where the ancient route now stops, but was once a fording-ferrying point before continuance in the East Riding. This settlement links to ‘Winta’, being ‘the homestead of Winta’s people’.

    Winta is the name of the first King of Lindsey according to the Lindisware King List, outwith his super-legendary forbears such as Woden. Woden, the chief pagan deity of the time, was sometimes called Wodan, Wotan and Odin, but also ‘Irmin’ by some Angles and Saxons, or ‘Jormun’ in Viking Age Norse.

    Might the route have been titled after ‘Irmin’, or after the eponymous ‘Irminones’ Danish tribe, or after a local ‘Irminsul’, a sacral pillar-like object (sometimes a tree-trunk erected in the open air) that played an important role in Anglo-Saxon paganism?

    We will probably never know, but that is the fun of toponymy, the study of place name origins, use and meanings.

    Additional wry smiles will duly follow when my daughter in law tells me that Grandson has gisted all this to his teacher and class.

    Meanwhile, I quite like Airmen Street.
     
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  7. Red Goblin

    Red Goblin Senior Member

    My bumble thanks to all you new visitors for accepting my invitation here where a circular Airhead St might aptly describe my failure to recall my own 2yo post 8 only yesterday. My earlier "gathorn" and later "garthorne" are presumably pronounced the same - counter-intuitively requiring its "gat" not rhyme with "cat" but with "cart" - and that prompted my recent efforts to clarify exactly how the diarist would have mentally verbalized his keyword; esp. the 2 fricative consonants. Suffice it to say I expect something blandly non-rhotic like London's modern RP only much less pretentious. Recently ringing around Cambridge, I was taken aback by both a native secretary and a Canadian undergrad each rendering both thinly - i.e. as in "thin" vs. "then"/"leather" or even the stereotypically-Irish th-stopping "den"/"ledder"/"t'in"/"letter" possibilities.

    Re that last trait, I've also been fruitlessly digging around lanthorns (old term for lanterns supposedly due to their using translucent cow-horn lenses before glass became the norm. Fireflies or glow worms, unhelpfully AKA Maybugs, were all then AKA lanthorn-flies. Maybe you can see where I was going with this but I've yet to find any mention of their ever being mistaken for wee folk of any ilk - used to illuminate Cornish pisky/pixie lanthorns, yes, but such mimicry of human gadgetry is about it so far.
     

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