I’m doing a newsletter and noting the death of an Irish priest. This Gaelic sentence was included in his obituary on the website of the funeral home.
Ar deis Dê go raib a anam dílis.
Can someone translate this for me? I want to quote it, but I want to make sure I understand exactly what it says. (Also, my client is likely to ask me.)
Google translate says:
“On the possibility of a faithful soul rape”
**That **doesn’t sound quite right…
ETA: Okay, I found this: “May his/her soul be on God’s right hand - Ar dheas Dé go raibh a anam.” Also, what about the his/her?
Again, yup, though this time it’s not from Latin. Rather, both the Latin and the Irish are from a common Indo-European root.
Curiously, the Irish and Latin works for “left hand” are unrelated.
Diligent is cognate, but distantly. Dílis doesn’t suggest faithful in the sense of dutiful, assiduous, which is what diligent suggests to me. Rather it suggests faithful in the sense of loving, rejoicing in, taking constant delight in.
Neither. Cognate with Latin animus, soul or spirit.
Dé and anam probably come straight from Latin, and arrive with Christianity. Dílis and deis are older.
No: cognate. They had gods before the Christians found them, you know. In Old Irish nominative, dative, and accusative are all día, genitive and vocative dé.
What surprises me is that the Irish words for “man” and “woman” are very obviously related to the Latin ones. They’re not particularly similar to the Germanic roots, which argues against it being a general Indo-European thing… but on the other hand, “man” and “woman” are quite fundamental concepts, not the sort of thing you’d expect to be loanwords.
fear (OI fer, gen. fir) is cognate with vir, yes; what are the “woman” words you are calling obvious? Bean (OI ben) is cognate with Greek γυνή (as in gyno- / gyne-) but I’m not aware of a Latin cognate.
Right. “Man” is the odd one, where English lost the word for “male person” and replaced it with the word for “person”. Old English wer meant a male, so you have werwolf, man-wolf, or wergild, man-price. So we have wo-man meaning a female person, but we lost wer-man, meaning a male person, instead we have man, originally meaning a person but now only meaning a male person.
I’m certain I remember some Irish word that looked a lot like “mulier” (one of the Latin words for “woman”), but without actually knowing Irish, it’s tough to track down what it was. The context was a pair of signs on restroom doors.
