Just morbidly curious how “May his faithful soul be at God’s right side” could morph into the above.
That might have been it, as I didn’t see the doors myself, only heard about them second-hand. I’m certain the women word started with m, but the rest could have been distorted in the telling.
You can’t type a little dot into google translate. So raibh, which can be spelled raiḃ, is misread by the translator-machine as ráib, which is “rape,” the plant that gives you canola oil.
Among the many stories that Peter Ustinov used to tell on chat shows was one about his confusion when faced with toilet doors labelled fir and mná. He could read many languages, but Irish was not one of them. Eventually he calculated that thw word beginning with ‘f’ was likely to be in some way related to femina, and the word beginning with ‘m’ to masculinus, and he made his choice accordingly. He got it wrong, of course.
And in the story as I was told it, my mom was faced with the same conundrum, and her first thought was the same, but then she figured that “fir” looked an awful lot like “vir”, and so got it right.
Thanks!
Getting a bit off topic, but canola oil comes from the canola plant, which is a specially bred variant from natural rapeseed.
The canola plant has a significantly lower erucic acid concentration which makes it safe to use for human consumption. Because of this difference, it has a distinct name from natural rapeseed.
Along the same topic, the erucic acid is needed as a supplement/ medicine in adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). See “Lorenzo’s Oil.”
Which is interesting furthermore because the translator-machine, like the reader human, may confuse the “rape” of botany with the “rape” of sexual attack.
It’s a database problem, not a typing problem. Copy-pasting the version with the dot, it is read as if it didn’t have the dot - compare with copy-pasting ano and año and telling it the original language is Spanish. In this second example, someone has actually bothered indicate the two separate translations… but the definitions under the window are given for both words :smack: and spelled with an n :smack::smack::smack::smack::smack:
The translation I get into Spanish is violación… rape as in violation and not -seed, ayup.
Well, not exactly, because the dot-version is (essentially) an older orthography. For a database to code both versions, it would have to enter the entire dictionary twice, just in case someone uses the old-fashioned h-free system. And there are a lot of words that are one thing with the dots, but map onto another without, as in the raibh / ráib example (especially if you ignore the fada / acute accent).
By the way, if you can’t make oil from rape, what was the original rape plant used for?
You can make oil from the non-canola varieties of rape, it’s just not very palatable due to the glucosinolate, and not very safe to eat due to the erucic acid. According to wikipedia, it’s mainly used for machinery lubrication.
–Mark
I don’t think this is a consistent usage outside the US and Canada. The culinary product is often referred to as, and sometimes sold as, “rapeseed oil” in other countries. Here’s a Guardian article and a BBC article, both referring to it as rapeseed oil.
And my cousins, who are canola farmers in Saskatchewan, always used to refer to their crop as rape (1980s, when we were last on speaking terms…).
In the case of a general spelling change, it could also be possible to create a rule (“if someone enters ḃ, make it bh”), but doing that actually takes more work and computer power than having both spellings in the list.
Italo-Celtic is a thing.
Dé / Deus
deis / dexter (compare Sanskrit dakshina: right hand, south)
dilig / delecto, delicia (delight)
Ever notice how *cara *means the same thing in Gaelic and Latin? Once my next door neighbor was a woman from Scotland named Cara. My first thought was how’d she get an Italian name? Second thought: oh, right: anam cara. Pure Italo-Celtic.
What is it with the 6/8 meter shared by Irish jig and Italian tarantella, anyway?
Funny how mná is an anagram of man, but it’s just one of those coincidences. Mná is the plural of bean*
*pronounced “ban” but with a slender b. Although /b/ and /p/ in Irish seem to me to be the letters least affected by slenderization, so would it make less difference in this instance?
Bean is from Proto-Indo-European *gwen- ‘woman’ which is also the source of Greek gyne, Persian zan as in “zenana”, Swedish kvinna, English queen.
Punctum delens strikes again:
anam ċara (/anam xara/) (what popularized the phrase)
or
anam chara (/anam xara/)
English speakers* seem determined to project their lack of diacritics onto other languages.
*not you: this error is extremely widespread, and this phrase is almost always written cara in English contexts, rather than ċara or chara.
Thanks for the correction! The way to spot those when unmarked would be to learn all the lenition rules, which I haven’t yet done. On behalf of many languages, I share your feelings about the erasure of diacritics.
Er… why is that surprising? Irish and Latin are sister languages, descended from a common ancestor.
Do you find it surprising when a particular Spanish, French, and Italian word are all “very obviously” related?
Just because two languages are in the same language family does not mean that one can make a “word for word” translation between the two languages.