What does “failre”, IIRC, mean? I saw it on a little sign outside a residence with a clover on it. I believe there is an accent over one of the vowels. Does this mean “hello” or “greetings”?
It’s “failte”, not “failre”, and I believe it means “welcome”.
The popular expression used on little signs outside a residence with a clover on it (The Spelling on this will be WRONG), “Cael Mille Failte” means “A Hundred Thousand Welcomes”.
The translation may also be WRONG.
Translation is spot on, and the original is close. It’s Cead Mille Failte.
(My father had the phrase over the fireplace for quite a few years. One of the many sad things about his death was that it had to be painted over so we could sell the house.)
Céad míle fáilte
One l in the míle.
It’s an important difference, “Cead Mille Failte” means may your reproductive organs erupt in a suppurating mass of oozing boils. Don’t ever get them confused, or there’ll be swordplay
(NB :- There is one l in mile, but the rest of this post is not necessarily true).
I don’t think an Irishman speaking Irish would use Cead Mille Failte as a greeting.
In ordinary speech, he’d probably say something like “Canas atá tú?” (How are you?)
The word failte was used as a computer password in school, much to the consternation of Protestants, who only knew the word from signs at border crossings 
Irish for “hello” would normally be Dia dhuit, or “God be with you”, according to my native-Irish-speaking wife. Her Connemara pronunciation is so weird that I couldn’t possibly hope to transliterate, alas.
Conas atá tú
I swear, I was just going to start a thread called “Is Gaelic the most fucked-up language in the world?” then I saw this thread.
I don’t mean that in a nasty way, honest. It’s just that Gaelic seems so bizarre, the pronunciations are a million miles away from the spelling, it boggles the mind. My mind, anway.
How Eithne can be pronounced Enya, or Máire pronounced Moya, is such a mystery. Not to mention Bhraonáin being pronounced Brennan. Enya started off her career with the phonetic spelling, but Máire kept hers until I guess she finally got sick of being called “Mare/Mary/Mayiree” or whatever. She’s now known as Moya Brennan.
I used to have a radio show and I loved music like that, and I was alway mangling the pronunciation. It wasn’t on purpose or for lack of caring about the matter, it’s just that I couldn’t figure it out. I had one listener who was in prison, and everytime I mangled a Gaelic name he’d write me a long letter taking me to task. I hate to admit this, but I stopped playing Gaelic artists if I wasn’t 100% sure how to pronounce their name, just because I didn’t want to get a letter from him.
Anyone who speaks, writes and understands Gaelic has my utmost admiration.
[/hijack]
I tried to learn Connemara Gelic back in the '80s, and that’s the greeting we were taught. The reaponse we were taught was Dia (‘and’ – I don’t remember the word) Máire dhuit. Is that correct? (Well, except for the forgotten word.)
I could never get past the spelling. The class was being taught at the Celtic Arts Center in Hollywood. (They’ve since moved to the Valley.) I came in in the ‘second semester’, so everyone else already knew the basics and I couldn’t catch up.
Minor hijack: I have a plaque on my front door that reads ‘Sliante’
What’s that mean?
It probably sayd sláinte, which means “health” and is used to toast “cheers” when drinking. It’s pronounced sort of like “SLON-shu”. (Think there might be a Latinate root shared with the French “santé”.)
I believe it means health, what I know for sure is that it is used to toast (to toast to one another over a drink, not to toast bread).
Beat me by two minutes, jjimm. Sláinte.
Thanks. I see I spelled in wrong. I’ve been pronouncing it wrong, too. (Since the plaque hangs on a string, it’s never level, so I’ve been pronouncing it the way it always hangs, which is slanty :o )
“Canas atá tú?” looks like Latin! Is this Irish? Or, was the SDposter joking? Or, is it a Catholic thing which would explain why it looks like Latin? Please explain.
Thanks, Jinx
Canas ata tu is real Irish. Though a Celtic language, Irish was strongly influenced by Latin via the early Christians, hence my comment about sante and slainte (sorry, can’t do fadas or acutes on this keyboard).
It means the signwriter painted that one after lunch. 
Gaelic spelling seems weird to English speakers, but is quite regular. Take “Eithne”, for example. “Ei” is easy enough to say. “th” is a lenited “t” (lenition is a type of sound change that occurs to consonants in Celtic languages), so it is always pronounced as “h” or is silent, depending on the word. Because the “n” has an “e” or “i” on either side of it, it is palatalized, and so pronounced with a “y” offglide, and the final “e” becomes a schwa. The rules are very different from English, but once you know them, you can pronounce almost any Irish word you see written.
It looks like Latin because Celtic and Italic languages are both Indo-European, so much of the basic vocabulary is going to be similar. “Tú” looks like Latin “tu”, but also like English “thou”, German “Du”, Russian “ты”, Hindi “tu”, Albanian “ti”, and Armenian “du”.