Here’s hoping that An Gadaí and some of the others from Éire show up and chime in. I apologize if this post looks like a series of one-line “paragraphs”.
I am looking for information about the word “uimh”, which Google Translate indicates is a synonym for “no”. However, I can’t find it in Foclóir Scoile or on teanglann.ie.
When I search online, I see the word comes up many times as an abbreviation for “uimhir”. Example: Rialachan (CE) Uimh. 2271/96 = Regulation (EC) No 2271/96.
Since “no.” is the English abbreviation for “number” (and they say Gaelic makes no sense! :dubious:), I am wondering if somewhere along the way, some eejit conflated “uimh.” with “no.” (both with the periods indicating an abbreviation).
For example, on one site, I have come across the phrase “uimh bhealach”, and according to various places, it is translated at “no way”.
Is this really the case? Can “uimh” be used as a synonym for the word, “No” (the negation, not the number abbreviation)?
Don’t speak Irish, but I can play around with Google Translate with the best of them
FWIW, Google Translate will translate both of these Irish sentences into English as “I have no house”. The sentence in red may be ungrammatical in Irish based on hibernicus’s response above:
Tá mé aon teach Tá mé uimh teach
You can substitute other Irish nouns for teach (“house”) and get similar results. But Google Translate does have some weirdness sometimes.
Both the blue and red sentences are ungrammatical (and nonsensical). The correct translation for “I have no house” is “Níl aon teach agam”. Don’t trust Google Translate.
I think it’s possible that some eejit made that mistake, and also possible that it’s a computer generated error. In any event, you are correct that uimh. is an abbreviation for uimhir meaning number, and does not mean “no”.
I was actually thinking about the word “no” as in “opposite of yes” not as in “not having some of…”
For instance, if you translate. “No! I see no house.” into French you get “Non! Je ne vois pas de maison.” rather than “Non! Je vois non maison” or even “Non! Je non vois maison”
Admittedly this may be a tangent since I’m not sure which sort of “no” the OP was interested it - the ‘no’ in ‘no way’ would be the second type.
I expect there’s a grammatical term for this distinction, which a proper linguist would know…
Some weirdness is a bit of an understatement. I find it only useful to get a gyst of what the original language text was about, and sometimes not even that in languages far away from English. It’s a very very rough tool for translation.
You’re correct, that Irish doesn’t really have a “no” or a “yes.” There are workarounds; I’m not as competent as Hibernicus or An Gadaí, but I think your “No!” would be “Ní héa,” which is a two-syllable complete sentence (adverb + verb (+unexpressed subject)), as opposed to English “no!”, which is an adverb alone, or an exclamation if you’d rather.
I think it’s a bit of an accident that we use the same word “no” in English to mean “not any”, as I can’t think of any other language that does this. In German it would be “kein Haus”, in Dutch “geen huis” and in Swedish “inget hus”. According to the OED, this “no” is a shortened form of “none”.
As for the meaning you are wondering about (the opposite of yes), Irish doesn’t have a generally applicable word for “yes” or “no”; you reply to yes/no questions by repeating the verb.
“Did you see the house?” “I saw” or “I didn’t see”.
“Ní heá” can mean no but only in certain circumstances where the verb is a form of “is” meaning “to be”.
“Is this your propeller hat?” “Ní heá”
but
“Did you steal my propeller hat?” “Níor ghoid”
Which leads to one of the distinctive characteristics of Hiberno-English; use of the auxiliary verb in answering a question.
“Did you see the house?” “I did” or “I did not”. A British English speaker would recognise either response as emphatic, but in Hiberno-English they’re not emphatic responses. If you wanted an emphatic reponse you’d add an adverb (“I certainly did” or “I did indeed”).
Why would you count the period? A period is not a letter. (And arguably the ‘h’ isn’t really a letter either; it’s a diacritic. But let’s not go there.)
But the answer is, no, it’s not used very much. Numbers are generally used in Irish without either the word uimhir or any contraction of it preceding them. The word is mostly used in contexts where it would’t be contracted. In circumstances where it might be contracted in English, it’s usually spelled out in Irish. About the only place you’d see the contract used is maybe in a table, where the saving in space might help with the formatting, or something like that.
The contraction can’t really be any shorter. You need the consonant, if the contract is to suggest the word, and the consonant is mh, not m.
