Mrs Piper and I are having some yardwork done, and part of the plan is a raised bed in a celtic knot design, with paths crossing through the bed at right angles. We plan to align the paths to the compass, and I think it would be a nice touch to have four tiles made to put at the entrance or each path, with “North” “South” “East” and “West” in either Welsh or Gaelic.
So, what are the Welsh and Gaelic words for the points of the compass? (and, is there a difference between Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic on this?)
Correct. The word that Google should have offered is “thiar”.
You can see why Irish compasses do not have the cardinal points designated by initials.
But a word of warning; there are different words in Irish for directions depending on whether they are absolute (deisceart, “the south”), relative (deas, employed in various forms to say things like “southerly, to the South, from the South”) or positional (theas, “in the South”). Plus, Irish spelling is only recently standardised, and there are common variants. “Thiar” (West) can be found in the form “iar”, for example, in the name Iarmhí (Westmeath, a county in Ireland).
Irish is written with a slimmed-down version of the Roman alphabet (and always has been, since Irish culture became literate). Only 18 letters are used regularly; j, k, q, v, w, x, y and z are employed only for loan-words from other languages.
However the phonetic values assigned to letters (and groups of letters) can differ dramatically from what Enlgish-speakers are used to. None of the words above would be pronounced in a way that English-speakers would expect.