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Scéalta Grá na hÉireann – The Ladies of Llangollen

Posted in History, Irish Language, LGBTQ+, Poetry with tags , , , , , , on June 10, 2026 by telescoper

I just watched a nice documentary programme on the Irish language channel TG4 in the series Scéalta Grá na h’Éireann (Ireland’s Greatest Loves). This one was about Lady Eleanor Charlotte Butler and the Honourable Sarah Ponsonby, often called The Ladies of Llangollen. The programme is available on the TG4 Player, actually, and it is possible I think to watch the whole thing anywhere in the world for free here. There’s also a little trailer on Youtube:

There’s an entire wikipedia page devoted to the Ladies of Llangollen, so there’s no need to reproduce it all here. However, for the sake of you who haven’t heard of them, they were. They were of Anglo-Irish extraction, both born in Ireland, and had been brought up just a few miles away from each other. They met in 1768 and immediately hit it off. They ran off together to avoid being forced into unwanted marriages, and moved to Wales in order to set up home  at Plas Newydd, near Llangollen in Denbighshire, in 1780.

They lived together for the best part of 50 years in Plas Newydd, in relative seclusion, devoting their time to private studies of literature and languages and improving their estate, comprehensively redesigning the house in a Gothic style, and adding a superb garden. They did not actively socialise and town-dwellers of Llangollen seem to have regarded them as eccentrics, simply referring to them as “The Ladies”.

Gradually, their life attracted the interest of the outside world. Their house became a haven for all manner of visitors, mostly writers such as Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Shelley, Byron and Scott, but also the military leader Duke of Wellington and industrialist Josiah Wedgwood; aristocratic novelist Caroline Lamb, who was born a Ponsonby, came to visit too. Even travellers from continental Europe had heard of the couple and came to visit them, for instance Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, the German nobleman and landscape designer who wrote admiringly about them.

The story of the “romantic friendship” between these two ladies is both charming and moving, but it’s also fascinating to learn how their lifestyle was accepted and even celebrated by wider society. One might have thought their relationship would have been regarded as scandalous by their contemporaries, rather than being widely admired as it turned out to be. One is tempted to assume that their  “marriage” had a sexual dimension, which it may well have done, but it could have been a platonic, yet still romantic, friendship. As far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t really matter;  what I find inspiring about them is that they dared to be different.

Anyway, here is the beautiful sonnet that William Wordsworth wrote after meeting the Ladies of Llangollen in 1824, although I believe the Ladies took exception to the description of their magnificent house as a “low-roofed cot”!

 A stream, to mingle with your favourite Dee,
 Along the vale of meditation flows;
 So styled by those fierce Britons, pleased to see
 In Nature's face the expression of repose;
 Or haply there some pious hermit chose
 To live and die, the peace of heaven his aim;
 To whom the wild sequestered region owes
 At this late day, its sanctifying name.
 Glyn Cafaillgaroch, in the Cambrian tongue,
 In ours, the Vale of Friendship, let 'this' spot
 Be named; where, faithful to a low-roofed Cot,
 On Deva's banks, ye have abode so long;
 Sisters in love, a love allowed to climb,
 Even on this earth, above the reach of Time!

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Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh

Posted in Biographical, Irish Language, LGBTQ+ on June 1, 2026 by telescoper

Today, 1st June, has been (and indeed continues to be for a few hours) the June Bank Holiday (Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh) in Ireland. It is the equivalent of the usual May Bank Holiday in the UK in that both have their origin in the old festival of Whitsuntide (or Pentecost) which falls on the 7th Sunday after Easter. Because the date of Easter moves around in the calendar so does Whit Sunday, but it is usually in late May or early June. Pentecost was actually on Sunday 24th May this year. Here in Ireland the Bank Holiday is always on the first Monday in June whereas on the other side of the Irish Sea it is on the last Monday in May. This year the weather was better last Monday, but you can’t have everything.

Although I’m only at beginners’ level in Irish, the phrase Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh gives me another chance to bore you about it. It’s actually quite a straightforward phrase until you reach the last word. “Lá” means “day” and “Saoire” means “leave” or “vacation” so “Lá Saoire” means “holiday”; “i” is a prepositional pronoun meaning “in” and “mí” means “month”. So far so good.

The word for June, however, is Meitheamh (at least when it is in the nominative singular case). Irish is an inflected language, which means that words change form according to their grammatical function. As an Indo-European language, Irish is distantly related to Latin which has six grammatical cases for nouns (actually seven if you count the rarely used locative case). Irish has only four cases – there’s no ablative and, curiously, no distinction between nominative and accusative. That leaves nominative, dative, genitive, and vocative. The dative – used after simple prepositions – is only rarely distinct from the nominative so basically the ones you have to learn are the genitive and the vocative.

In Latin cases are indicated by changes to the end of a word, but in Irish they involve initial mutations. In the example of “mí Mheitheamh” meaning “month of June”, requiring the genitive form of “June”, the initial consonant “M” undergoes lenition (softening) to sound more like a “v”. In old Irish texts this would be indicated by a dot over the M but in modern orthography it is indicated by writing an “h” after the consonant. This is called a séimhiú (pronounced “shay-voo” ). Note the softened m in the middle of that word too but it’s not a mutation – it’s just part of the regular spelling of the word, as is the -mh at the end of Meitheamh. There’s also a softened “t” in the middle of Meitheamh which makes it vrtually disappear in pronunciation. Meitheamh is thus pronounced something like “Meh-hiv” whereas “Mheitheamh” is something like “Veh-hiv”.

As well as being Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh, today is also the start of Pride Month, so let me take the opportunity to say Bród sona daoibh a chairde!

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Cat Crainn

Posted in Irish Language, Maynooth with tags , , , , , on May 21, 2026 by telescoper

In Irish, a pine marten – such as the one shown on the left – is cat crainn which means literally “cat of the tree” or, less clumsily, “tree cat”. The word for “tree” in the nominative case is crann and the genitive meaning “of the tree” is crainn. They are about the size of a domestic cat.

I mention the pine marten partly because a while ago it came up on Bitesize Irish, which is a way I’m trying to add to my meagre vocabulary of Irish words and phrases, and partly because the story of these animals is quite fascinating. Pine martens have existed in Ireland for thousands of years alongside native red squirrels whose habitat is similar. More recently the invasive grey squirrels arrived and bullied their smaller red cousins into decline. Pine martens were also in serious decline because of hunting and deforestation and were critically endangered until recently, when legal protections were introduced. Now the population is growing and they are spreading into new areas.

Pine martens are fierce predators who eat all kinds of small mammals including rats and voles as well as squirrels. Having coexisted with them for ages, red squirrels have learnt to avoid pine martens quite effectively. Pine martens will try to catch them but don’t find them easy prey. Grey squirrels are a different matter, though, so there has been a big difference in the rate of predation with the grey squirrels being forced out of many areas. This differential effect has been excellent news for the red squirrels, whose population is recovering strongly.

I’m told that there are pine martens on the campus at Maynooth, though I have never actually seen one in the flesh and am not sure where they live. This is not surprising – they are secretive and good at hiding. There are grey squirrels on Maynooth campus too. I have seen many. I’ve never seen any red squirrels though. If the pine martens thrive, perhaps that will change?

Although undeniably cute, with their chocolate-coloured coat and creamy yellow bib, pine martens are wild animals and will bite if you give them cause. The word for “bite” in Irish is greim.

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An Cháisc versus Y Pasg

Posted in History, Irish Language with tags , , , , on April 5, 2026 by telescoper

Today is Easter Sunday and it says something about my poor grasp of the Irish language that it was only today that I learnt that the word for “Easter” in modern Irish is Cáisc. When following the definite article (as in the title of this blog), this becomes Cháisc. You can also find the possessive form Cásca, e.g. Easter Sunday is Domhnach Cásca.

Although it’s not immediately obvious, the word Cáisc is related linguistically to the Latin “Pascha” and Hebrew “Pesach,” and to the word for Easter in many other European languages  Pâques, Pascua, etc.), including the Welsh Pasg (the form Y Pasg with the definite article appears in the title of this post) as well as to the English adjective “paschal”. 

I haven’t succeeded in becoming at all fluent in Irish, but I have learnt that isn’t very much like Welsh.  Although Irish and Welsh are both Celtic languages they are from two distinct groups: the Goidelic group that comprises Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic; and the Brythonic group that comprises Welsh, Cornish and Breton. These are sometimes referred to as q-Celtic and p-Celtic, respectively, although not everyone agrees that is a useful categorization. Nevertheless it has stuck and does help with some aspects. The C at the start of Cáisc is a manifestation of the roots of modern Irish in a q-Celtic, as opposed to p-Celtic, language. Hence the difference between it and the Welsh Pasg. Irish, as a q-Celtic language, will generally tend to have a k/c/q sound at the start of words that start with a p-sound in Welsh (or others derived from Latin); the “q” is, of course, historic, since very few modern Irish words begin with “q”. Another example is the word for the number “four”: in Irish it is ceathair; in Welsh it is pedwar…

Incidentally, Scottish Gaelic is not the language spoken by the Celtic people who lived in Scotland at the time of the Romans, the Picts, which is lost. Scottish Gaelic is actually descended from Middle Irish. Also incidentally, Breton was taken to Brittany by a mass migration of people from South-West Britain fleeing the Anglo-Saxons which peaked somewhere around 500 AD. I guess that was the first Brexodus.

Although I speak neither with any proficiency, Welsh and Irish don’t sound at all similar to me. This is not surprising. It is thought that the Brythonic languages evolved from a language  brought to Britain by people from somewhere in Gaul (probably Northern France), whereas the people whose language led to the Goidelic tongues were probably from somewhere in the Iberia (modern-day Spain or Portugal). The modern versions of Irish and Welsh do contain words borrowed from Latin, French and English so there are similarities there, but the original Celtic languages were very different.

Beannachtaí na Cásca!

Tá coinín na Cásca tagtha…

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Labhair an teanga Ghaeilge liom

Posted in Irish Language, Pedantry with tags , , on March 9, 2026 by telescoper

It’s the first day of the sixth week of the second semester at Maynooth University, which means that the half-term break that incorporates St Patrick’s Day (17th March) is approaching rapidly. It also means that we’re in the middle of Seachtain na Gaeilge, an annual international festival promoting the Irish language and culture, in Ireland and all around the world. 

My own attempts to learn Irish have not been very successful, but I do think it’s a fascinating language and will definitely try harder when I have time (i.e. when I have retired). In lieu of being able to speak or write fluently as Gaeilge, I thought I’d share a short poem that illustrates many interesting features of the language, including: the modification of the noun Gaeilge to form the adjective Ghaelige, the different pronunciation of “s” when followed by a broad or slender vowel, the softening effect of “h” after a consonant, the modification of saoil (world) to tsaoil when preceded by the definite article an, the prepositional pronoun liom meaning “with me”, etc. etc. The title means “Speak the Irish language with me” – teanga is, literally, tongue.

P.S. The Irish word for “pedantry” is pedantraí…

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Proto, by Laura Spinney

Posted in History, Irish Language with tags , , , , , , , , on September 24, 2025 by telescoper

I interrupted the sequence of novels I’ve been reading recently to absorb a non-fiction book, Proto by Laura Spinney (left). I find linguistics a fascinating subject and when I saw a review of this recently and couldn’t resist. I’m glad I bought it because it’s absolutely fascinating. It is the story – or at least a very plausible account of the story of the lost ancestor of the Indo-European languages, the methods that have been used to reconstruct “Proto”, and why it was the spark that generated so many other languages across Europe, Eurasia and India.

The topic is very complex and I won’t attempt to describe it all in depth here; each chapter could be a book in itself because each family of languages within the Indo-European group – including lost ones such as Tocharian – has its own fascinating story. There are chapters focussing on the origins of language itself, the possibilities surround Proto (a language that was never written and probably exists in many dialects), Anatolian, Tocharian, Celtic, Germanic and Italic, the Indo-Iranian group (based on Sanskrit), Baltic and Slavic, and Albanian, Armenian and Greek. The last of these is fascinating because it used a method of writing borrowed from a  non-Indo-European source that became the origin of the European alphabet.

The story of which all these are subplots begins around the Black Sea shortly after end of the last Ice Age. In this area there lived mesolithic hunter-gatherers who had survived the ice who interacted with farmers moving up from the direction of modern day Syria. Their languages would have merged in some way to allow them to describe things that their neighbours had that they didn’t. Hunter-gatherers would not have words for, e.g., ploughing or barley while farmers would have fewer words for spears and other hunting equipment. Into this mix, the argument goes, came a third group, a fully nomadic culture called the Yamnaya people. These people and their successors subsequently underwent vast migrations from the steppes across the continent and were responsible for spreading the Proto-Indo-European languages. That’s a hypothesis, not a proven fact, but it is plausible and has a reasonable amount of evidence in its favour.

Recent progress in this field has been driven not only by linguists but also by archaeologists and geneticists, with each aspect of this triangulation vital. It was reading about archaeology in this book that prompted me to write a post about the Nebra Sky Disc. There are some fascinating snippets from palaeogenetics, too. Full DNA sequences are now known for about 10,000 individuals who lived in prehistoric times.

One extraordinary find involves two burials of individuals who both lived about 5,000 years ago. Their DNA profiles match so well that they were probably second cousins or first cousins once removed. The thing is that one of them was buried in the Don Valley, north-east of Rostov in modern-day Russian, while the other was found 3,000 km away in the Altai mountains. Assuming they were both buried where they died, the implications for the distance over which people could move in a lifetime are remarkable.

Another fascinating genetic snippet applies to Irish, a Celtic language. The Celtic languages derive from a proto-Celtic source that probably arose about 1000 BC. Around 2450 BC one of the cultures preceding the Celts arrived in Britain and Ireland, now called the Bell Beaker People because of their taste in pottery. The genetic record shows that the DNA of the Beaker folk replaced about 90% of the previous local gene pool, and all of the Y chromosomes; for some reason men of the earlier culture stopped fathering children. A similar change happened in Ireland, about 200 years later.One possible inference is that there was a violent conquest involving the erasure of the male population, but we don’t know for sure that it was sudden and catastrophic.

Whatever language the Beaker people brought with them was not Celtic (though it may have been Indo-European). The fascinating conundrum is that when Celtic languages arrived in Ireland whoever brought them left not a trace in the genetic record. This is unlike any of the similar changes in language use throughout European pre-history. Either the population responsible has not been identified or the language was spread through communication (e.g. for trade) rather than settlement. Irish may be a Celtic language, but there is little evidence of significant numbers of Celts settling here and bringing it with them.

Some time ago I wrote a post about the Celtic languages, which you might want to look at if you’re interested in this topic. A lot of that post I now realize to be very simplistic, but to add one other snippet I should mention that the name of Turkish football team Galatasaray translates to “Palace of the Celts” after the Celtic-speaking people who settled in Anatolia; these were the Galatians to whom Paul addressed his Epistle.

I thoroughly recommend this fascinating book. It made me want to find out more about so many things. It also gacve me additional motivation to pursue an idea I had a while ago to do a Masters in Linguistics wehn I retire from physics…

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Summer Solstice 2025

Posted in Irish Language, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on June 21, 2025 by telescoper

In case you weren’t aware, the Summer Solstice in the Northern hemisphere took place this morning Saturday June 21, 2025 at 02:42 UTC (03:42am local Irish Time). Among other things, this means that today is the longest day of the year (as defined by the interval between sunrise and sunset).

According to this website, the interval between sunrise and sunset in Dublin today will be 17 hours and 12 seconds. which is a whole second longer than yesterday (!) and six seconds longer than tomorrow.

In the Northern hemisphere, days will get shorter from the Summer Solstice until the Winter Solstice in December.

The nights are drawing in. Although sunset does carry on getting a bit later for a few days, the days definitely start getting shorter from now on. I explained this in earlier posts here.

Incidentally, the word for “solstice” in the Irish language is grianstad which translates literally as “sun-stop”. The Summer Solstice is Grianstad an tSamhraidh“. The nominative singular word for “Summer”, a masculine noun in Irish, is Samhradh, but in the construction used here, “of summer”, it is in the genitive case so becomes Samhraidh. Moreover, when a masculine noun beginning with s- in the singular genitive is preceded by the definite article an) it experiences an initial mutation in the form of a t-prothesis; hence (an tSamraidh is “of the Summer”.

The Winter Solstice is Grianstad an Gheimhridh. The word for winter is Geimhreadh, which is masculine, and has a genitive form Geimhridh. In this case, however, because it doesn’t begin with “S” there is no t-prothesis but instead a lenition (séimhiú) that softens the initial “G” indicated by the “h”. Hence Grianstad an Gheimhridh, “Sun-stop of the Winter”.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

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Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh

Posted in Biographical, History, Irish Language, Maynooth on June 2, 2025 by telescoper

It’s a Bank Holiday Monday here in Ireland, which makes for a nice end-of-term break for some of us. Not all staff had exams early enough to finish in time like I did, however, and no doubt some had to spend the weekend marking exam scripts. I am fortunate to have been able to accomplish everything I intended over the weekend – nothing at all – and today I’ll be able to recover from that exertion.

The June Bank Holiday (Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh) in Ireland is the equivalent of last week’s late May Bank Holiday in the UK, in that both have their origin in the old festival of Whitsuntide (or Pentecost) which falls on the 7th Sunday after Easter. Because the date of Easter moves around in the calendar so does Whit Sunday, but it is always in late May or early June; this year it falls on Sunday 8th June.

As if in celebration, the honeysuckle in my garden has started to flower:

The day after Pentecost was traditionally a holiday known as Pentecost Monday or Whit Monday. This enabled people to attend extra church services and organize local fairs and cultural events. Pentecost Monday became a public holiday in Ireland following the Bank Holidays Act 1871 which applied before Ireland became independent. Following the Holidays (Employees) Act 1973, this holiday was moved to the First Monday of June. This new date was first observed in 1974. This is why
we have the first Monday in June off work instead of the last Monday in May.

Although I’m only at beginners’ level in Irish, the phrase Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh gives me a chance to bore you about it. It’s actually quite a straightforward phrase until you reach the last word. “Lá” means “day” and “Saoire” means “leave” or “vacation” so “Lá Saoire” means “holiday”; “i” is a prepositional pronoun meaning “in” and “mí” means “month”. So far so good.

The word for June, however, is Meitheamh (at least when it is in the nominative singular case). Irish is an inflected language, which means that words change form according to their grammatical function. As an Indo-European language, Irish is distantly related to Latin which has six grammatical cases for nouns (actually seven if you count the rarely used locative case). Irish has only four cases – there’s no ablative and, curiously, no distinction between nominative and accusative. That leaves nominative, dative, genitive, and vocative. The dative – used after simple prepositions – is only rarely distinct from the nominative so basically the ones you have to learn are the genitive and the vocative.

In Latin cases are indicated by changes to the end of a word, but in Irish they involve initial mutations. In the example of “mí Mheitheamh” meaning “month of June”, requiring the genitive form of “June”, the initial consonant “M” undergoes lenition (softening) to sound more like a “v”. In old Irish texts this would be indicated by a dot over the M but in modern orthography it is indicated by writing an “h” after the consonant. This is called a séimhiú (pronounced “shay-voo” ). Note the softened m in the middle of that word too but it’s not a mutation – it’s just part of the regular spelling of the word, as is the -mh at the end of Meitheamh. There’s also a softened “t” in the middle of Meitheamh which makes it vrtually disappear in pronunciation. Meitheamh is thus pronounced something like “Meh-hiv” whereas “Mheitheamh” is something like “Veh-hiv”.

Gheobhaidh mé mo chóta…

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Caisearbhán

Posted in Irish Language, Maynooth on April 11, 2025 by telescoper
The Irish word for dandelion is caisearbhán

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An Cailín Ciúin 

Posted in Film, Irish Language, Television with tags , on December 27, 2024 by telescoper

Now that the Christmas dinner and follow-up leftovers are done, I thought I’d just mention a very beautiful film I watched on the TV late on Christmas Day – An Cailín Ciúin (in English: The Quiet Girl). I was quite surprised to see it scheduled then, but TG4 is known for bold and imaginative programming.

It’s (mostly) in the Irish language, but don’t let that put you off; there are subtitles. It’s gentle, poignant and wonderfully observed. A little gem, in fact. I’d encourage you to see it if you can. It’s a fine film all round, but I can’t resist pointing out Catherine Clinch in the central role of Cáit, the quiet girl herself. She had never acted in front of a camera before this film, which makes her subtly expressiven performance all the more remarkable.

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