10 surprising Irish words you didn't know you were using almost every day.

[eridani]

http://www.upworthy.com/10-surprising-irish-words-you-didnt-know-you-were-using-almost-every-day?c=upw1

Like the Irish hero-poet-politician Pádraig Pearse once said: "Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam — a country without a language is a country without a soul."

The Irish language might be struggling to survive, but it's not dead yet. In fact, it's one of the oldest living languages in the world, as well as the first national language of the Republic of Ireland, which means that all government documents are written in Irish and English and that children study the language in school.

That being said, less than 2% of the population actually speaks the native tongue on a daily basis, and only 41% claim to speak it at all, even after years of schooling.

Thanks, colonialism!
But this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising and the beginning of Ireland's struggle for independence, making it an extra-special year for celebration.

So go forth with your newfound Irish knowledge and have the craic (that means "fun&quot !

Which means a lot more than just drinking alcohol, by the way. But if you are gonna drink, please be safe — and for the last time, stop ordering Irish car bombs.

[liberal N proud]

1. Without ordering one, I was trying to figure out what is in one last night

[Recursion]

2. "Galore" is Newfie Irish, IIRC (nt)

[stone space]

3. There's another one that I grew up with and advocated for decades.

"Youse" (second person, plural pronoun), often as part of the phrase "Youse guys" (not gender specific).

Having grown up in Dubuque, I just assumed that the word was simply a Dubuqueism, formed out of logical necessity (in much the same was as "You all" and the more recent third person singular "they".

Being a logician by profession, I couldn't help but advocate for it and use it regularly and religiously in my own speech.

Decades later (and decades ago...I'm old as dirt), I saw an article in the New York Times that quoted Gerry Adams using the word "Youse", and it finally clicked in my head that it must be an Irish thing.

[Maeve]

4. One they missed has a cool history--jazz

From the Irish "teas" (pronounced chass or j'ass) --"heat". It was used first in the US to apply to sexual passion, but also used in baseball (as in 'putting a little jazz on the ball'). Later it was used to refer to the hot music style, following the creation of the Original Dixieland Jass Band (original spelling).

For more words and fascinating history, check out "How the Irish Invented Slang" by Daniel Cassidy.

[Igel]

5. Sigh.

1. Irish is one of the earliest attested written languages in Europe. That doesn't mean that the Picts or the Basques or the future Anglo-Saxons didn't have their languages at the time. They just weren't written down.

There's a bit of glory in that, for the monks who did the writing at the time. Pretty pointless if you're a 25-year-old Irishman and you're key claim to dignity is that some Catholics wrote stuff down in a language you don't speak.

We may stipulate that Modern English began in the 1500s and middle English in the 1200s or whenever, but it's not like everybody learned a new language overnight. English goes back step by step until you reach Indo-European, and before that presumably to Nostratic, and before that to things we can't identify and so haven't named. How many times language sprang up among humans is an unknowable question, unless genetics comes to the rescue.

One problem with languages that revel in glories past is a reliance on antiquated orthography. French suffers from this. English does, too, but I like to think that we anglophones would have been wise enough to dispense with Caxton's orthography in favor of something more reasonable if not for the dialectal diversity that our orthography has to cover. Like Chinese, to go phonetic would be to shatter the linguistic unity, more real in the case of English than Chinese. Irish Gaelic's orthography is to die instead of.

2. To say that less than 2% of the population speaks the native tongue is an absurdity. Native is what you grow up speaking. If you don't grow up speaking it, it's not native. I'm mostly of Irish ancestry; in no way is Irish "my" language or my "native" language. Genes =/= culture =/= language. This was well established in even mildly liberal circles about 100 years ago, and hasn't changed except among the doctrinaire left and the racist right.

Personally, I don't even like the sound of Irish. Russian, Czech, Polish, Ukrainian, Spanish, French, Italian, even Bulgarian, those I've studied to a greater or lesser extent. Irish ... No thanks.

3. The writer of at the link makes a stupid mistake. Call it what it is, stupid. I assumes that Gaelic = Gaelic. Now, Scotts Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are sprung from a common source--the Scots left Ireland and headed east into Scotland, but that happened around the same time that the Angles and Saxons and Jutes headed west into England. Scotts Gaelic is as Irish as English is Dutch or Low German. Some of the words taken to be from Irish are from Scotts Gaelic.

4. At other times, the writer of the OP lapses into wishful thinking. Padraig is probably from Patricius, so the anglicization is straightforward. Moreover, Padraig is often pronounced, um, "Patrick", and the writer is confused by the antiquated orthography into thinking what isn't must be.

5. There's no gaping cultural wound calling St. Patrick's Day "St. Patty's." If anything, it's a bit of political correctness. We can't call it "St. Paddy's" because "paddy" is like dago, wop, kyke, hunky, kraut, or any number of derogatory ethnic slurs. Even then, that gaping cultural wound must not be that gaping or that much a wound because, well, most Irish Americans at least are barely aware of how hurtful "paddy" must be to them. Like other gaping cultural wounds, before they can be a wound these days you have to teach the person exactly how much pain they should be suffering, from an early age, so they can truly assimilate the heinousness of whatever. Irish-American advocates aren't much in evidence, these days, so the "no pain (by our supporters) no gain (by us)" rule doesn't come into play.

[ananda]

6. That was interesting.

I knew about whiskey because of East of Eden.
But some of the other words were surprising to me.