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Is there a distinction to be drawn between Hiberno-English words, i.e. only understood within Ireland, and words originating in Ireland but now part of standard English? Since the former may be listed on that page, is there a need to list them here too, or indeed should they be moved here?
As stated, crack is not originally Irish; similarly smithereens is from English smithers with Irish diminutive suffix -een.
Some of the origins seem dubious folk etymologies .
A number of these words are cognate with Scottish Gaelic - certainly "loch" is how it's spelled in Scotland... are we certain that these all came to English via Irish Gaelic? - Donnchadh mac Alasdair —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.81.254.74 (talk) 11:15, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
An editor (it doesn't matter who) recently added a bunch of edits speculating on the origins of some of these words. While I think much of the additions are dubious, it occured to me as I considered reverting that none of this article, or very little, is sourced or references. As such I added the (({sources))} template, and will leave it be, but as of now it is a mix of possibly useful information and outright misinformation, casting doubt on the whole thing. -- Gnetwerker 18:25, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
Crack or rather crak is a Scots word, which found its way into Irish Gaelic under the spelling of craic. It probably came to Ireland with the Plantation of Ulster and as many other Scots words has become part of everyday speak by both sides of the community such as other Scots words like scundered, foundered, thieving, plastered etc. Mabuska 23:56, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
Would it be a good idea to separate the list into sections alphabetically? akarkera 09:27, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I (and others I hope) think so, and now added. User:SeanMacGC 21:15, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
Since the book SLC is written by someone with an obvious bias, that represents a questionable source and should only be accepted where it can be backed by other reputable sources (OED etc).
Caca from Irish? - only to someone who never studied Latin! I wonder if some of these "Irish" words are actually derived from words in other languages, such as Latin, and SLC fails to realize the historic origins. Michael Daly 20:39, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps it be no coincidence that the "most contrived" are also the most numerous... by far. By simple force of numbers is it not unreasonable that there will be a majority of apparent 'contrived' derivations? Here is the entry for "caca" in full, literatim, verbatim, from SLC:
Caca, n., excrement, shit; often used as a euphemism in presence of children.
Caca, gen. as attrib.adj. of cac, excrement, filth;fig. shit; rud caca, a dirty, shitty thing. (Dineen, 145.)
The Irish cac and caca are probably derived from the Latin caco, to void excrement. (Cassell's Latin-English Dictionary, 76.) Seamus an Chaca (Seamus the Shit) was the moniker given to James II of England, a royal "chicken" caca, who abandoned his beleaguered Irish army on the Boyne River in June 1690.
There are few entries in SLC that do not have a similarly expansive etymological derivation -- what I have furnished so far on this topic are merely the distilled results, not the rationale and reasoning behind those derivations; Professor Cassidy has provided those.
User:SeanMacGC 10:50, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
Block and bealach make no sense. Bealach means way or route (e.g. a (now-small) road in Kerry is called an bealach béama - the "main route), whereas in geographic terms "block" arrived on the scene due to the way modern US cities were built - in regular shaped blocks. While the author of SLC may have found references to support his conclusions, I doubt the applicability of the references he's found based on the examples shown here. As someone from Ireland, a lot of this looks like a massive stretch. 84.12.111.19 11:58, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
--SeanMacGC 19:49, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Michael Daly. Cassidy has a bad reputation amongst linguists as a reliable source. For instance, the derivation of "spiel" from Irish rather than German is patently ludicrous. I propose removing all entries that don't check out when compared with the etymologies in the OED (or similarly well-respected English dictionary). --Folantin (talk) 14:07, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
Cassidy has a terrible reputation among linguists:
http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/grantbarrett/comments/humdinger_of_a_bad_irish_scholar/
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002935.php
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005098.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003326.html
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005228.html
http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/bunk/
Dismissing these critiques as anti-Irish bias is preposterous -- Cassidy makes blatant errors for words with well-established etymologies (c.f. bunkum), and has rampant sourcing issues. It's supposition, not scholarship, and should not be used as a source on par with the OED. 75.35.219.51 (talk) 18:17, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
Many of the words here appear to be attributed as a result of supposition. Many of them seem incredible. This "article" needs to be better sourced, and a better etymology of the words given or be deleted. It completely lacks academic veracity or credibility, and stinks of the tall stories of some Irish bloke in a bar.
So, at the moment it's just another steaming pile of wikiality, and should not be trusted at all in any way. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.132.168.164 (talk) 03:04, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
Whoever added "Bard" to this list has to my mind raised a very pertinent point - this word is attributed as originally from old Irish, Scots, Welsh and Celtic. I presume this means it's a word which was in use in all of Britain (including England) from before the beginnings of the English language and therefore most likely spoken by English-British people from the start. Therefore NOT a word of Irish origin adopted by English speakers but a word common in the roots of both languages.
You could say the same of many other entries on this page and it all starts to look a bit pointless ( ... apart from the obvious accusation that it's an incomplete collection of trivia).
I don't wish to denigrate someone's best efforts to provide an interesting article, but until this is straightened out by an expert it remains the sort of article which gets Wikipedia a bad name. Sure there are constant linguistic arguments about where/whether lines are drawn between languages and this article will never be free form them, but at the moment it seems to me way off the mark. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.53.39.216 (talk) 10:01, 25 June 2008 (UTC)
The following etymology dictionaries are currently available for free online: Etymology Dictionary by Ayto (2005), Etymololgy Dictionary by Harper (2001), Etymology Dictionary by Partridge (1966), Etymology Dictionary by Weekley (1921), Etymology Dictionary by Skeat (1888). Also available online is the concise version of the Oxford English Dictionary. On the basis of these six dictionaries, I propose to delete bard, callow, shanty from the list of words of Irish Gaelic origin.
Bard. In short, English bard primarily comes from popular ancient Latin writings that have bardus = poet. Bard is an ancient Celtic word. Welsh bardd and Breton barz mean 'poet-singer'. Scottish Gaelic bard entered Scottish English in mid-15th century with the meaning of 'vagabond minstrel'. However the modern literary meaning of bard is 17th century and is derived from -- or at least strongly influenced by -- the ancient Greek bardos and Latin bardus (e.g. used by the poet Lucan, 1st century AD), which in turn come from the Gaulish language. The word bard appears in modern French, Spanish, Italian, German and other European languages and I believe this widespreadness is due to its presence in the Greek and Latin, not English. But in any case, none of the etymology dictionaries give the English word bard a demonstrable descent from Irish Gaelic, even though several of them mention the co-existence of the Irish Gaelic word. The demonstrable descent is from Scottish Gaelic and Latin. (See also the comment by 86.53.39.216 earlier on this page.)
callow: All the above etymology dictionaries say callow descends from Old English calu = ‘bald’. They also say this old english word is probably West Germanic, and point to cognates in Old Friesan, Dutch and German. They do not point to any Irish connection. The Wikipedia article cites the Oxford English Dictionary as saying that callow is "cognate with the Irish calbh (bald), and is a particularly Irish usage (OED)." -- bear in mind that "cognate" does not mean originating from. I haven't looked at the full-length OED, but the concise OED that's free online says callow's origin is "Old English, "bald", probably from Latin calvus ‘bald’, later "unfledged""; see http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/callow. Similarly see http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/callow Furthermore the meaning of callow as "a water-meadow" in the Wikipedia article is not supported by any of the dictionaries.
Shanty. Here are quotes from the various dictionaries about Shanty: Quote 1: "Shanty: In Canadian French, chantier takes the sense ‘hut, or small, rough, temporary dwelling’: whence English shanty."ref1. Quote 2: "Shanty: rough cabin, first recorded 1820, from French Canadian chantier "lumberjack's headquarters," in French, "timberyard, dock," from Old French chantier "gantry," from Latin cantherius "rafter, frame".ref2. Quote 3: "Shanty: a small, crudely built shack. Origin perhaps from Canadian French chantier ‘lumberjack’s cabin, logging camp’"ref3. Quote 4: "Shanty = Hut. Origin in US & Canada. Perhaps corruption of French chantier, workshop, used in Canada of woodcutters' forest quarters. Cf. shantyman = lumberman, Canadian French homme de chantier (see gantry). Others derive it from Irish sean toig, old house."ref4. Quote 5: "Shanty, meaning ‘shack’, originated in America, and the fact that to begin with it was mainly used for the houses of Irish immigrants suggests that it MAY have come from Irish sean tig 'old house'."ref5. It's wrong to derive it from "old house" because there's unanimity that it originated in America at a time when there were very few old houses to be found and the population was growing explosively; and the plain meaning of the word is a roughly built house, not an old house. In all those etymology books I saw no report of any evidence that Gaelic speakers in America used the word nor any evidence of them passing it on to English speakers. Most of the books don't even mention the Irish hypothesis for Shanty, and the remainder say it's merely speculative and unproved. Note that use of the word Shanty has been dated to 1820 at latest, whereas Irish Catholic immigrants were not very numerous nor very poor in America prior to that date, and most of them were able to speak English and spoke English. (They tended to come from the east and southeast counties in Ireland; the Irish western counties didn't start emigrating until the 1840s). Based on what's said in the etymology books, Americans used their own word Shanty to describe the housing they observed some poorer people living in, and didn't borrow that word from the people who were living there -- and more often than not the people living there were not Irish immigrants, I may add.
As an aside, I believe that slob is not an Irish Gaelic word either. That's based on the lengthy treatment of the subject in Walter Skeat's etymology dictionary at [2]. However, the OED believes it is has an Irish Gaelic origin, and I don't want to get into a fight where the OED could be marshaled aginst me. All dictionaries including the OED say that slobber and slobbery are not of Irish Gaelic origin, but the OED says that slob is etymologically a different word from slobbery. I believe the meaning "untidy person" (first recorded in 1861) is surely derived from slobbery and surely not of Gaelic origin. (As for the "mud" meaning for slob, it looks like it's probably Old English in origin as well.) Seanwal111111 (talk) 21:33, 30 April 2010 (UTC)
I propose to delete the following six words from the list. My sources are the same half a dozen dictionaries I cited earlier on this page concerning the deletion of "shanty".
Alannah: This word is not in any of the dictionaries. Therefore (1) it's not an English word and (2) you can't cite a standard reference saying it's of Gaelic origin. According to Wikipedia, "Alannah is a given first name for a person, which has disputed origins: It can be either derived from the Old High German word for "precious" or from the Irish language term "a leanbh" or "child".
Baltimore: This is purely a placename (the internal link goes to the city in Maryland). The list excludes placenames, so Baltimore should be excluded likewise.
Drum: The Gaelic "drum" isn't in English; only "drumlin" is in English.
Fiacre: Once again, I cannot find this word in English dictionaries. Fiacre is a word in French, now more or less archaic, which is said to come from the name of an Irish-born saint. But it does not exist in English.
Puck: This word is in Old English. Therefore it couldn't be from Irish. Cognate words are seen in Old Germanic languages, e.g. puk in Friesian and puki in Old Norse. There are also cognates in Welsh, Cornish and Irish, but that in no way implies the word entered English from Irish. (Also, the meaning in Irish is not the same as in Old English and modern English. Also, in relatively recent centuries the Irish meaning may have been affected by the English).
tocher: This is not a word in standard English dictionaries. The source cited by the Wikipedia article is "The Concise Scots Dictionary", implying it's found in Scots dialect English. According to the Wikipedia article, this dictionary says the word is from "Old Irish". "Old Irish" can be either Scottish or Irish -- there was no distinction between the two in the writings of olden times, and more than half of "Old Irish" writings were produced in Scotland. So this word "tocher" fails to qualify for the list because it's not in English and it's not from Irish in the narrower sense.
cross: This entry can stay but it needs more comment. If it's true that "Cross" comes from Old Irish, it needs to be commented that Old Irish is both Scottish and Irish Gaelic. It needs to be commented as well that Cross may not come from Old Irish. Here's what Weekley says about it:
No Gaelic origin theory there. Note that the difference is very subtle and almost non-existent between the Middle English southern form crois (certainly from French crois) and the northern form cross (reportedly from Old Norse kross). Skeat says that modern Cross is from the Old French crois, and not from Gaelic, and that the Gaelic word was croich (thus disagreeing with this Wikipedia article's statement that the Old Irish form was cros).
During the conversions of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, Gaelic-speaking Christian missionaries were active in the northern areas of England and southern Scotland (far less so in southern England). I think that's why it's supposed that the English northern form cross may come from Gaelic. But the etymology dictionaries that report a Gaelic source also say the northern form comes, or probably comes, from Old Norse kross (despite the fact that the Old Norsemen weren't Christians) and the latter comes from Old Irish. See e.g. Dictionary.Reference.com. That makes no sense to me. The Harper says that English Cross probably comes from Scandinavian and then the Scandinavian comes from Old Irish cros. I don't know how he gets that result, but in any case his word "probably" there, and all that I've said above, indicate to me that adoption of the word into English from Gaelic sources is poorly documented, involves guesswork, and is uncertain. By the way, none of the other Old English Christianity words have Old Irish source theories; see e.g. god spell (gospel), calic (chalice), cirice (church), maesse (Mass).
Tilly: This word is not used in Ireland in the sense stated. It appears to be a colloquialism confined to Newfoundland.
I can't imagine the List of English words of Old Irish origin getting a great number of entries. Old Irish is certainly a different language from Irish, but keeping these words in their own section on this page would set them apart well enough. --Leif Runenritzer (talk) 04:20, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Kibosh is probably not from Irish. See discussion at American Dialect Society list and Cohen, Gerald (compiler), "Stephen Goranson's suggestion that _kibosh_ in _put the kibosh on_ may derive from _kurbash_ (a type of whip)," "Comments on Etymology" vol. 40 no. 1-2 (Oct.-Nov. 2010) pages 12-48. This includes two addenda (a) Stephen Goranson: ca. 1830: Broadside 'Penal Servitude' with lines: "It would put on the kibosh like winking / That is if they was to introduce the lash' and (b) Matthew Little's preliminary treatment (Nov. 2009; only now published) suggesting _kibosh_ from _kurbash_. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Coralapus (talk • contribs) 14:19, 25 December 2010 (UTC) See now, for a non-Irish etymology and a review of other proposals, Origin of Kibosh: Routledge Studies in Etymology (2017) by Gerald Cohen, Stephen Goranson, and Matthew Little ISBN 113862895.Coralapus (talk)Coralapus
I have just removed "slum" which has been added, with a reference to Cassidy.
While I haven't got a reference that definitely says Cassidy is wrong, I have several circumstantial reasons to doubt his etymology ("s lom é" = "it is bleak"); and the discussion further up this page suggests that he is not reliable.
As I say, these are all circumstantial: perhaps there are older, Irish references; perhaps the older meanings in the OED are unrelated words; and borrowings from sentences, though rare, are not unknown. Perhaps Cassidy has solid evidence for his suggestion (I haven't seen Cassidy's book). But judging from the comments mentioned above, I would doubt it, and say that the burden of proof for inclusion in this list is to show the evidence that Cassidy relies on. --ColinFine (talk) 19:09, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
I've removed "dig" (unsourced, and with an unsourced story about Irish and Blacks in New York), and "slapper", which is sourced only to Wiktionary: I'm going to remove the etymology from there, as it is unsourced and unlikely. --ColinFine (talk) 09:22, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
I may have been hasty in removing clock, thanks to Rashers who pointed that out. The OED accepts that there may be an Old Irish derivation involved but that involves the word going Old Irish > Germanic > Flemish > English. I guess the question is, do we include words which are maybe of Irish origin? In any case, if it's the case, then it belongs on List of English words of Irish origin, not here, as it certainly did not come via modern Irish. Akerbeltz (talk) 13:40, 9 November 2011 (UTC)
On 27 Mar 2012 Seanwal111111 deleted the word CLOCK from the list, with supporing comment: "Deleted CLOCK because the language and area of origin of the word is undetermined; see http://archive.org/stream/oed02arch#page/510/mode/1up " -- that link is to the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles.
On 21 Jul 2012 editor Gimpel43 restored the word CLOCK with the comment: "The cited source from "Seanwal111111" is from 1893. Today (2012) the origin of the word "clock" from Old-Irish "clocc" isn't disputed."
Here's what dictionaries with copyright date 2012 are saying:
Editor Gimpel43 cites the following as his sole support for the undeletion of CLOCK:
There has been no substantive new evidence about the etymology of CLOCK since the report dated 1893 I cited above, to my knowledge. I am now going to delete the word from the list again. Seanwal111111 (talk) 23:04, 21 July 2012 (UTC)
On 21 July 2012 Seanwal111111 deleted the word "clock" for the second time from the list of english words of irish origin with the main argument "origin of the word is undetermined", though one of his cited sources "Collins English Dictionary" says "ultimately of Celtic origin" and the other cited sources make a irish origin probable.
There is substantive new evidence about the etymology of CLOCK since the report dated 1893 you cited above and you yourself wrote it down: "Collins English Dictionary" gives us "ultimately of Celtic origin". The argument that "Merriam-Webster Dictinary" uses the word "akin" and "akin" doesn't imply an Irish origin is a weak argument. The whole Comparative Linguistics is based on the alikeness of words. So if you argue "akin" means nothing in Comparative Linguistics , than the whole Comparative Linguistics is doing jabberwocky. Any german dictionary leads the word "Glocke" back to Irish "clocc" not only because of the alikeness of the word but also because there is a historical framework. Most parts of germany, switzerland and austria (also england) got evangelised from ireland in the Early Middle Ages. And the irish monks brought the thing "bell" and the word for the thing "clocc" along. The word is not attested in Classical Latin but is attested in Medieval Latin, because this was the language of documents at that time.
Here are some good sources for the etymologie of the word "clock":
The english word "clock" is not straight adopted from Old Irish. The word made a journey from Ireland to Germany and The Nederlands. From Middle Dutch it came eventually into Middle English. On this long way it changed its meaning from "bell" to "clock".
I will bring the word "clock" back on the list in the next time, so User Seanwal111111 has time to think about. Gimpel43 (talk) 10:18, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
Oh no, hold it there. We're not on a quest for the truth, remember? Wikipedia is about verifiable facts so if there are bona fide sources which support this, German or English, then that suffices. We're specifically not here to research stuff like that. Akerbeltz (talk) 18:25, 22 July 2012 (UTC) And incidentally, Old Irish does not take it back "further", Old Irish covers the period of the 6th - 10th century, which covers both the late end of Vulgar Latin and the early bits of Medieval Latin. Akerbeltz (talk) 18:38, 22 July 2012 (UTC)
This article is described as "a list of English language words from the Celtic Irish language." The word boycott is not derived from the Irish language and does not belong here. See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=boycott&searchmode=none 88.151.31.65 (talk) 18:50, 17 January 2015 (UTC)
I moved the following from the main page, as it seemed more appropriate for the talk page:
This purports to be a list of English language words from the Celtic and Irish language, ("Irish", The Scots dialect is Gaelic). It is however, riddled with inaccuracies and words which either are not used in the English language or do not derive from the Irish language. It seems that editors may not realise that the Irish language uses a reduced alphabet of 23 characters. However given that the ten vowels are are formed in very similar patterns and are sometimes considered to just be long and short forms of the same character and the character 'h' is more often used as a grammactical form than a letter it is common to consider the alphabet to have only 19 characters. The word "craic" for example is spelt thus as there is no letter "K" in Irish. However it is not known as such in the Irish language
Cassidy knew no Irish. He was ignorant of linguistics. All he did was look for similar words in an Irish dictionary and try to match them with English words (or, often, he ungrammatically stringed together Irish words and offered the strings as etymons of English words). The little that is right in Cassidy's book has long been known and is thus not original with him (such as the Irish origin of galore). Whatever was original with him is fantasy. He was debunked long ago. See, for example, Danielomastix's blog, cassidyslangscam / A debunking of Daniel Cassidy's theories about the influence of the Irish language on English slang (https://cassidyslangscam.wordpress.com/author/johndonnelly01/page/2/), which should be mentioned hereS. Valkemirer (talk) 20:07, 28 November 2021 (UTC)