From: Rikd Cmei5 <londheart@...>
Subject: City Lit Gaelic Group Re: Trousers and Beautiful Days
To: gaeliccl@yahoogroups.com
Date: Friday, 10 July, 2009, 3:05 PM

When I first went on a gaelic course (first year Irish) I had a recurring experience of finding words which looked like they might have influenced English, or even resulted in English words, and this continued when I did Gaelic at the City Lit. It even made me consider whether the the sound of English (and, indeed French), overall and individual ones, had an ancient, historical celtic influence. But it has always been difficult to mention aloud, because it goes against mainstream assumptions re celtic irrelevance, academic assumptions re language families, and, like spelling reform, comes across a bit deep for someone ostensibly in their first year(s).

I only put 'Sunday' because I have been invited to a free showing of Johnny Johnson at the Saddlers Wells Sunday lunchtime. I'm flexible, I guess.

Ruiseart


--- In gaeliccl@yahoogroup s.com, "Morag T" <moragt@...> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Beautiful Days
>
> So it's just the three of us going to the play, then? I'm sure there were more on the first poll - PLEASE do use the poll to show when you're going.
>
>
> Trousers
>
> The word comes from Gaelic "Triubhas" - who'd have thought it? Not me, but that's what it says in The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, published by Oxford University Press, "the culmination of 44 years of painstaking work by scholars at the University of Glasgow" according to the BBC, no less. See the link here http://news. bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/magazine/ 8135928.stm
>
> I don't, either, believe the "triubhsar" plural (see comments on the original article) because a) Gaelic plurals are not formed with "-r" and b) this word (like "briogais", still in common use) is singular in Gaelic - the Gael wears "a trouser", like the Frenchman wears "un pantalon".