The Things You Can’t Say in Irish

You can’t simply agree — you echo the verb of the question back. The language is quietly impossible to answer evasively.

You can’t be happy or hungry or afraid. These things come like weather, settle on you a while (the little word orm), and then they lift.

There is no verb “to have.” Things exist at you (the word ag), and even your skills and knowledge are possessions held this way.

Desire is a kind of absence — the thing you want is held away from you (uaim). And obligation isn’t something you take up; it’s laid on you (orm).

Liking, loving, hating, remembering, knowing, preferring — almost none of these are verbs. They’re states held with you (liom) or to you (dom).

Liking is good with you; loving is not an act you perform but a thing you carry for someone.

Not one of them is a plain word. They are prayers and good wishes, worn smooth by centuries of saying.

You don’t say goodbye. You wish safety onto the one who leaves — and they wish it back to the one who stays.

When Irish does turn unkind, it turns baroque. These are the milder ones.

Irish doesn’t do “honey” or “babe.” It reaches for treasure, pulses, and secrets — and many slipped whole into English.

No phrase quite carries them. They are the deep cuts — the words you keep in Irish because nothing else will do.

Stack two plain words and you get a creature. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Whole thoughts arrive by the back door.

The seanfhocail — the “old words.”

The week was named for fasting days; the autumn months are named for the harvest itself.

Where English sees one shade, Irish sometimes sees two — and draws the line in a place English never thought to.

One set of numbers for objects; an entirely separate set for human beings.

Place-names are just ordinary words. Learn a dozen and the whole island starts to translate itself.

A man’s surname and his sister’s are literally different words. Ó means “descendant of” and Mac means “son of.”

So the son is Seán Ó Briain, but his daughter is Síle Ní Bhriain — Ní for “daughter of the descendant of.”

Marry in and it changes again: the wife becomes Máire Uí Bhriain. Three forms of one family name, sorted entirely by who you are to it.

Anglicise all of that and you get every O’- and Mc- and Mac- on Earth.

The verb comes first. Itheann sé arán is literally “eats he bread.”

There are two verbs for “to be” — one for passing states (tá), one for declaring what a thing is (is) — and you must choose every time.

It tells right now from always in the verb itself: tá sé ag obair (working this moment) versus bíonn sé ag obair (works as a rule) — the grammar that gave Hiberno-English “he does be working.”

Words won’t hold still: their opening sound mutates with the grammar around them — bó a cow, mo bhó my cow, ár mbó our cow.

It has a verb form for things done with no doer named — Labhraítear Gaeilge anseo, “Irish is spoken here,” with nobody doing the speaking.

And to call someone by name you change the name itself: Seán becomes a Sheáin! the instant you speak to him.