Nobody ever says this about "OMG", "enthusiastic", "goodbye", or "holiday". - ThreadSky

darach.bsky.social • 51 days ago

Nobody ever says this about "OMG", "enthusiastic", "goodbye", or "holiday".

There’s an aspect to the Irish language I find interesting. The religious content in every day phrases. Assume you’ve come across that? Dia duit - god be with you etc. Which as someone who is absolutely not religious I find a bit problematic (but it doesn’t bother many)

Comments

bootsmcgoot.bsky.social•51 days ago

didn't know about enthusiastic! you're right of course, it's woven throughout english

nidurkey.bsky.social•51 days ago

Or adieu!

metaphysiology.bsky.social•51 days ago

For me it was always a simple and sober curiosity as to what the common Irish greetings were prior to the conversion of the nation. Maybe it was simply "Déithe duit" or some specific Irish god "Dagda duit"? (Disclosure: inspired here by Asterix and co saying "By Toutatis!"😅)

plasticcoffee.bsky.social•51 days ago

Language & culture are intertwined and some people don't get it

lynnok.bsky.social•51 days ago

Language and culture are alive and always changing and some people resist it.

sharrow.bsky.social•51 days ago

Ah here there is a difference, we are taught in school that the phrase for hello is ggod be with you And the reply is God and Mary with you.

That's pretty specific.

bleary.off-the-records.com•51 days ago

Once you get into Padraigs and Brids it’s hard to pretend it’s not religious

lnr42.bsky.social•51 days ago

But Good/God Morgen also literally means that in several languages. And we just ignore that and translate as Good Morning.
If we were told "Dia Duit" meant "Good Morning" or "Good be with you" straight up, we'd be like 🤷‍♂️

If you want a strictly not etymologically religious greeting, try "Aon Scéal?"

eltorosolo.bsky.social•51 days ago

No, this is false. Etymologyically, "good" and "god" are not related, even though "god" is also a cognate of English "good" in several germanic languages. Pure coincidence.

lnr42.bsky.social•51 days ago

My information must be way old.

lnr42.bsky.social•51 days ago

Oh! It's Goodbye = God be with you.
Darach already mentioned it. But that's the source of my Good/God drift confusion.

eltorosolo.bsky.social•51 days ago

Ah, I didn't know that one!

codonn.bsky.social•51 days ago

cad é an craic

unamccormack.bsky.social•51 days ago

“Bloody hell”.

matthewpb.bsky.social•51 days ago

Something astonishingly arrogant about saying “I personally don’t believe this thing that everyone in the entire society that formed the language believed, so I find it a bit problematic. The language should be reinvented to reflect my values.”

timoconnorbl.bsky.social•51 days ago

There is, isn’t there? A fierce dose of Main Character Syndrome about it.

matthewpb.bsky.social•51 days ago

I’ve just seen somebody claim that the Irish language contains religious language because of the church’s role in the 20th century state. These people are full on conspiracy theorists but they’d never think of themselves that way.

radiobeartime.com•51 days ago

Bono duit ;)

jgrenewriter.bsky.social•51 days ago

😂

radiobeartime.com•51 days ago

My problem as a London born Tipp-BIFFO hybrid is that I pronounce “Dia duit” like Bob Hoskins throwing someone into a woodchipper.

jamsamcam.bsky.social•51 days ago

I mean if you think the Irish language as a kind of living thing that was put into a cryo chamber for 100 of years by the British until modern Irish people freed it. Why wouldn’t it have so many phrases based on religion ? It didn’t have the chance to pick up new ones

fionnuisce.bsky.social•51 days ago

It's only something people notice because they're coming to it as a second language and thus looking for a literal translation of idioms.

"Dia duit", like Eng. "goodbye", is a phatic expression. It doesn't really matter what it means, it's just a *thing you say* in a given social situation.

matthewpb.bsky.social•51 days ago

You’re right that most people don’t know/notice the religious meaning of “goodbye” but people do say “oh my god” etc all the time and the literal meaning of that is very blatant and inescapable!

timoconnorbl.bsky.social•51 days ago

Yelling “Jesus *Christ* almighty!” when your team miss a sitter isn’t a detailed exercise in Trinitarian theology, like.

matthewpb.bsky.social•51 days ago

It’s been spoken constantly for 100s of years

jamsamcam.bsky.social•51 days ago

Point is, there have been phrases that may have been replaced with a less religious ones like we’ve seen with other languages

harder for minority languages to do this. Esp when you states discouraging folk from speaking.

So it’s a bit weird to think that it having these words as being problematic

timoconnorbl.bsky.social•51 days ago

…

…

I’m sorry, *what*? “A cryo chamber”?

Like nobody used or spoke Irish until, oh, 1995?

jamsamcam.bsky.social•51 days ago

Of course they did but a language that’s lol was under attack and had its population of speakers reduce will naturally had some opportunities to gain new words etc taken away from it

Cornish for example almost went extinct and the new modern version almost certainly lost plenty of them

fliglman.bsky.social•51 days ago

it's because the Irish are secretly Québecois

timoconnorbl.bsky.social•51 days ago

lauradicus.bsky.social•48 days ago

Yeah, where did OMG come from in English? Every language has diety references.

billallen.bsky.social•51 days ago

Gruss Gott

ianwinick.bsky.social•51 days ago

Just out of interest, Darach, what secular ways are there of saying hello in Irish with resorting to anglicisms?

"Conas atá?" springs to mind but that might be from a Gaeltacht fever dream.

thejoegriffin.bsky.social•51 days ago

I wish you luck in this debate. Godspeed.

contact.barryomahony.ie•51 days ago

Yup, and I never hear those same people calling out Spanish or French for the same reasons.

To be fair to this specific guy in the quote, people school him on "goodbye" in the comments and he admits he didn't know that. A bad take is a bad take, but at least he had the decency to acknowledge it.

jermcurtin.bsky.social•51 days ago

Wait till they discover Spanish, me cago en Dios.

davesrants.com•51 days ago

I tried to bring up my atheist kids to not say oh my god and they both do!

On your broader point I think the usages in English were/are more derivative so people didn't find it as apparent as Irish. Not helped by a lack of fluency in Irish etc.

bioniclaura.bsky.social•51 days ago

Yeah it’s like Inshallah or Alhumdulillah in Arabic. Lots of languages have religious phrases that are common things to say.

darach.bsky.social•51 days ago

Also, nobody ever has this issue with the Union Jack being a trinity of overlapping Christian crosses.

darach.bsky.social•51 days ago

The movement to surgically remove cells of language infected with religion is "high risk, low return" at the best of times and can unintentionally enforce other biases.

For example, replacing "Christian name" with "firstname" assumes that every culture's first name carries equal weight.

thedenature.bsky.social•51 days ago

I usually say “family name” and “personal name,” though I know these terms are also imperfect.

islandofreil.bsky.social•51 days ago

This assertion is problematic in the case of religious minorities whose first names do carry that weight, such as Jews. My first name is not my "Christian" name.

darach.bsky.social•51 days ago

So that'd be your given name! My point is more that replacing christian name with firstname is superficial and incurious if it hides the christianity without considering the broader cultural issues.

islandofreil.bsky.social•51 days ago

That's entirely fair. I'm cool with "given name."

iodhadh.bsky.social•51 days ago

Not quite the same context, but I feel similarly about the people attempting to surgically remove all traces of Christianity from Irish mythology or folk belief in pursuit of a pure pagan past, when the reality is that Ireland’s paganism has been deeply syncretic for its entire recorded history.

iodhadh.bsky.social•51 days ago

We only have record of those beliefs because of the early Christian monks who thought them worth preserving. In some places Christian adjustments are obvious; in others, we have no idea what was altered. Any attempt at a non-Christian Irish polytheism is always going to be modern reconstruction!

neiljackman.bsky.social•51 days ago

Very well said! The certainty of some people about pre-Christian practice in Ireland grinds my gears a bit.

iodhadh.bsky.social•51 days ago

We can make our best guess, and in some cases a pretty reasonable assumption, but true certainty? Never. And my belief (as an Irish polytheist myself) is that it’s more important to adopt principles and values into my modern life than try to reconstruct (invent) unknown ancient practices.

timoconnorbl.bsky.social•51 days ago

Or, come to that, months like January, February, March, May, June, July and August, or the days of the week.

timoconnorbl.bsky.social•51 days ago

Too long for a single post, but it remains one of the best summaries of this kind of language-Puritanism.

punchedmonet.bsky.social•50 days ago

I do! They need to lock in and use a cooler cross type 😤

dirkvanbryn.bsky.social•51 days ago

I actually quite enjoy how Irish makes me speak in a particular way. I don't really say things like "God bless the work" or even "God help us" when I speak English.

andrewbrook.bsky.social•51 days ago

Or “bloody”.

aveteresa.bsky.social•51 days ago

Zounds! (God’s wounds) and Gadzooks! (God’s hooks - the nails of the cross), or lasting a lot longer in common parlance, Blimey! (God blight me).

webwight.bsky.social•51 days ago

“Wow” comes from “God’s wounds”

darach.bsky.social•51 days ago

I hadn't heard that before!

webwight.bsky.social•47 days ago

Push a button and I will tell you a random fact ☺️

aveteresa.bsky.social•51 days ago

Really? I thought it came from the equally blasphemous speech of oath taking: I vow. Either way, it is religious in origin!!

siobhanmcelduff.bsky.social•51 days ago

It's an odd desire to want to strip metaphorical language from speech.

timoconnorbl.bsky.social•51 days ago

To use the mots justes - Jesus Christ, like.

timoconnorbl.bsky.social•51 days ago

Little enough these lads have to be bothering them if a pattern of idiomatic speech shared across languages across Europe gets them hot and bothered.

siobhanmcelduff.bsky.social•51 days ago

I was more intrigued to see someone suggest this was a result of the Irish Free State's heavy hand on the language, which seems to suggest that in rejecting it you're getting back to something authentic in Irish. Which is just very strange thinking about the history of the language to me.

fhayesmccoy.bsky.social•51 days ago

So was I. It's deeply weird. I think it may, in part, be an unhealthy side effect of the justifiable concern about the continuing influence of the Church on education.

siobhanmcelduff.bsky.social•51 days ago

I think there's an idea that a language that uses such phrases must be repressed in some way, which ignores just how much religious language gets used during a lot of things that are very much not what you'd be doing in church.

finnlongman.com•51 days ago

A lot of people's understanding of the history of Christianity in Ireland is v skewed. A couple of months back someone told me they thought St Patrick=15th century, and I regularly see people saying Christianity was imposed by English colonisers. So this shapes MANY misconceptions about the language

arobertswrites.com•51 days ago

I have see some crazy stuff about Irish history but those things are new to me 😬

matthewpb.bsky.social•51 days ago

Oh dear god

islandofreil.bsky.social•51 days ago

I suspect this is a combination of general historical ignorance and fetishization of "the old pagan ways"

finnlongman.com•51 days ago

(and also the literature -- people are often mistaken about how old a story is and then if they're also a thousand years out in terms of Christianity then no wonder they think a fifteenth century story written by monks is in some way pre-Christian)

elfprince13.mumak.app•51 days ago

genuinely hilarious given that Irish missions are largely responsible for the Christianization of Germanic Northumbria.

lizardky.bsky.social•51 days ago

"Phantom Time Conspiracy, or just ignorant? Next, on 60 Minutes!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory

timoconnorbl.bsky.social•51 days ago

I’m sorry, *what?*

I’m tagging in @voxhib.bsky.social here because I’m damned if I’m suffering hearing this alone.

johnorthside.bsky.social•51 days ago

May be conflating the standardising of language via a national curriculum with assumptions about what exactly was standardised

timoconnorbl.bsky.social•51 days ago

As noted: the Proclamation is *wildly* more religious in tone than the Constitution of the IFS.

I mean, if WT Cosgrave had access to a time machine, I somehow doubt his priority in using it would have been to go back and badger Pearse into sticking in religious language.

https://bsky.app/profile/timoconnorbl.bsky.social/post/3lf7w4rr22c2v

fhayesmccoy.bsky.social•51 days ago

An insular awareness of Irish history from the Rising to the establishment of the State doesn't help. The religious imagery, language/ metaphor used to present/shape/promote Irish nationalism was popular in national cultural discourse elsewhere in Europe at the time, including Britain.

timoconnorbl.bsky.social•51 days ago

Or, indeed, the 1916 Proclamation.

elliottucker.bsky.social•51 days ago

TIL about enthusiastic! Thanks!

punchedmonet.bsky.social•50 days ago

Sorry to the poster who I’m sure is sound and it’s a more than valid thing to not personally like but I’m so SICK of this conversation (possibly a little triggered by the seónín use of this point which has been the majority of my encounters with it lmao)