DÚIRT MÉ LEAT.

May 26, 2004 by 10 Comments

An exceedingly strange BBC News story: Spike Milligan wanted his gravestone to read “I told you I was ill,” there was a long struggle with the Chichester Diocese, and they finally approved it… but only if it was written in Gaelic (Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite)! Can anyone explain this? (Thanks to Jeremy of READIN for the link.)

Comments

  1. nomis says
    May 26, 2004 at 11:46 pm

    An earlier story implies that the debate was within the family:
    “Mr Milligan famously quipped that he wanted his gravestone to say: ‘I told you I was ill.’
    But his widow Shelagh told the BBC on Tuesday that the line was only a joke and it was not an epitaph he would have wanted.
    She said she and other relatives were still to decide what the stone should say.”

  2. nomis says
    May 26, 2004 at 11:49 pm

    Sorry, here’s the earlier story.

  3. The Shamrockshire Eagle, editor and sole proprietor of says
    May 27, 2004 at 10:56 am

    “Duirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite”, is how it should read.
    The diacritic isn’t optional in Irish any more than in French,
    you know! (Please don’t tell me that the other was what they
    actually put on the gravestone…)

  4. James Noonan says
    May 27, 2004 at 10:56 am

    He said this in many interview I believe, and I it was the title of a tribute concert.
    He was, by admission, prone to strong mood swings so if there were such a thing as an afterlife he’d be alternately delighted and annoyed for eternity. The comic would love it, the melancholy poet detest it.

  5. MacDara says
    May 27, 2004 at 4:54 pm

    I was going to say that the fadas were missing but the Shamrockshire Eagle person beat me to it.
    ‘Breoite’ is a newish one for me though; at school we used to say ‘tinn’. Of course, I could never really speak “as Gaeilge”: my French is better than my Irish, and my French is pretty bad.

  6. language hat says
    May 27, 2004 at 7:04 pm

    Thanks for the fadas — I knew they should be in there but was too lazy to look them up. Now I’ve fixed the quote, so the entry will no longer insult Irish eyes!

  7. Aidan Kehoe says
    May 30, 2004 at 8:12 am

    Irish isn’t French, though, so upper case letters _do_ get accents 🙂 . But, eh, this is getting silly.

  8. language hat says
    May 30, 2004 at 9:19 am

    Fixed! Accents are not considered silly here at LH.

  9. Gearóid Ó Laoi says
    January 20, 2005 at 2:18 am

    it should be
    Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite.
    Duirt is meaningless.
    go raibh mé tinn would mean the same thing.
    In Munster Irish it would normally be said..
    Dúrt leat go rabhas tinn.
    It would be more usual in Irish, and probably English to say you (plural) or ye as we say in Cork.
    Then it would be
    Dúirt mé libh go raibh mé breoite…or
    Dúrt libh go rabhas tinn.

  10. language hat says
    January 20, 2005 at 7:56 am

    Fixed — go raibh maith agat!

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