Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire and Dónall Ó Braonáin write for Raidió Teilifís Éireann about Irish names for food:
Languages are a window into different cosmologies, a way of looking at the world differently. This especially applies to Irish food history and much can be learnt from the Irish language about our ancestors’ cattle-based economy and transhumance traditions, influenced by Ireland’s temperate climate, where regular rain meant grass grew nearly all year round. Consider the etymological richness of ‘Bóthar’, the Irish word for road (from ‘bó’—cow), defined in width by the length and breadth of a cow, a signifier of the long affair of our bovine past; extending also to our ‘buachaillí’ (boys) and ‘cailíní’ (girls), meaning, respectively, cowboy or herd boy and little herder, the suffix ‘ín’ denoting the diminutive. […]
In his iconic book Cladaí Chonamara, Seamus Mac an Iomaire gave Irish names and descriptions for 43 different types of seaweed from his native west Galway. Extending this descriptive profusion, rabharta means a spring tide (which provides an abundance of cast-up seaweed), and the word garbhshíon or scairbhín na gCuach (rough weather of the Cuckoos) refers to a particular time between late April and early May when rough or harsh weather throws up seaweed on the coastline, which is also gathered for fertilising potato beds. […]
The triad ‘Turscar, Prátaí, Páistí’ (cast-up seaweed, potatoes, children) reinforces the historical interconnectedness between the weather, cast-up seaweed / wrack, potatoes, and population growth in coastal parts on this island. The adoption of the potato as a staple food directly influenced the dramatic population growth in Ireland from one million in 1590 (roughly coinciding with the introduction of the potato) to 8.4 million in the 1840s. […]
A pernicious fallacy that continues to be peddled is that Ireland does not have a rich food tradition, or varied food culture, often based on historiography that has neglected to engage with any sources in the Irish language. For example, the Harvard historian Hasia Diner stated in Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration that ‘Irish writers of memoir, poems, stories, political tracts, or songs rarely included the details of food in describing daily life’ unlike those of other peoples.
But it is clear that Diner did not consult with any source in the Irish language nor indeed with many English language sources. The correspondences of Daniel O’Connell, the letters of Jonathan Swift, the diary of Humphrey O’Sullivan and the travel narratives of John Gamble are all rich in food and beverage related discussion.
The American food historian Ken Albala points out that the first thing a cultural historian should do is learn the language of the culture being studied. In The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Vincent Morley notes how the failure of so many historians to use Irish language sources had a remarkable effect on our official history. In a review of Morley’s book, Declan Kiberd noted that ‘it would be hard to imagine French people paying much heed to a history of their country, written by someone with no working knowledge of its language; but they do (or did) things differently in Ireland’. […]
Manchán Magan’s Thirty-two Words for Field inspired the title of our forthcoming chapter ‘Seventy-Two Words for Potato: Irish Language sources for Food History’ in Irish Food History: A Companion. In the coming days, as you travel about, pay attention to the Irish place names you pass. Remember the etymology of the words ‘bóthar’, ‘buachaill’ and ‘cailín’.
Amazingly, two of those etymologies are correct: bóthar and buachaill are in fact from the word for ‘cow’ (cailín, alas, does not seem to mean ‘little herder’). And if you’re wondering, as I was, about páiste ‘child,’ Wiktionary sez:
From Early Modern Irish páitse (compare Manx paitçhey, Scottish Gaelic pàisde), from Old French page, from Late Latin pagius (“servant”) (possibly via Italian paggio), probably from Ancient Greek παιδίον (paidíon, “boy, lad”), from παῖς (paîs, “child”); some sources consider this unlikely and suggest instead Latin pagus (“countryside”), in sense of “boy from the rural regions”.
Also, quite unexpectedly, rabharta ‘spring tide’ was familiar to me because I own a copy of Sorley MacLean’s Spring Tide and Neap Tide: Selected Poems, 1932-72/Reothairt is contraigh: Taghadh de dhàin, 1932-72. Thanks, Trevor!
“Complaints about the monotony of our cuisine are much exaggerated. Why, in former times we ate 43 different sorts of seaweed with our potatoes.” As it happens, I recently have been seeing social-media statements from an Irish-American lady of my acquaintance complaining that corned-beef as a St. Patrick’s Day staple is a purely diasporic innovation, because back on the Auld Sod it’s just bacon bacon and bacon (all very good bacon on offer for the tourists these days, of course).
FWIW, wikipedia asserts that Ireland was historically a major center of corned beef production but mostly for the export market, such that “Before the wave of 19th century Irish immigration to the United States, many of the ethnic Irish did not consume corned beef dishes. The popularity of corned beef compared to back bacon among the immigrant Irish may have been due to corned beef being considered a luxury product in their native land, while it was cheap and readily available in the United States.”
I think I see the argument – the caile which takes a diminutive suffix to form cailín (it’s caileag in Scottish Gaelic, same idea different ending) is the same as the caill in buachaill, so the words must be related in meaning.
The problem is that it’s not true – buachaill seems to have come in one piece from Greek (βουκόλος/boukólos), while caile is related to a Greek word παλλακή/pallakḗ.
(It had not occurred to me that buachaill was a close relative of bucolic.)
Gaelic caileag ‘girl’ and cailleach ‘old woman’ are oddly unrelated – cailleach apparently comes from caille ‘veil’, related to Latin pallium
The Poor Mouth has lots of pigs, but somehow scarcely anyone eats pork; only potatoes.
Isn’t it rather just the cognate?
I took it as a borrowing from Latin borrowed from Greek (as the OED gives for English bucolic), but you’ll know better than me. It doesn’t seem to split within Gaelic the way that cowherd can be split in English, though, as if it has come from somewhere as a complete word.
Rich and fecund material. I had suspected byre was connected with bó and that whole PIE-based complex involving bucolics and cows (not bull, which is from PIE *bʰel-). Prompted by the post to check, I found that byre is in fact cognate with bower, bothy, booth, boer, and a host of other lexemes – from PIE *bʰuH- and therefore in fact connected with everything else of noetic interest.
On the matter of seaweed, I knew that it was excellent for preparing soil for potatoes and had a role in the Great Hunger of 1845–1852. But I still can’t tell just how and how much seaweed itself was part of the Irish diet before, during, immediately after, and long after (as an element of haute cuisine, or oat cuisine) the famine.
As for Ulysses, which anything Irish impels me to recall or consult afresh, seaweed first appears in “Proteus”, as seawrack: “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.” And later in the episode, and later in the novel. But I find no connection with potatoes, which themselves turn up 26 times. Some of those times, in sequence:
First, as a shrivelled talisman (accompanied by his famous lemon-scented soap) that Bloom is concerned not to lose from his pockets: “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have.” And later (a little after hearing the shouted order “Roast and mashed here”):
Second, as an element in the poorest Irish diet contrasted with the well-to-do priest’s fare:
Undermines the constitution, indeed.
Third, the familiar hot-potato meme but in the context of informers and political intrigue:
Fourth, in a direct reference to the Famine:
Fifth, “In liver gravy Bloom mashed mashed potatoes.”
Sixth, itemised in an inventory of Irish bounty:
Seventh, several adventures and epiphanies in “Circe”:
The talisman potato’s origin story:
Testimony in the court proceedings against Bloom:
A temporary loss of the valued potato, to Zoe the whore (who at first confuses it with more anatomical or pathological items):
An account of the potato as a benign import from the New World, contrasted with malign tobacco (mentioned earlier as likely to stunt growth in a Dublin street urchin – but Bloom puffs on a cigar in “Cyclops”):
Skipping a briefer mention (“cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers, egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors”), a salvific invocation:
The talisman returned:
Sundry further mentions:
Eighth and finally, later brief mentions. In “Eumaeus”:
And in “Ithaca”, from Molly:
See also Bloom’s potato, which will reward reading. (I don’t know why this author says that Bloom does not eat the potatoes that he “mashed mashed”. It had it all seemed to be mixed together, so the mere fact that other items on the plate are mentioned as consumed does not warrant exclusion of the potato element.)
Combining a couple of current threads, when it comes to seaweed the mot juste [in The Guardian] is female-led seaweed company
@Jen in Edinburgh: You write about “caille” ‘veil’, related to Latin “pallium”. Actually, it would be fairer to speak of “caille” as a borrowing from Latin “pallium”: the latter word seems derived from the Indo-European root *pel-, “to cover”, and if so its Celtic (and therefore Gaelic) cognate should have no initial consonant at all (Indo-European *p was lost in Celtic, almost without a trace).
The earliest stratum of Latin loanwords in prehistoric Old Irish, however, shows a substitution of /k/ for Latin /p/ (As a consequence of the loss of Indo-European *p in Celtic, Early Old Irish still lacked a /p/ phoneme): cf. “cásc” as the word for Easter, from a prehistoric pre-Old Irish*/kaska/ borrowed from a Latin (?Romance?) form /paska/. “Caille” shows the same /k/ = /p/ correspondence, and thus I am sure it must be a loan from (roughly) the same time period.
(Even if the above etymology of “pallium” proves to be wrong, I do not believe it is possible for a Latin /p/ to correspond to Old Irish/Modern Gaelic /k/ EXCEPT as a consequence of a (relatively early) borrowing from Latin to prehistoric Old Irish. Could any Hatter better acquainted than I with matters relating to the diachronic phonology of Latin and Celtic confirm this?)
@Etienne, Jen
https://dil.ie/6598
It surprised me that Middle Irish bratt is also from Latin brattea (for bractea). But could the Latin word be a Gallicism (with intrusive c?)? If not, this is another illustration of the physical robustness of the pagan Irish, who needed no covering other than body paint and the odd tattoo, despite a harsh climate.
Previous discussion of seaweed harvesting (and burning).
See also Bloom’s potato, which will reward reading.
Thanks for that; it was indeed worth my while. I agree with you that there is no reason to think what was mashed was not thereafter consumed.
I realized I didn’t know what “teem” meant in “wouldnt even teem the potatoes for you,” so I looked it up; OED: “Chiefly Irish English. To drain the water off (boiled potatoes, etc.).” Of course the Joyce quote is one of the citations.
So when it’s teeming with rain, is the sky also having its water drained off it? I like this idea.
(Actually, the OED does list rain together with that meaning, where I would have taken it as the ‘teeming with folk’ one – ‘ To be vibrantly full, throng, swarm with’)
I have now been told off for saying that one word was a borrowing when it’s only a cognate, and for saying that another was cognate when it was actually a borrowing. I just won’t say anything 🙂
I’m fairly sure my mother told me cailín came from “little cloak”. I suppose this was a folk etymology; while caille means “veil” in modern Irish, the sense in cailleach “nun; crone; witch” might be “[black] cloak”. I think caile and caille would sound different in other dialects but are homophones in Munster.
As I may have mentioned before, when I was but a callow lad and assigned to read _Ulysses_ in English 129 (40 springs ago this year), we were given as the prompt for our essay the instruction to pick some word used some reasonable number of times in the book (not too many not too few) and then use the concordance* the university library had copies of to locate all of its occurrences in the text, and … talk coherently about those occurrences and try to say something interesting about what they showed about what Joyce was doing with the word. I’m not sure what word I used (I have a vague memory of “candle” but that’s not guaranteed to be even 51% likely to be accurate), but I doubt any of my classmates tried “potato.” Although maybe they should have!
*Not remembering the name but googling right now, Hanley’s 1951 _Word Index to James Joyce’s Ulysses_ may have been it, unless there was enough market demand for a rival concordance to have been published by ’84.
Parts of Gaulish turned *kʷ into p, so theoretically a loan from Gaulish into Latin would work, too, but whether that’s at all plausible is well beyond my knowledge. The a makes it look native in Latin; Latin has a lot of a that are somewhat tricky to explain.
Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes
it seems relevant to the cows (bucholic or bothy-bound) the way that poverty is indicated by ersatz dairy here. it brought this to mind (from the clancy brothers):
ahem! ahem! me mother has gone to church
she says i cannot play with you because you’re in the dirt
it isn’t because you’re dirty, it isn’t because you’re clean
it’s because you’ve got the whooping cough and eat margarine
caile is related to a Greek word παλλακή/pallakḗ
One fact about caile that should be explained by an any etymology is its original treatment as grammatically masculine, both in Classical Irish (Early Modern Irish) and modern times—see Dinneen (1927) here and Ó Dónaill (1977) here, for example. (Similarly, Old Irish bé ‘woman’ was originally neuter, and only later feminine.) The entry for caile in the eDIL has some citations relevant to the grammatical gender of the word. The sources of the first two citations in the eDIL are Oswald Bergin’s edition of Irish grammatical tracts here (where caile occurs in a list of masculine nouns with a note about this anomaly) and from the poetic works of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair here (stanza 32, where the lenition of c after the definite article in the genitive an chaile is regular for masculine nouns, not feminine). An etymology of caile should provide an account for this grammatical behavior of the noun.
Here is a relatively recent treatment of caile in Patrizia de Bernardo Stempel (1995) ‘Zum Genus Femininum als ableitbarer Kategorie im Keltischen’ (in W. Smoczyński (ed.), Kuryłowicz Memorial Volume. Part One), with its footnotes (note the summary by J. Vendryes, Lexique étymologique de l’irlandais ancien, that I have boldfaced):
Attractive as the semantics and general morphology of this account may be, there are phonological objections—see, for example, Nicholas Zair (2012) The Reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals in Celtic, page 91:
Here is the relevant portion of Kim McCone, Towards a Relative Chronology of Ancient and Medieval Celtic Sound Change (1996) that was referenced:
(Apologies for OCR and automatic html tagging errors.)
The mysterious group of Latin paelex, Greek παλλακή, Biblical Hebrew פִּילֶגֶשׁ pîlegeš, etc., seems to be separate from caile.
Wow, you’ve outdone yourself! Thanks as always for your dogged research and willingness to share your results.