Scottish Gaelic for Practitioners

This site uses Scottish Gaelic, Gàidhlig (GAA-lick). Not Irish. The two are close relatives and they are not the same language, and the difference matters more than almost anyone writing about Celtic spirituality admits. Until now the vocabulary has been scattered across the site: a word glossed here, a plant name there, a charm term in a footnote. This pulls it together, with a pronunciation for everything.

I am not a fluent speaker. I am someone working at it, using the language because the material is in it and does not survive translation intact. If you are further on than me, corrections are welcome and wanted, and there is at least one on this page already that I had to make.

Scottish, not Irish

This needs saying up front because the conflation is everywhere (and it's very annoying). Scottish Gaelic and Irish descend from a common Old Irish ancestor and diverged over roughly a thousand years. They share a great deal of vocabulary and a great deal of lore. They are not interchangeable, and using Irish forms for Scottish material is the linguistic equivalent of illustrating an article about Edinburgh with a photograph of Dublin.

The forms this site uses, and the Irish equivalents to avoid:

Note also that Scottish Gaelic does not generally use the dh in sídhe. If you see sídhe, Bealtaine or Lá Fhéile, you are reading Irish.

And one important exception. The Ogham letter names used across this site, Beithe, Luis, Fearn, Sail, Nion, Duir, Coll and the rest, are Old Irish, not Scottish Gaelic. Ogham is an Irish alphabet, its manuscript tradition is Irish, and the Bríatharogam kennings are in Old Irish. Where the Ogham letter name and the modern Scottish Gaelic tree name happen to look similar, that is descent, not identity. The Ogham article labels these explicitly and so should you.

Pronunciation, the bare minimum

Enough to say things without embarrassment. Gaelic orthography is genuinely regular once you learn it, which surprises people.

• Stress is on the first syllable. Almost always. This alone fixes most mispronunciation.
• mh and bh are usually a v sound, sometimes silent or nasalised.
• dh and gh are a soft throaty sound at the back, or silent. Never English d or g.
• th is an h sound, or silent. Tigh (tie), a house.
• s before e or i is sh.
• ch is the sound in loch. Never a k, never a ch as in church.
• t and d before e or i are closer to ch and j. This is why teine is CHEH-nuh and deiseil is JESH-al.
• b, d, g in the middle of a word are unvoiced, closer to English p, t, k. Ubag is OO-pak.
• Broad and slender. Vowels come in two families: a, o, u are broad and e, i are slender. A consonant surrounded by slender vowels is pronounced differently to the same consonant surrounded by broad ones. This is the rule that makes the whole spelling system make sense, and the reason for all those apparently silent vowels: they are not silent, they are telling you how to say the consonant beside them.
• Accents matter. The grave accent lengthens the vowel. Bàs (baas) is death. Bas (bass) is a palm.
• Go and listen. LearnGaelic has audio for everything and a spoken dictionary. Tobar an Dualchais has thousands of recordings of native speakers, many of them saying exactly the things this site writes about. Ten minutes of listening beats an hour of reading a pronunciation guide, including this one.

The vocabulary

Practice and practitioner

Beings

The year

Land and water

Plants

Scottish Gaelic names. The Ogham column in the Plants database is Old Irish and is a separate system.

The words that carry an argument

Five terms where the Gaelic makes a distinction English cannot, and the distinction is the point.

• an dà shealladh (un DAH HYAL-ugh). Two sights, not second sight. The ordinary and the other, held at once by the same eyes. Not an extra faculty; a doubling.
• deiseil (JESH-al) and tuathal (TOO-uh-hul). English gives you clockwise and anticlockwise, which are neutral. Gaelic gives you with the sun and against it, a cosmological claim built into a direction. Everything on this site about the direction of a fold, a stir, a circuit or a smoking runs on this pair.
• sìth (shee). The same word means a fairy mound and peace. Whether that is coincidence or ancient association is debated, and either way it is doing something to how the Good Neighbours were thought about.
• cailleach (KAL-yuch). Old woman, hag, nun, carlin, a woman without children, and in Carmichael's glossary also a period of time. English has no single word holding all of that, and the fact that Gaelic does is most of what you need to know about the figure.
• eòlas (YAW-luss). The word for a healing charm is the word for knowledge. Not a spell, not a formula. Knowing.

Practical advice

• Learn to say a handful of things properly rather than reading many badly. Six words you can say without flinching will serve you better than a glossary you mispronounce.
• Do not use Gaelic you cannot read. A charm recited phonetically off a page you do not understand is not more authentic than the same intention in Scots or English. Your intention lives in the language you think in.
• Use Scottish forms for Scottish material. Bealltainn not Bealtaine. Samhainn not Samhain. Label Old Irish material as Old Irish.
• Check the accents. They change the word.
• Use a real dictionary. Am Faclair Beag is free, excellent and includes Dwelly, the historic dictionary, where the folk vocabulary lives.

A note on my own limits

The pronunciations above are rough approximations written for English readers. They are not IPA and they are not authoritative.

Dialect varies significantly across the Gàidhealtachd. A Lewis speaker and an Islay speaker will not sound the same, and neither would recognise everything above as quite right. Some of these words, particularly the plant names, I have only ever seen written.

Before you publish any of this on your own site, check it against LearnGaelic's spoken dictionary. It is free, it takes seconds per word, and it will save you from repeating my mistakes.

Treat this page as a door rather than an authority. The authority is the speakers, and a great many of them are recorded on Tobar an Dualchais saying these words for nothing.

Sources

• Am Faclair Beag — free Scottish Gaelic dictionary, incorporating Dwelly's Illustrated Gaelic-English Dictionary, the essential resource for folk vocabulary.
• LearnGaelic — free courses and a spoken dictionary with audio for every entry. Verify pronunciations here.
• SpeakGaelic — BBC Alba and partners, structured beginner course.
• Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches — thousands of field recordings of native speakers, free and searchable.
• Sabhal Mòr Ostaig — the Gaelic college on Skye.
• Dwelly, E. (1911). The Illustrated Gaelic-English Dictionary. Via Internet Archive and within Am Faclair Beag.
• Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text, with Gaelic and English in parallel. The glossary in volume II is the single best source for the vocabulary used on this site.
• Black, R. (ed.) (2005). The Gaelic Otherworld. Birlinn. Extensively annotated, with the Gaelic explained.
• Bean-nighe — for the corrected form and the diminutives.
• McManus, D. (1991). A Guide to Ogam. An Sagart. For why the Ogham letter names are Old Irish and not Scottish Gaelic.
• Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba — Gaelic place-names of Scotland, and an excellent way to read the landscape.

Related: [Naming and Speaking]; [The Silences]; [The Cailleach]; [The Good Neighbours]; [Ogham]