Quote:
Gaedhilge na Mumhan? What's that?
It means "the Irish of Munster", or the Munster dialect of Irish, spoken in the southwest. Actually, there are a range of local dialects there, but they fit largely into a pattern known as the Munster dialect.
Gaedhilge is a variant (older) spelling of
Gaeilge.
Just to belabor the point (because I have time on my hands), here's some historical info which I've posted before about the history behind the English names for the provinces:
The English versions of the names of three of Ireland's four provinces were created by Viking (Norse) settlers in Ireland, in their own Norse version of Irish. They left Connacht alone, as even Cromwell did, but for the other three provinces they took the Irish forms and put them into their own their own Germanic grammatical format. In Irish, the historical names for the provinces are as follows:
Ulster =
Ulaidh [
Cúige Uladh = Province of Ulaidh”]
Leinster =
Laighin [
Cúige Laighean = “Province of Laighin”]
Munster =
Mumhain [
Cúige Mumhan = “Province of Muster”]
Connacht =
Connachta [
Cúige Chonnacht = “Province of Connacht”]
The Norsemen eventually became assimilated into the surrounding Irish population and became Irish speakers (or Gaelic speakers in Scotland), and a number of Norse words entered the Irish language, such as
bád for “boat”,
seolta for “sail”, and
fuinnneog for “window” (= “wind eye”). At an intermediate stage, though, the Norsemen sometimes applied Norse grammar to Irish names and words.
Norse was a Germanic language (as is English), and adjectives or descriptors normally preceded the noun/subject, whereas in Irish they normally come after the noun/subject. That is why we have in English “the red book”, whereas the Irish is
an leabhar dearg (literally, “the book red”). They also had a different way of creating the “Genitive case” of a noun, used to show possession. In English we say “Peter’s book”, using the added “s” to show possession or attribution (the genitive case), whereas in Irish one takes the words
Peadar (Peter) and
leabhar (book) to create
leabhar Peadair, meaning “book of Peter”, where the added “i” placed inside
Peada[i]r shows the genitive nature of the word (the “of” part of “of Peter”), and there is often an accompanying pronunciation difference.
What the Norsemen did with the Irish names of the provinces shows the same Germanic approach. Instead of using the word
cúige, they shifter to the Irish word
tír, which means “land” or “country”. Then they reversed the order of the words and used the Norse/Germanic “s” to show the genitive case, resulting in the following:
Ulaidh + s +
tír = Ulster = "Ulaidh's land" [or “land of Ulaidh”]
Mumhain + s +
tír = Munster = "Mumhain's land" [or “land of Mumhain”]
Laighin + s +
tír = Leinster = "Laighin's land" [or “land of Laighin”]
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