carr fholcadh?! agus peann luaidhe

mhwombat · **Joined:** Mon 29 Aug 2011 3:36 am **Posts:** 247

I stopped at the service station today and noticed they had a sign saying "car wash/carr fholcadh". Is that wrong in several ways, or has my brain stopped working? I would interpret "carr fholcadh" as a car you take a bath in!

I was also intrigued by the phrase gan luaidhe because like English, Irish uses the same word for the element lead and the "lead" (actually graphite) that's in a pencil. I'd used luaidhe in both contexts, but I'd never thought about that before. That got me wondering whether the mistake was inherited from English, or whether both English and Irish inherited it from another source. So the I wondered how old pencils are, and how the lead/graphite mix-up occurred. I still don't know the answer to the etymology question, but here's some interesting info.

Wikipedia wrote:

Some time before 1565 (some sources say as early as 1500), an enormous deposit of graphite was discovered on the approach to Grey Knotts from the hamlet of Seathwaite in Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England.[4][5][6][7] The locals found that it was very useful for marking sheep. This particular deposit of graphite was extremely pure and solid, and it could easily be sawn into sticks. This remains the only large scale deposit of graphite ever found in this solid form.[8] Chemistry was in its infancy and the substance was thought to be a form of lead. Consequently, it was called plumbago (Latin for "lead ore").[9][10] The black core of pencils is still referred to as lead, even though it never contained the element lead. The words for pencil in German (Bleistift), Irish (Peann Luaidhe), Arabic (قلم رصاص qalam raṣāṣ), and other languages literally mean lead pen.

I found that interesting because I would have assumed that the stuff in pencils was called "lead" by someone who didn't know how they were manufactured. It never ocurred to me that the people making the first pencils thought they were actually using lead. One would think they would notice that this "lead" was surprisingly light.

mhwombat · **Joined:** Mon 29 Aug 2011 3:36 am **Posts:** 247

Oh wow. I just googled "carr fholcadh", and discovered that the exact same question was asked on "that other forum" in 2004. By me.

mhwombat · **Joined:** Mon 29 Aug 2011 3:36 am **Posts:** 247

On another forum, Breandán wrote:

I also think that carrfholcadh was intended. Isn't it interesting how "a little bit of nothing" can make a huge difference?!

On a similar note, I have been reading an old edition of Pádraic Ó Conaire's Scothscéalta lately and it has taken a while to get my head around the fact that he leaves the relative particle a out completely. That is, if he was to write carr a fholcadh, it would appear in his book as carr fholcadh, presumably because he wrote pretty much as he spoke the language (and the a is practically silent in natural speech.)

It's not what happened in the sign Wombat saw, I think, but the result is similar until you get used to it. :?

Saoirse · **Posted:** Thu 18 Apr 2013 10:31 pm

mhwombat wrote:

Oh wow. I just googled "carr fholcadh", and discovered that the exact same question was asked on "that other forum" in 2004. By me.

Can wombats suffer from amnesia?

Lughaidh · **Joined:** Thu 15 Sep 2011 12:06 pm **Posts:** 2436

To me carr fholcadh is English translated word for word (in the English word order).

Car wash is folcadh carr(annaí) or ní carr(annaí) in Irish.
Just as "peann luaidhe". It's not "luaidhepheann" :mrgreen:

I'm a bit worried by that sh*tload of so-called "new words" that are composed in the opposite way from the way Modern Irish works. Some people use and even create loads of them, and most learners, since they also think in English, don't see the problem.

I wonder what will come next... putting adjectives before nouns (maith leabhar, mór teach...?)

Saoirse · **Posted:** Fri 19 Apr 2013 8:41 am

Lughaidh wrote:

I'm a bit worried by that sh*tload of so-called "new words" that are composed in the opposite way from the way Modern Irish works. Some people use and even create loads of them, and most learners, since they also think in English, don't see the problem.
I wonder what will come next... putting adjectives before nouns (maith leabhar, mór teach...?)

Aontaím le sin! :cry:

franc 91 · **Posted:** Fri 19 Apr 2013 10:45 am

I seem to remember that Bríd Mhór, or was it one of her family, made a similar remark about English words being bodily (brutally) transposed into Irish in this way. There are exceptions of course, such as seanbhean and seanduine srl. which I wouldn't have thought were the result of the influence of English. Sometimes Irish has words like guthán/fón póca for a mobile phone which isn't the direct transposition of the English and I see that fón siúil should really mean a cordless phone, but 'cordless' doesn't mean anything now anyway.

Breandán · **Posted:** Fri 19 Apr 2013 10:59 am

mhwombat wrote:

One would think they would notice that this "lead" was surprisingly light.

Is it any more wonder than for us to find out later that both graphite and diamond are made of the very same atoms? Hindsight is 20/20. :winkgrin:

Lughaidh · **Joined:** Thu 15 Sep 2011 12:06 pm **Posts:** 2436

Quote:

I seem to remember that Bríd Mhór, or was it one of her family, made a similar remark about English words being bodily (brutally) transposed into Irish in this way. There are exceptions of course, such as seanbhean and seanduine srl. which I wouldn't have thought were the result of the influence of English.

no, there are a handful of adjectives in Irish that are always prefixed (or almost), they are exceptions, and btw they are almost the same ones in all the Celtic languages:

Irish sean, Gaelic sean(n), Manx shen, Welsh, Breton and Cornish hen
Irish droch, Gaelic droch, Manx drogh, Welsh drwg, Breton droug/k, Cornish drok
Irish fíor, Gaelic fìor, Manx feer, Welsh gwir, Breton gwir, Cornish gwyr
ie. it's not something new!

Rossaí · **Joined:** Sat 01 Oct 2011 12:03 am **Posts:** 231

There are many compound words in Irish that have been formed in this fashion. It's not breaking the rules at all although I can see why one could imagine so.

príomhsráid/ reophointe/ scamallsparán/ galfchúrsa srl srl carrfholcadh is accepted also. Ó Ríordáin does it a lot in fact in a lot of his poetry

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