Quote:
Greetings everyone! I want to translate these uh, concepts if you will, into Scottish Gaelic for myself and two friends. They are the following:
Eagle Heroine
Wolf Warrior
Wolf Woman (either a female werewolf, a woman whose temper resembles a wolf or something like that)
Sword-sharp Quill (meaning that words are more hurtful than a sword, can bite like a sword, you get the idea)
Hope you can help us out, and thanks! G'night!
Like Irish, Gaelic doesn't have a separate form to distinguish hero and heroine, but you can use
bean-ghaisgeil ("heroic woman") for heroine. For the whole expression, I'm assuming that you don't mean a heroic female eagle, so you could use the following:
Bean-ghaisgeil nan IolaireanHeroic Woman of the Eagles
Using a similar approach, the next one could be any of these, using two different words for warrior (
laoch is more towards "hero", but can also mean "warrior") and two different words for wolf. In the last two versions below, the word for "wolf" (
faol) is a bit archaic (in Gaelic), but it has the virtue of being shorter, in case that matters:
Gaisgeach nam Madaihean-allaidhLaoch nam Madaihean-allaidhGaisgeach nam FaolanLaoch nam FaolanWarrior of the Wolves
There's no Gaelic folk tradition of werewolves, so far as I'm aware, although the main Irish dictionary, FGB, does have
conríocht for werewolf. I couldn't find it in any of my Gaelic dictionaries, though. Your third expression could, however, be done with a combination of the preceding expressions:
Bean-ghaisgeil nam Madaihean-allaidhBean-ghaisgeil nam FaolanHeroic/Warrior Woman of the Wolves
Your last expression is more problematic. Adjectival forms like "sword sharp" are very Germanic. I think there's even a particular name for them, as used in old writings like Beowulf or the Icelandic Eddas, but I've forgotten it. It also exists in other literary traditions, like "sailing the wine-dark sea" in the Illiad or the Odyssey (I forget which). In any case, I'm not sure one can reproduce that type of structure in Gaelic (or Irish), except as something like:
clèite cho geur ri claidheamha quill as sharp as a sword
If you can live without the "sword" part, you could have something shorter like this:
clèite ro-gheur"extremely sharp quill" or "too-sharp quill"