Etymology of the word caighdeán?

tiomluasocein · **Joined:** Thu 01 Sep 2011 11:36 pm **Posts:** 687

Labhrás wrote:

Gortaleen wrote:

djwebb2021 wrote:

I'm afraid, a Ghuirt a' Lín, that use of spellings like gh in Seanachló are just wrong. Seanachló used the dot for lenition: ġ. Irish people are typically contemptuous of their own heritage, for some reason.

Caiġdeán

The use of the punctum delens to indicate lenition is a shorthand. In the pre-digital media era it saved ink and it saved effort to use the dot instead of an "h" to indicate lenition. In the current case, it would take considerable effort to change all the lenited letters in the excerpt from using the "h" to using the punctum delens.

It's like saying Czech š is a shorthand for sh. No, it isn't.

Not quite.

tiomluasocein · **Joined:** Thu 01 Sep 2011 11:36 pm **Posts:** 687

Gortaleen wrote:

Walericator wrote:

Thanks for sharing this interesting article.

There's more to the story of caighdeán.

Fr Clune notes in the foreword to his book Réilthíní Óir that most of the terminology in the book came from the islands off of County Kerry.

Tomás Ó Criomhthain relates in An t-Oileánach of Fr Clune spending nearly two months of eight hour days with Tomás gathering information for Réilthíní Óir. Tomás notes that this was the most grueling time of his life...

I haven't seen the latest version of Tomás' book now called An tOileánach but it's reported that it now includes Tomás' gripe about not being mentioned in Réilthíní Óir.

It's true that Fr Clune thanked others for helping with his book in its foreword but he only makes an oblique reference to the isles off of Kerry and he doesn't mention Tomás at all.

That's too bad, really. I wonder why. Jealousy?

I have searched everywhere for any indication of the etymology of this word according to what has been posted here and it's a mystery to me. There must be someone who knows more about the origins of the word. Labhrás's idea:

[I don't know but if it is a measured (and obviously highly standardized) distance I'd suppose it could be related to the number fifty (in whatsoever measurement) - Old Irish óic, Modern Irish aog changed to a weak aigh, -d- because caoga is an nt-stem (caogad), án as a suffix.]

is interesting but without more information or study, it's hard to say.

djwebb2021 · **Joined:** Thu 27 May 2021 3:22 am **Posts:** 1725

I think Labhrás' suggestion of a connection between caighdeán and cúig/caogaid likely to be true, especially given that it was once used for a length of fishing net.

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