I am looking for help with the Scottish Gaelic translation for "God bless the broken road". It was the wedding song for my wife and I and we both feel a very special connection to it. I am interested in getting the phrase as a tattoo. There is a significant amount of Scottish and Scotch-Irish ancestry on my father's side (his mother's maiden name was Wallace) and would like to honor that heritage by getting it in traditional Scottish Gaelic.

Also, "God bless the broken road" is actually a line from the song, but the song is technically titled "Bless the broken road". If you could offer the translation for both phrases (I would assume it would just be inserting the SG word for God in front?) I would appreciate it.

Any help would be appreciated. Please note that it is "bless" (present tense) and not "blessed" (past tense). Thank you very much in advance for any help you can provide!

Also, does anyone have a recommendation for a good font to use for Scottish Gaelic?

Irish and Scottish Gaelic, which are closely related, are both very noun-oriented ("the blessing ..."), as opposed to being verb-oriented ("bless ..."), so the normal structure would be different. Here is the usual Gaelic way of wishing a blessing on something or someone:

Beannachadh Dhè air an rathad briste
The blessing of God on the broken road



It would not really be customary to bless something without a subject (the one doing the blessing). You can say Mo bheannachadh air ... ("My blessing on ...") or Beannachadh Dhè air ... ("The blessing of God on ..."), but it isn't usual to say just "A blessing on ..." without a subject.

As to the placement of the word "God", Irish and Gaelic grammar and sentence structure are very different from that of English, so you can't just take words out of the dictionary and use them in English word order, especially since they can change form, depending on how they are used. The nominative form (when it is the subject) of the word "God" in Gaelic is Dia, but the genitive form needed to be used above (Dhè = "of God").



Scottish Gaelic has generally been written with the same fonts as English, at least since the Reformation (unlike Irish, which was written in older fonts until the mid-20th century). Actually, prior to the Reformation there really was no written form of Scottish Gaelic, since Gaelic speakers wrote in Irish back then, or more likely in Latin, since that's what most scholars used (most non-scholars were illiterate).

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Thank you so much. Would you be able to be so kind as to provide a phonetic pronunciation of the Scottish phrase?

Here's a rough approximation, understanding that I'm not a fluent (much less a native) speaker, and that the pronunciation can vary from place to place for some words:

Beannachadh Dhè air an rathad briste
"BANN-ukh-ugh yay err un RAH-ud BRISH-tuh"

-- “kh” is a guttural sound like the “ch” in “Loch Ness”
-- “gh” is a deeper guttural sound, like the “kh” sound, but deeper in the throat, using the larynx. If that sound is hard to make, you can just use a hard “g” (as in “gun”) and still be understood (English speakers can often only hear a "g" sound anyway).
-- "u" or “uh” is a short, indistinct vowel sound which occurs a lot (the vowel written in the word may vary)
-- In rathad ("RAH-ud") there is no "th" or "h" sound at all. The emphasis is on "RAH" (as in a football cheer in the US), then there is a very brief hiatus (a glottal stop, if you know what that is), and then the short "ud" sound.

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.