Native Irish Speaker and Sci-Fi fan here. What an unexpected delight. For those who might not pick it up , the author name "Máiréad Ní Ghráda" is that of an unmarried (that's the "Ní") woman ("Máiréad" which is like a variation of Mary).
Here's my Translations of the Chapter titles. I'm pretty sure many of these have old-Irish style séimhiú (a dot above a consonant denotes what would now be a h after the consonant) in the originals that have not been translated by the OCR, so there are several missing h letters. If I weren't on a plane over Afghanistan, I'd download the PDF to check. Will update the repo when I can!
Pláinéid na feaca Súil Duine riamh = A planet no person's eyes have ever seen
An Radarc, tríd an gCiandracán = the view throughout the [Ciandracan] (this is a compound proper noun, "Cian" is "head" or "brain" and "racán" could be visor or rocket)
An Turas go Manannán = the Trip to Manannán
Manannán = Manannán (it's a noun, which is very similar to the Irish term for the Manx and the Isle of Mann).
Muintear Manannáin = the people of Manannán
na 'Cráidmí' = the Craidmi (I think it's just a plural noun)
An tÁrd-Máigistir = the high Magistrate, or possibly the supreme magistry
An Priorún = the Priory
Oidce sa Coill = The class/lesson/teaching in the woods/forest
An tinneall = the fire
Oidce tar Oidceanta = Lesson upon lesson
Lug Lám-fada = the long-armed lug
An Tróid leis na 'Cráidmí' = The war with the Craidmi
Diogaltas = Revenge
An téalod = not sure about this one
> Oidce sa Coill = The class/lesson/teaching in the woods/forest
> Oidce tar Oidceanta = Lesson upon lesson
I suspect these are actually mistranscribed by the project. That looks more like it should be "Oiḋċe sa Coill" or "Oidhche sa Choill" without the ponc séimhithe, and in modern spelling "Oíche sa Choill" - "A Night in the Forest". Comparing the transcription of the first chapter with the source in the PDF they're missing a fada (an acute accent for non-Irish speakers) in "ná".
Similarly, I'd probably render the second one as "Night upon Nights".
Not a native speaker myself, just a former gaelscoil student who's done their best to undo the gaelscoilis tendencies. Probably closer to a "heritage speaker" in the linguistic sense in some aspects.
Sadly out of practice these days, since I've been living in Denmark nearly three years. It's strange to lose competency in a language that you spoke every day for about 13 years.
I hope the project can upload a full scan at some point. I'm a huge sci-fi fan, and there's definitely a dearth of Irish language books in that genre.
Oh man, you weren't kidding. Part of me wants to print out some of these pages to use in my D&D game, somehow.
(Although, part of me is also uneasy with that idea - using someone's culture & heritage as set dressing, without paying it any of the actual respect it deserves. It would be just as easy to copy a few paragraphs from Wikipedia, & use a Star Trek font to make something look fantastical, which is something I've done in the past.)
No-one's going to mind in the slightest if you lift Gaelic type or script for a D&D setting. (If you start larding in corny Irish stereotypes as well then people might start to be offended and/or amused.) If it matters, the writing style is basically just a long-surviving regional variation of what was once a mainstream form of Latin script, anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule#/media/F... . So its story is quite similar to the story of how blackletter hung on as the primary script family for German until roughly the same time in the 20th century.
Stop worrying. It truly doesn't matter. No culture deserves respect. You might respect one culture or another for some reason but if you don't, as in this case, then there's nothing to worry about.
I don't know if I agree with that, but I will say that people in general deserve respect. If I were playing with an Irish player, I definitely wouldn't want to offend them by treating their language like set-dressing, and I wouldn't particularly want someone using my culture for that, either.
I think the biggest stumbling blocks is that not many of us can read Irish (Gaelige).
While I am on mobile and (therefore) have not accessed the files, the ToC and description of the OCR process leads me to understand that the original print is in Irish, not English.
It looks extremely accessible. I can puzzle through the pages I looked at with school-level Irish.
The script can be mechanically translated to the modern characters, no ambiguity there. The spelling and grammar isn't the perfectly standardized Irish introduced in the 1940s and 50s - which isn't representative of how anyone ever spoke the language - but its differences are those a good to mediocre student might make anyway while trying to write the official standard.
It helps that this is clearly written for a YA audience. Literary Irish has lots of complicated constructions and idioms which are difficult to translate, but this does not.
I couldn't verify it, and a human translation would likely be preferable -- but it's probably good enough to get an idea of the story if you want to read some right now.
Native Irish Speaker and Sci-Fi fan here. What an unexpected delight. For those who might not pick it up , the author name "Máiréad Ní Ghráda" is that of an unmarried (that's the "Ní") woman ("Máiréad" which is like a variation of Mary).
Here's my Translations of the Chapter titles. I'm pretty sure many of these have old-Irish style séimhiú (a dot above a consonant denotes what would now be a h after the consonant) in the originals that have not been translated by the OCR, so there are several missing h letters. If I weren't on a plane over Afghanistan, I'd download the PDF to check. Will update the repo when I can!
> Oidce sa Coill = The class/lesson/teaching in the woods/forest
> Oidce tar Oidceanta = Lesson upon lesson
I suspect these are actually mistranscribed by the project. That looks more like it should be "Oiḋċe sa Coill" or "Oidhche sa Choill" without the ponc séimhithe, and in modern spelling "Oíche sa Choill" - "A Night in the Forest". Comparing the transcription of the first chapter with the source in the PDF they're missing a fada (an acute accent for non-Irish speakers) in "ná".
Similarly, I'd probably render the second one as "Night upon Nights".
That does make more sense.
Thanks.
Not a native speaker myself, just a former gaelscoil student who's done their best to undo the gaelscoilis tendencies. Probably closer to a "heritage speaker" in the linguistic sense in some aspects.
Sadly out of practice these days, since I've been living in Denmark nearly three years. It's strange to lose competency in a language that you spoke every day for about 13 years.
I hope the project can upload a full scan at some point. I'm a huge sci-fi fan, and there's definitely a dearth of Irish language books in that genre.
"An t-Éalod" I think would be "the escape"?
That's almost certainly right. I couldn't see that as anything other than "Teal" but Éalú makes perfect sense especially thematically.
Beautiful, it's typeset in classic cló Gaelach.
Oh man, you weren't kidding. Part of me wants to print out some of these pages to use in my D&D game, somehow.
(Although, part of me is also uneasy with that idea - using someone's culture & heritage as set dressing, without paying it any of the actual respect it deserves. It would be just as easy to copy a few paragraphs from Wikipedia, & use a Star Trek font to make something look fantastical, which is something I've done in the past.)
No-one's going to mind in the slightest if you lift Gaelic type or script for a D&D setting. (If you start larding in corny Irish stereotypes as well then people might start to be offended and/or amused.) If it matters, the writing style is basically just a long-surviving regional variation of what was once a mainstream form of Latin script, anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule#/media/F... . So its story is quite similar to the story of how blackletter hung on as the primary script family for German until roughly the same time in the 20th century.
Stop worrying. It truly doesn't matter. No culture deserves respect. You might respect one culture or another for some reason but if you don't, as in this case, then there's nothing to worry about.
> No culture deserves respect.
I don't know if I agree with that, but I will say that people in general deserve respect. If I were playing with an Irish player, I definitely wouldn't want to offend them by treating their language like set-dressing, and I wouldn't particularly want someone using my culture for that, either.
I think the biggest stumbling blocks is that not many of us can read Irish (Gaelige).
While I am on mobile and (therefore) have not accessed the files, the ToC and description of the OCR process leads me to understand that the original print is in Irish, not English.
Yes, which imho makes it more remarkable. I do not doubt an English translation is coming once they can convert it into modern Irish.
It looks extremely accessible. I can puzzle through the pages I looked at with school-level Irish.
The script can be mechanically translated to the modern characters, no ambiguity there. The spelling and grammar isn't the perfectly standardized Irish introduced in the 1940s and 50s - which isn't representative of how anyone ever spoke the language - but its differences are those a good to mediocre student might make anyway while trying to write the official standard.
It helps that this is clearly written for a YA audience. Literary Irish has lots of complicated constructions and idioms which are difficult to translate, but this does not.
Here's Claude's translation of the PDF in the repo:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/0c40c3f8-16de-4947-93c1-3...
I couldn't verify it, and a human translation would likely be preferable -- but it's probably good enough to get an idea of the story if you want to read some right now.
I can verify it looks fine.
Not absolutely rigorous, e.g.
> "You have far more knowledge of the stars and the planets than any other living man"
Why "far more knowledge"? I don't see any emphasis like that in the original.
I'd have a few nits but they're of similarly small magnitude.