💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 4-24.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:50:14. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
On Duo this morning, I see "madra rua" - I look for "red" and "dog" among the available words. They aren't there, but "fox" is. This is the correct answer.
On social media, I post about this, get a quick response. That's nothing, I'm told. "Madra" does some heavy lifting. "Madra crann" ("tree dog") for squirrel, but also "cat crann" (tree cat) for pine marten. "Madra uisce" ("water dog") for otter.
Someone else chimes in: "boin De" - God's little cow (ladybug). "Smugairle roin", seal snot - jellyfish.
I'd learned the Irish for "fox" when I first started the course, though I'd learned it as "sionnach". Apparently the divide between sionnach and madra rua is spoken vs "book" Irish. I was surprised; I thought it might be the opposite, colloquialisms surviving in speech outside the grasp of standardization committees. But no.
For a few minutes, I felt a little sad that English didn't have anything like this. Then I remembered: trash panda (raccoon), danger noodle/nope rope (snake), and so on. Yesteryear internet slang holding the same door open.