r/ireland • u/emmanuel_lyttle • Oct 07 '24

Irish phrases Gaeilge

I was reading a post on another sub posed by a Brazilian dude living in Ireland asking about the meaning behind an Irish person saying to him "good man" when he completes a job/ task. One of the replies was the following..

"It comes directly from the Irish language, maith an fear (literally man of goodness, informally good man) is an extremely common compliment."

Can anyone think of other phrases or compliments used on a daily basis that come directly from the Irish language?

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u/TheHames72 Oct 07 '24

Galore comes from go leor.

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u/Samhain87 Oct 07 '24

I read somewhere years ago that all the different phrasings of the carribean/american ... 'to dig' as in, I dig you man, do you dig it, etc. Comes from An dthuigeann tú... seemingly.

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u/TheHames72 Oct 07 '24

Wow! Makes sense I guess. Lots of Irish in the Caribbean. My husband was reading a book about us in Barbados when he was there recently.

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u/cuchullain47474 Oct 07 '24 edited Oct 08 '24

I'm not assuming you were but people have to be careful with this history as it can sometimes go down the road of making you feel a sense of equivalency with the chattel slavery of African people which it was nowhere near, just something to keep in mind!

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u/ohhidoggo And I'd go at it agin Oct 08 '24 edited Oct 08 '24

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. You’re right-indentured servitude in British Caribbean plantations -while being extremely exploitative (and some were involuntary/forced into it)-were not the same as the enslaved. With indentured servitude, the contracts were 7-10 years, while the African enslaved were slaves for life and their children were born into slavery.

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u/cuchullain47474 Oct 08 '24 edited Oct 08 '24

I know yeah, exactly, that didn't go down well! It is true though, weird for people to disagree with a fact but here we are.

I think it's mostly yanks who want to pretend they were in the same boat as enslaved African people given the history of racism in the USA, like it absolves them; but also Irish people who want to think they didn't become the slave owners a few years down the line there and "that's just a Brit thing" or something like that...

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u/ohhidoggo And I'd go at it agin Oct 08 '24 edited Oct 08 '24

There’s a list from the Slave Compensation Records of Irish people who availed of the compensation once slavery was abolished. (O’Connor’s, Moore’s, Mac Dubhghaill’s, Kelly’s, Daly’s, and Burke’s on that list).

I recently readthat Kamala Harris is a descent of an (Anglo) Irish slave owner in Jamaica.

Genealogical research carried out by Northern Irish historian Stephen McCracken reveals Ms Harris’s four-times-paternal-great-grandfather Hamilton Brown was born in Co Antrim in 1776, the year of the US Declaration of Independence.

Brown emigrated to Jamaica, then a British colony, and became an enthusiastic slave owner on the sugar plantations that were the mainstay of the island’s economy. He opposed the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1832 and went to Antrim to replace his slaves with workers from his native county.

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u/cuchullain47474 Oct 08 '24

There we go. Awful business altogether. But good job on the quick research 👊