Translation Confirmation “Wide is the door of the little cottage”

[Des Nolan]

Hi,

I’m a member of the GAC Fairfield club and they would like to paint the following “Irish saying” in Irish on their new kids room which is designed to look like a little cottage. The requestor who’s asked me to confirm the google translation before they stencil it and paint it on the wall, provided the following, which looks good to me, but just wanted to be 100% sure before its painted on the wall for 6,000 members to see.

“Wide is the door of the little cottage.”

“Is leathan an doras an teachín beag.”

Go raibh maith agat,

Deasúin Ó Nualáin

[eadaoin]

you need to leave out the first “an” anyway. The rest looks ok to me, but might need a bit of attention from someone with better grammar.

“Is leathan doras an teachín beag.”

[Des Nolan]

Eadaoin, Go raibh aith agat, Deas

[Héilics Órbhuí]

Wouldn’t it be “an teachín bhig”?

[Des Nolan]

Héilics, Thanks for trying to help, But I’d have to ask you why? I searched web and found many references to “teachn beag” and “teachín beag” but none with “bhig,” except when “tí” was used instead of “teach.” I’ve no idea the for reasons for either, but based on the numbers alone I’m inclined to go with ‘end’ of original translation. Deas

[Héilics Órbhuí]

(Apologize in advance for lack of fadas, I’m at work now and don’t know how to make them on this keyboard):

Teachin is a masculine noun and here it is in the genitive (doras an teachin). Adjectives need to be in their proper form just like nouns. “Beag” is “big” after masculine noun (hata an fhir bhig) and “bige” after feminine nouns (bruach na habhann bige). Additionally, masculine nouns lenite the following adjective in genitive (opposite of the nominative, where it’s feminine nouns that do this). So it becomes “bhig”. “Teachin beag” would be nominative, i.e. “ta teachin beag thall”.

Additionally, I’d caution against using Google searches to judge whether something is correct or not. With a scrutinizing eye, they can be useful, but you have to know enough to be able to filter out the utter proliferation of bad Irish out there. Also, the Irish corpus is not yet very well represented digitally. If you could search books written by people with real Irish you’d get a different picture but as it is you often just get blogs from learners and government web sites which are themselves often badly translated. In other words, if you don’t see something coming up in the search results, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. “Ti” is probably much more common than “teachin”, so I wouldn’t expect to see many results for the latter.

[Des Nolan]

My apologies too, I’d no sooner sent my reply then realized you were most likely thinking of the genitive which your quick reply confirms and indeed bhig would the genitive singular of beag. Why then, don’t I see it used more often online, I wonder. Confession – my grammar is weak as…Don’t know if there’s an impact, but teachín is also the word for “little cottage”. I guess, I’ll drag out the grammar books tonight. (also surprised for a presumably Irish saying I haven’t found a translation of it online.). Thanks, Deas

[Héilics Órbhuí]

No need to apologize. See my revised post above to answer your other question. You often won’t see lesser-used variants or words well represented in search results. There are plenty of legitimate Irish words that won’t come up at all if you Google them.

[Author]

Posts