Seeing you is like seeing the new (season’s) barley.
Note: This is a very enthusiastic expression one would use to greet a favorite friend or relation not seen for a while. Although we translated this seanfhocal as a simile, it is actually a metaphor. (A more literal translation is: “You are the new barley to see.”) This agrarian metaphor is a reminder of the time when the harvest was anticipated by the whole community. Homegrown barley bread would be a welcome change from the usual potatoes and Indian meal. Of course, the “juice of the barley “, poteen (poitín as Gaeilge), would be enjoyed at the harvest celebration of Lughnasa.
Note also: This is another example of fronting. Fronting is a grammatical structure where the copula, ‘is’, is used with an inverted word order to emphasize one part of a sentence over another part. We saw a fronted adjective, ‘Is TEANN gach madra gearr . . .’ (i.e.: ‘It’s BOLD that every terrier is . . .’), emphasized before. Here we have a fronted noun, ‘eorna’. But it is a definite noun, “an eorna”. The copula is never followed immediately by a definite noun. The correct pronoun must separate them. In this case, the definite noun is feminine, so the pronoun must be feminine. “Is í an eorna nua tú a fheiciáil.”
