Okay you Gaelic speakers. I have a question I hope you can help me with. I’ve printed up the lyrics for “Green Grow the Rushes Oh!” and am wondering what this line means…
“And warly cares and warly men
May a gae topsy-turvy oh”
Anyone have any idea?
Susan
That looks English to me.
Mabey ‘gae’ is an unfamiliar contraction.
Or, mabey not…
Is it Scottish English possibly, I think more properly called Scots? “Gae” would mean “go”. I find “wardly” for “worldly”, but I find no “warly”, which doesn’t mean anything really—I mean it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist because I couldn’t find it. “Worldly” could make sense though. “aw” could mean “all”, they don’t give anything just for “a”, but “aw” comes up as a variant.
http://www.scots-online.org/
Scottish English is akin to Australian English or Canadian English (ie vocabulary differences and a slightly different accent from English English), but Scots is a separate language/dialekt. Most Scots speak Scottish English, but not all Scots speak Scots.
And Scots Gaelic isn’t even in the same family as Scots, Scots English, and English.
There’s more linguistic diversity in Scotland than many people seem to think. 
Okay, so what she has looks like Scots to me. And Scots is not related to Gaelic except very distantly, as being in the Indo-European family of languages or so.
So I think “And worldly cares and worldly men may all go topsy-turvy oh”
You might also prefer to wait for someone who actually knows something about the language to come along. 
Yep. Many people seem to use the word “Gaelic” generically to refer to Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and on and on.
Likewise, it seems that “Scots” is used to describe many different languages and dialekts as well.
I’ve even seen “Scots” and “Gaelic” used interchangeably. :roll:
The line is " And wardly cares and warldly men may a’ gie tapsalteerie-o".
Somewhere around here I have a songbook which deciphers the Broad Scots dialect (not Scots Gaelic) Robbie Burns used to write this song in but it’s late now and I’m too tired to dig it up. What I do remember is that “warldly” is “worldly”, “a’” means “all” and “gie” is, even today, used in Scotland to mean “give”. There is another Broad Scots terms in this song, “sae douce” that also needs a translation. If you come up empty-handed, drop me a PM and I’ll hunt down the book.
Happy hunting.
They’d more correctly use “Celtic” to describe that family of languages. The only of that group that are actually “Gaelic” are Irish, Scottish and Manx.
“Scots” is only properly used to describe a particular dialect of English used in Scotland (the dialect Robert Burns wrote in), which is also called “Lallans” (or “Ullans” in Ulster). You can refer to “Scots Gaelic,” to be sure, but “Scots” used alone always refers to “Lallans” (which is, by the way, exactly what this is).
Redwolf
BTW, if any of you ever does need an Irish Gaelic translation, a terrific resource is http://www.irishgaelictranslator.com . I believe there’s a similar site for Scottish Gaelic as well, but I don’t have the URL. We do have a fellow at IGTF who is fluent in Scottish Gaelic, however, so when we get one that looks Scottish to us, we flag him to it. We also have a fluent (native) Welsh speaker on the board, so it’s a great site to visit for help with any of these languages.
Redwolf
Thanks all! That gives me a good idea of what the line means. which is all I need.
See ya around!
Susan
Susan,
I think the correct Scots word in your lyrics should be ‘wardly’ not
‘warly’. Here are the lyrics as written by Robert Burns:
An’ warldly cares, an’ warldly men
May a’ gae tapsalteerie, O!
The closest old Scots meaning of ‘warly’ appears to be warlike, but that
is not correct in the context of this song. The correct word is ‘wardly’.
Tapsalteerie is a great old Scots word that means the same as topsy turvy
but it seems to roll around the mouth and tongue better.
The translation would thus be:
And wordly cares and wordly men
May all go topsy turvy, O
Incidentally, many people still mistakenly state Scots is a dialect of
English. It is not - it evolved from the speech of the Angles of
Northumbria and is best described as a Germanic language related to
English. Historians say that by 1607 the Scots spoken at the Scottish
court was significantly different from the English spoken at the English
court and if James VI and the Scottish court had not moved South to
occupy the throne vacated by Elizabeth I then the two languages would
have continued to diverge to the point they would be as different today as
Norwegian and Danish. The union of the crowns sounded the death
knell for the Scots language as all ambitious Scotsmen and women began
to affect the speech of the English court so as to forward their careers.
In the working class backstreets of 50’s Edinburgh I’d hear Scots words
used all the time but the education system deemed it the speech of the
ignorant and uneducated. I witnessed the establishment assault on the
Scots tongue the same way my dad witnessed the assault on the Gaelic
tongue just 30 years earlier in the schools of Perthshire.
Colin
It needs a whole 'nother branch attached to it, showing just where Scots Gaelic fits in there (i.e. far away from, but distantly related to, Scots). 
Better mak yer feet yer freends. 
Scots Gaelic isn’t really related to Scots at all. Scots is essentially a Germanic language. Scots Gaelic isn’t terribly different from Irish Gaelic (most speakers of the Ulster dialect can understand spoken Scottish Gaelic with very little trouble). They’re completely different language families.
Redwolf
They’re in completely different families within the Indo-European family.
About half the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language, including English, French, Spanish, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Hindi, Albanian, the Scandinavian languages, Russian, Greek, and on and on…
I don’t have the time to read all answers, but it means approximately:
May all worldly cares and worldly men take a long walk off a short pier.
I would guess that “sae douce” means “so sweet”. Would that make sense in the context? I remember being told that some modern French words were directly absorbed into Scots English (as opposed to the earlier intake of Norman French words which helped to make up standard English).
