I’ve just started the Mad For Trad instructional CD ROM and so far I love it. The first tune is “Baidin Fheilimi”. The instructor say’s it’s a lullaby familiar to all Irish school kids. I’d love to know what “Baidin Fheilimi” means. Better yet I’d really like a good Irish/English dictionary. I stopped by Barnes and Noble and the only one they had did not have pronunciations for each word. Could any of you recomend a good dictionary? Pronunciation is important to me. Not that I’m expecting to meet any genuine Irish folk or leprauchans I’d just like to get things right from the start.
Mary
[ This Message was edited by: DaleWisely on 2001-09-20 17:37 ]
I was thinking about picking up a book and tape set for Irish myself. I’m still hoping that my great-aunt will soon take me to visit my newly discovered (to me at least) Ireland relatives. Her mother was born in Roscommon, though I’m not sure if that is where my relatives live now.
Hi Mary,
You might want to give the Beginner’s Guide to Irish Gaelic Pronunciation a try at http://www.sirius.com/~ststones/gaelpron.html I haven’t used it myself so I can’t give you an evaluation but it might be a good start for you.
[ This Message was edited by: Tom_Gaul on 2001-09-16 01:18 ]
[ This Message was edited by: Tom_Gaul on 2001-09-16 01:20 ]
[ This Message was edited by: Tom_Gaul on 2001-09-16 01:25 ]
[ This Message was edited by: Tom_Gaul on 2001-09-16 01:26 ]
On 2001-09-15 22:39, dakotamouse wrote:
I’d love to know what “Baidin Fheilimi” means.
This is a translation by James N. Healy from his book “Irish Ballads and Songs of the Sea” (Mercier Press)
Phelim’s Boat
Phelim’s boat will go sailing to Gowla
'Tis Phelim’s wee boat, and with Phelim we’ll sail.
Phelim’s boat will go sailing to Tory.
'Tis Phelim’s wee boat, and with Phelim we’ll sail.
Chorus:
Boat of neatness; boat of sweetness
Neat and sweet the boat of Phelim is,
Tidy and fine, with a beautiful line.
'Tis Phelim’s wee boat, and with Phelim we’ll sail.
Phelims wee boat was wrecked out on Tory
Phelim was steering and no one else there.
Codetta:
Boat of Phelim…
Boat of Phelim…
[ This Message was edited by: Feadan on 2001-09-16 09:39 ]
Yikes! Wrecked boats are lullabys? Thanks for the translation. And thanks Tom for the link to pronunciation. I’ve printed it off. Maybe I’ll pick up that book at Barnes and Noble anyhow and just use this pronunciation guide. You’d think it wouldn’t be that difficult to add a phoentic guide to each word in a dictionary but I can’t seem to find one that does.
I’m always intrigued by how prevalent the macabre used to be in children’s stories and songs. (Then again, I was alway sung “Rock-a-bye baby”, which features a baby plunging from the top of a tree. )
You guys heard a child’s song from Ireland, “Weila waila?”
(Warning, not for the faint of heart)
This version is from Soodlum’s 100 Irish Ballads.
There was an old woman and she lived in the woods, weile weile waile,
There was an old woman and she lived in the woods, down by the river Saile
She had a baby three months old, weile, weile, weila,
She had a baby three months old, down by the river, Saile
She had a pen-knofe long and sharp,…
She stuck the pen-knife in the baby’s heart… (I’ve also heard eye)
Three policemen and a detective bobby came knocking at the door,…
The pulled the rope and she was hung,…
And that was the end of the woman in the woods, weile, weile, waile,
And that was the end of the baby too, down by the river Saile
There’s no history for the song in the book. I would imagine it’s based on a real event. Sorry if I grossed you out. Kids really do sing it in Ireland.
Tony
My wife used to sing all three of our sons to sleep with ‘Four Green Fields’. It works fine until they get old enough to understand the words, then it tends to keep them awake nights.
Shheeeesh! I’m glad my mom doesn’t sing. Makes me appreciate Barney the dinosaur’s theme song. Sure it’s insipid but there isn’t too much wrong with “I love you, you love me”.
Childrens songs and stories are almost always about horrible things - they seem to like it for some odd reason. My two oldest girls (5 and 3 yrs old) play “Ring around the rosy” which is a song about the bubonic plague epidemic that swept through Europe 600 years ago.
Here is the song:
“Ring around the rosy,
Pocket full of posy,
Ashes, Ashes,
We all fall down.”
Lets dissect it:
“Ring around the rosy”
One of the first signs of the plague is a red ring around a rosy-red bump (“ring around the rosy”).
“Pocket full of posy”
People would carries flowers on their person to avoid getting the disease (because they believed it was spread by “foul air”) or to cover up their own sickly stench.
“Ashes, Ashes”
“Ashes” is a child’s way of saying the “aw-choo” sound of sneezing. Sneezing was triggered in plague victims as they began to hemorrage internally. With the plague you can sneeze yourself to death
“We all fall down”
Obviously “Fall down” is a euphemism for dying. The plague killed an estimated 1/3 of Europe’s population during the period of 1347 - 1350. Therefore, every child at them time would have known many people who died from it
Despite the meaning of its lyrics “Ring around the rosy” has a simple and pretty tune. Perhaps thats how children handle bad things that happen to them - they turn it into something beautiful? If that is the case then perhaps there is a lesson for us all.
An urban legend? In this case, I think not; for once the excellent Snopes.com site may have got it wrong.
Here in England it has been universally accepted as desciptive of the 17th century plague that swept England, not the Black Death as mentioned in Snopes.
The same disease, it reappeared in mutated form (as it does), but with a red ring on each cheek as the first symptom, followed by sneezing (“A-tishoo, a-tishoo” not “Ashes, ashes”), severe 'flu, then full-on haemorrhagic fever. In the Black Death, a person got black buboes in the armpits and the groin, hence its name.
This nursery rhyme refers to the 17th C plague from whence it originated. Snopes comment about it not going into print until 1881 and therefore not being extant beforehand is entirely spurious. As folk musicians, we understand the bardic tradition of handing down songs/tunes/stories person-to-person unchanged over centuries (ref. Gurdjieff’s story about the “Epic of Gilgamesh” being discovered on 4,500y old clay tablets in the city of Ur: his own father, an Armenian bard, sang the same story WORD FOR WORD 4,400y later in Armenia in the 1860s).
Although snopes.com does provide some very interesting information about the possible origins of “Ring Around the Rosy” the explanations also demonstrate an ignorance of how history is actually recorded and an ignorance of the strength of oral traditions. First, the article is based on the (western) assumption that anything of importance gets recorded by someone and that it is recorded correctly (i.e., without editing). Second, it assumes that songs, tunes, stories, and so forth cannot exist for long periods of time without being in a written form. With respect, I don’t believe either of these assumptions will hold when scrutinized.
I don’t want to belabour the point because we are already way off-topic.
But it get’s stranger when you go off topic from a topic title that’s somehow changed. I wasn’t asking for an opinion on the Mad for Trad CD Rom. I was asking for opinions on Gaelic/English dictionaries. But now my title seems to have changed. Aaanyyyy hoo. Thanks again for the help guys.
I was given a very good CD package “Learn Irish Now” by a company called “Transparent Language”. It has a feature where you can record your pronunciation and compare it with a native speaker on a graph. This is very useful as many of the sounds in Irish are not used in English. Kind of like that sound in French that Americans can’t make. Only Gaelic speakers are much more encouraging than the French are said to be. It takes a great deal of work to learn the language and many find it a hobby in itself. The spelling is most confusing as a lot of times the consonants are not pronounced but only indicate how the vowels are to be pronounced. There is also a good bit of regional variation. They have a couple of newsgroups-Gailaige A and Gailaige B (the spelling is off but it is something strange) where members can flame at each other about correct sentence construction. Laziness and time limitations have kept me more focused on the whistle. Slan agat, Emily
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