Rediscover the lost words of an ancient land in this new and updated edition of an international bestseller.
Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German, and branches spanning the world, from Australia and India to North America.
But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke another tongue. Look closely enough and English contains traces of the Celtic soil from which it sprung, found in words like bog, loch, cairn and crag. Today, this heritage can be found nowhere more powerfully than in modern-day Gaelic.
In Thirty-Two Words for Field Manchán Magan explores the enchantment, sublime beauty and sheer oddness of a 3000-year-old lexicon. Imbuing the natural world with meaning and magic, it evokes a time-honoured way of life, from its 32 separate words for a field, to terms like loisideach (a place with a lot of kneading troughs), bróis (whiskey for a horseman at a wedding), and iarmhaireacht (the loneliness you feel when you are the only person awake at cockcrow).
Told through stories collected from Magan's own life and travels, Thirty-Two Words for Field is an enthralling celebration of Irish words, and a testament to the indelible relationship between landscape, culture and language.
- 386 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Foreword
- Prisms and Perspectives
- Kaleidoscope
- First Utterance
- Isn’t it Yourself?
- Who Are You Of?
- Netherworld
- Island Sanctuary
- Dancing Words
- The Wave
- Wave as Goddess
- Blarney – Wave Three
- Fairy Words
- Taboo
- Fairy Psychology
- Land
- Field Names
- Place Names
- Deciphering Place
- Thresholds
- Irish Songlines
- Witches’ Hill
- Circles
- Resonance
- Sound
- Arabic
- India
- The Cure of Words
- Women and Witches
- Finding Witches
- How to Recognise the Cailleach
- Sex in Irish
- Seaweed
- Divine Inspiration
- Contortions and Comets
- Lights in the Sky
- The Illumination of Language
- Specificity
- Quantum Irish
- Winds
- The Ecology of Irish
- Cows and Copper
- Curses
- Stones and Loss
- Losing a Word
- Family
- Illusion
- A Collection of Fish
- References
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Yes, you can access Thirty-Two Words for Field by Manchán Magan in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Languages. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.