(I hope this is the right forum for Sengoídelc; should I post somewhere else?)

https://web.archive.org/web/20080918055 ... mergin.php citing www.ucc.ie/celt/published/G800011A/index.html gives this text:

1. Am gáeth i mmuir. ar domni.
2. Am tond trethan i tír. 1550] {MS folio 12b 40}
3. Am fúaim mara.
4. Am dam secht ndírend.
5. Am séig i n-aill.
6. Am dér gréne.g
7. Am caín. 1555]
8. Am torc ar gail.
9. Am hé i llind.
10. Am loch i mmaig
11. Am briandai.
12. Am bri danae. 1560]
13. Am gai i fodb. feras feochtu.
14. Am dé delbas do chind codnu.
15. Coiche nod gleith clochur slébe. {MS folio 12b 45}
16. Cia on cotagair aesa éscai
17. Cia dú i llaig funiud grene. 1565]
18. Cia beir búar o thig Temrach.
19. Cia buar Tethrach. tibi.
20. Cia dain.
21. Cia dé delbas faebru. a ndind ailsiu.
22. Cáinté im gaí cainte gaithe. Am. 1570]

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A few things confuse me about this transcription:

* On Line 6, is the '.g' at the end part of the text or a formatting issue? Is the 'g' a standalone word? Or is the line 'Am dér gréneg'?

* On Line 19 similarly, is 'tibi' part of the line? Is the line 'Cia buar Tethrach. tibi' or 'Cia buar Tethrach'? I can't find 'tibi' in Old Irish texts; searching dil.ie for 'tibi' brings up the Latin marginalia. But the translations seem to have some word that there means smiling/laughing. " Who are the cattle of Tethra who laugh?" and " On whom do the cattle of Tethys smile?"

* On Line 22, is it 'Cáinté im gaí cainte gaithe. Am' or 'Cáinté im gaí cainte gaithe'? (I'm pretty sure it's the second)

* Just generally why are there dots in the text like on Line 13? Is that an Old Irish thing or is it just a quirk?

GRMA

On line 6, the ".g" has been copied over from the edition of this text on the Corpus of Electronic Texts (CELT). That text, in turn, was digitised from this print edition:

Book of Leinster, formerly Lebar na Núachongbála. R. I. Best, Osborn Bergin and M. A. O'Brien (ed), first edition [xxvi + 260 pp. 4 pls. (MS facss.)] Dublin Institute For Advanced StudiesDublin (1954)

I don't have a copy of that edition to hand, so I can't say whether the "g" was inserted during the digitisation process for CELT, or whether it was in Best, Bergin and O'Brien's edition too. What I can tell you is it wasn't in the manuscript, at least, as far as I can see (You can find it on p.12, bottom right-hand corner of the second column). The manuscript has "Amdér gne." with a stroke above the "g" of "gne". It's clear in the CELT edition that the editors expanded the manuscript abbreviation to "gréne", because they italicise the letters "ré", which they added, "Am dér gréne.g". This information was lost when the text was copied over without formatting to the site you found it on. What's interesting is that the second "g", which follows the dot, is also in italics, which would suggest it was added by the editors if indeed it was in the print edition. My suspicion, however, is that it may have been a footnote in the print edition, which was not correctly digitised.

The same is not the case with ". tibi." on line 19. This does occur in the manuscript, in full. In Old Irish, there is a verb tibid, "to smile/laugh". The second singular in the present indicative would be tibi, "you smile", and if a conjunct particle occurred before it, putting it into dependent form, it could be either second or third singular, e.g. ní tibi "you do not smile" or "he/she/it does not smile".

MacAllister's translation "On whom do the cattle of Tethys smile", suggests to me that he thought this was an instance of tmesis. I think he's right that this is tmesis, but that his translation is still incorrect. If this is tmesis we could rearrange the phrase like so: cia-tibi buar Tethrach. I think this has to be unstressed cia, since it seems to be acting like a conjunct particle, and stressed cía would require a relative construction to follow it. Therefore, cia can take the place of either the subject or object before a verb. Cia-tibi, then, can mean "who smiles (at)", or "(at) whom do you smile", or "(at) whom does he/she/it smile". Adding back in buar Tethrach, we have to rule out the 2nd singular inflection for the verb, and so we can get two possible meanings; "who smiles at the herd of Tethra?" or "at whom does the herd of Tethra smile?"

I think this is how MacAllister landed at his translation, but I think he picked the wrong option for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the notion of a herd of cattle smiling at all is creepy as hell, never mind in unison. More importantly, it's nonsensical. Secondly, Tethra is the name of a Fomorian king who was slain in the Second Battle of Mag Tuiredh, which seems a likely reference for a poem in the Lebor Gabála to make. Therefore, I think what is being asked here is "who is smiling, looking over the herd of cattle he has stolen from the Fomorian King, Tethra?" Cattle raids, of course, were famously a display of power in Irish mythology, and raiding a neighbouring Kingdom's cattle was seen as a heroic feat. Having your cattle stolen would have been seen as shameful, so any King would have fought to prevent his herd being raided lest he lose his authority. Obviously, a king who dies in battle can't protect his herd from being raided, and they would be very valuable, so it follows that somebody would certainly have stolen Tethra's cattle. It seems most likely, then, that at the most basic level this is a reference to the raider smiling as he surveys his newly acquired herd, but looking at the broader context, it's a reference to the fall of the Fomorians to the Túatha Dé Danann.

Based on what's in the manuscript, and based on what's made it into the digital text you're looking at, I think Carey's translation, "Who are the cattle of Tethra who laugh?", is impossible. This would require a relative construction and stressed cía. Something like cía nod-tibi buar Tethrach (or, to retain the tmesis, cía nod buar Tethrach tibi) lit. "at whom is it that at him the herd of Tethra smiles?" As I said above, I'm not seeing anything to indicate this kind of construction here. It's possible that Carey justifies this well in the book where he gives this translation, The Celtic Heroic Age (2003, pg. 265). He may, for example, have assumed this recension is corrupt and that, based on the meter of the preceding line, the original exemplar did have cía nod buar Tethrach tibi. I think this is difficult to justify, though, given how there's no single strong meter throughout the whole piece. The following line, for example, cia dain, would require a lot of work to fit to the same meter. Aside from this, the notion of laughing cows is cheesy.

Am is in the manuscript. It's written at the end of the line, near the edge of the page, well into what should be the margin. It's actually just an a with a stroke above it to signify the m, which is a common abbreviation in manuscripts. It probably means indeed, as Carey has translated it. The poem actually goes on after this, as can be seen on CELT, however, the webpage you're looking at cut it off early at the point where there's a page break in Best, Bergin and O'Brien's print edition.

The dots in line 13 occur in the manuscript. The poem isn't written with each "line" on a new line in the manuscript. That would have wasted space. Instead the scribe ran all the lines into each other, and put a dot generally at the end of every "line" of the poem. In this particular case there's a dot after fodb which looks a bit lighter in colour then the next one after feochtu. It's possible the scribe intended both of these dots to indicate the ends of two separate lines, just like most of the other places he put dots. It's also possible the lighter dot was accidentally placed there because the clause could reasonably have ended after fodb and this confused the scribe, but after realising the line was meant to continue the scribe tried to erase it and/or darken the next dot. I can't imagine why else it would be there.

Amergin may be where Osborn Bergin got the Irish version of his surname from: Ó hAimheirgín.

I never realised that connection, or even that he used that form of his surname. Very interesting. Do you know any specific places or publication where he uses Ó hAimheirgín, or where someone refers to him as such?

With that being said, he was from Cork, and apparently well versed in Munster Irish. It seems likely he knew his whole life that Bergin is an anglicised form of Ó Beirgin. In the same way, it's not impossible that he was also aware that Ó Beirgin is a variant of Ó hAimheirgin.

Yes. Peadar Ua Laoghaire's Mo Sgéal féin, in the last chapter: Thug sé cuireadh do thriúr againn, do'n Ollamh Kuno Meyer <L 217> agus do Dhochtúir Ua h-Aimhirgin agus dómh-sa".

And he says at the start of the chapter it happened in 1912, if I'm not mistaken. By that stage Bergin had returned from his studies in Germany. It's quite possible, in that case, that he did choose that form of the name based on his studies rather than because it had been in use in the family for generations past. I wonder if there are any earlier records of him using it.