Hi,

I am looking for the correct translation of The Wanderer or simply Wanderer.

I'm looking for the term best suited for someone on a journey.

I'm a writer and am looking to include two of the words in a story, but am undecided whether to use The Wanderer or just Wanderer...

Thanks,

In the dictionary there are two words - both masculine - fánaí and seachránaí. If you want to put the definite article in front of them - it's - An Fánaí and An Seachránaí. NB the s in seachránaí is pronounced sh. Voilà

I would lean toward "An Fánaí" for "The Wanderer," but that's just personal preference. "An Seachránaí" would do as well.

For someone on a journey my knee-jerk response was "An Turasóir," but because that has more the meaning of "The tourist" these days, perhaps you'd do better to use "Fánaí" for one and "Seachránaí" for the other (I'm assuming you need both a "wanderer" and a "person on a journey")

Redwolf

An Fánaí i nGairleog = The Wanderer in Garlic

Ahahaha, I just noticed my spelling mistake. Sorry!

The story I'm writing is about a bard. One of the songs she plays in the book is about a journey and I think An Fánaí will be a perfect name for a song!

Thanks again.

There's a lovely musical number played by Dordán called "Fáilte an Fhánaí" ("The Wanderer's Welcome"), so there's precedence!

(Note: the "h" in "Fhánaí" above is a grammatical thing that you won't want for your usage).

Redwolf

Why wouldn't I want to include the letter H?

It is it sort of like the difference in English, how some countries include a U in some words and othera don't?

No, it's nothing like that. It's a special grammatical process called lenition. The form you're looking for wouldn't require it; if you just wanted to say "The Wanderer" An Fánaí would be the say to go.

That's why I said at the beginning, that both words are masculine, if they were feminine then you would put in an 'h' at the beginning of them, when you use the definite article. Here are two simple examples: a man in Irish is - fear,(pronounced a bit like fi-ar) - the man is - an fear, (an is pronounced a bit like 'on') - in contrast a woman is - bean (which rhymes with the English word man !) and the woman is - an bhean (the bh here is pronounced like a v). As said above, this is called lenition and it is applied in quite a few other contexts, which it would be too long to go into here. Lenition comes under the more general heading of what are called mutations. If you want find more about it, you can look at the Nua Leargais website and click on Gramadach na Gaeilge.

Just in case you'd like to know the grammar behind it:

"An Fánaí" standing by itself is in the nominative case, which is what you want for a simple title such as this. It's literally "The Wanderer." It's also the root form of the word, as you'd find it in a dictionary.

In "Fáilte an Fhánaí" The word is in the genitive case (which is similar to putting an apostrophe + s after a word in English, or putting the word "of" in front of it). It means "The Wanderer's Welcome" or "Welcome of the Wanderer."

Where English typically only changes the ends of words, Irish often changes the beginning as well (called "initial mutation").

Hope that helps!

Redwolf