The number of TV channels? The number of electric appliances in my house? The ease of getting food and ready-to-eat meals and, well, anything really, delivered to my house? No, as significant as these are, I think the biggest difference between my life and my grandmother’s is the number of times in a day I bump into unsolicited and seemingly random chunks of new information. I’m left wondering whether my grandmother was *ever* accosted by answers to questions she hadn’t asked, or even thought to ask. To wit:
A friendly greeting goes a long way, and in Gaelic, there are different ways to say hello depending on the time of day:
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- Hello – Halò! (ha-LOH)
- Good morning – Madainn mhath! (MAH-tin vah)
- Good afternoon / Good evening – Feasgar math! (FES-kar mah)
- Good night – Oidhche mhath! (OY-kuh vah)
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I had not, in fact, been wondering about Gaelic greetings, but–courtesy of something or other on the internet–here we are now. Let’s see what we have, shall we?
The lead-in seems unnecessary: surely we all know that a friendly greeting goes a long way, and all languages that I’ve been exposed to have greetings related to the time of day. Of course as soon as I wrote that I Just Knew and, indeed, it turns out that this is not a universal truth. In this good-grief-this-must-be-comprehensive catalogue, I particularly enjoy these less-time-constrained options:
- Greetings that vary with the time of day plus the weather, with distinct greetings for a cloudy morning or a rainy afternoon, for example
- Greetings used only at the end of the workday
- Greetings that ask how you slept or whether you’re, you know, even awake
- Greetings that welcome you here
- Greetings that express interest in how things are going in various aspects of your life (land, crops, work/business, children, health)
- Greetings that ask where you came from or where you’re going
- Greetings that ask whether you’ve eaten recently
- Greetings that, taken literally, ask whether it’s really you, or whether you’re really here
- Greetings used only on a second meeting on the same day
- Greetings that reflect social status, like greetings reserved for children, or greetings used only by children when addressing their elders
- Greetings that are wishes for good things (peace, health, long life, victory) to fall upon you
But I’ll admit that the nature of greetings was my second thought. My first was to be wary of the handy pronunciation guide, especially MAH-tin vah, based on my own experience with a similar pronunciation challenge in English itself. But maybe my fears were unfounded. As this cheery guide went on to say:
If someone greets you first,
you can simply reply with the same phrase.
Why didn’t I think of that? If I can hear it accurately and reproduce it faithfully under the time pressure usual in a social interaction, then, yes, indeed, I can “simply reply with the same phrase”.
Or I could just smile and nod. That goes a long way, too.
