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noun
Gaelic  n.  The language of the Gaels, esp. of the Highlanders of Scotland. It is a branch of the Celtic.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Gaelic" Quotes from Famous Books



... northern nations, but at some points his knowledge of Scottish literature made the transition fairly easy to the literature of other Teutonic peoples. But he was especially bound to be interested in the Gaelic, for a Scotsman of his day could hardly avoid forming an opinion in regard to the Ossianic controversy then raging with what Scott thought must be its final violence. He did not understand the Gaelic ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball

... published the first installment of what professed to be a translation of the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard, whom tradition placed in the 3d century. Macpherson said that he made his version—including two complete epics, Fingal and Temora, from Gaelic MSS., which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands. A fierce controversy at once sprang up over the genuineness of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... settlers drove out the old Celtic speech throughout almost all England and the Scotch Lowlands before the end of the eleventh century; it drove out the Cornish in the eighteenth century; and it is now driving out the Welsh, the Erse, and the Gaelic, under our very eyes. In language at least the British empire (save of course India) is now almost entirely English, or in ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen

... loved you alway, I will not deny it; not for three months, and not for a year; but I loved you from the first, when I was a child, and my love shall not wither, till death shall end me."—GAeLIC SONG. ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr

... Douglas, who first encouraged Macpherson to undertake his translations. While taking the waters at Moffat in the fall of 1759, he was pleased to meet a young Highland tutor, who was not only familiar with ancient Gaelic poetry but who had in his possession several such poems. Home, like nearly all of the Edinburgh literati, knew no Gaelic and asked Macpherson to translate one of them. The younger man at first protested that ...
— Fragments Of Ancient Poetry • James MacPherson

... for breath he watched me, his left hand hovering in front of my mouth to stop the first outcry. Through his spread fingers I saw Don Quixote light the lantern and raise it for a good look at me. And with that in a flash my wits came back, and with them the one bit of Gaelic known ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... said he, in the Gaelic; "and I will tell you that the Skye College in the old times never turned out a better pupil. And will you take a glass of whiskey now, or a glass of claret? And it is a great pity your hair is red, or they would call you Donull Dubh, and people would say you were the born successor ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... a fire such as one sees slung under tinkers' carts. I saw that he was also a voteen, as the peasants say, for there was a rosary hanging from a nail on the rim of the barrel, and I saw I shuddered, and I did not know why I shuddered. We had passed him a few yards when I heard him cry in Gaelic, 'Idolaters, idolaters, go down to Hell with your witches and your devils; go down to Hell that the herrings may come again into the bay'; and for some moments I could hear him half screaming and half muttering behind us. 'Are you not afraid,' ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats

... neighbourhood, from whom I had obtained much insight into the manners and customs of that district. He informed me that there is a distemper occasioned by want of water, which cattle are subject to, called in the Gaelic language shag dubh, which in English signifies 'black haunch.' It is a very infectious disease, and, if not taken in time, would carry off most of the cattle in the country." The method taken by the Highlanders to prevent its destructive ravages is thus: "All fires are extinguished ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier

... transcribed. In the Scoti Chronicon they are "Clanquhele" and "Clankay. Hector Boece writes Clanchattan" and "Clankay," in which he is followed by Leslie while Buchanan disdains to disfigure his page with their Gaelic designations at all, and merely describes them as two powerful races in the wild and lawless region beyond the Grampians. Out of this jumble what Sassenach can pretend dare lucem? The name Clanwheill appears so late as 1594, in an Act of James VI. Is it not possible that it may ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... was a grey-headed man, slack in the twist but limber in the joints—distinguished by a constant lowering of the eye and a spasmodic twitching of the corners of the mouth. He was active and nimble, and in moments of excitement much given to spitting Gaelic oaths like a wild-cat. But, spite his half-century of life, he was still the best and the most daring man of a company who had ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett

... beautiful drive of about two hours. We had seats on the outside, and the driver John, like some of the White Mountain guides, was full of song and story, and local tradition. He spoke Scotch and Gaelic, recited ballads, and sung songs with great gusto. Mary and the girls stopped in a little inn at St. Catherine's, on the shores of Loch Fine, while Henry and I took steamboat for Inverary, where we found ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... reverend author of this song, "is undoubtedly old, from its resemblance to several Gaelic and Irish airs. 'Cuir's chiste moir me,' and several others, might be thought to have been originally the same in the first part. The second part of the air is, I think, modern." The Gadie is a rivulet, and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... a close analogy between the Swahili and the Gaelic stories that reveals their ultimate derivation from Babylonia. In the Scottish story the seven-headed dragon comes in a storm of wind and spray. The East African serpent comes in a storm of wind and dust.[417] In the Babylonian ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... of life and their treatment of women, are all so closely similar to that of the Greeks of Homer that a theory has been advanced and ably defended, that the Homeric Greeks were really invading Celts—Gaelic or Gaulish tribes from the north of Europe. If it indeed be so, we owe to the Celts a debt of imperishable culture and civilisation. To them belongs more especially, in our national amalgam, the passion for the past, the ardent patriotism, the longing for spiritual ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... that it was not the primitive and original tongue of any of the British Islands, nor yet of any portion of them. Indeed, of the whole of Great Britain it is not the language at the present moment. Welsh is spoken in Wales, Manks in the Isle of Man, and Scotch Gaelic in the Highlands of Scotland; besides which there is the Irish ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... the Celtic renaissance had arrived. This is one of the facts which make them interesting. Perhaps, as some would tell us, seventeen years ago was a benighted time; at any rate we must admit it was rather dark from an Irish literary, or even "Irish Ireland," point of view. It was before the Gaelic movement, and before we had such things as "intellectuals" and the "economic man," or even the Irish Literary Theatre. Leamy's gentle and loyal soul could have taken no influence from the asperity of some of the intervening ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy

... mimic war correspondence here presented to the public. The stirring story of these tin-soldier campaigns occupies the greater share of the book, though interspersed with many pages of scattered verse, not a little Gaelic idiom and verb, a half-made will and the chaptering of a novel. This game of tin soldiers, an intricate "Kriegspiel," involving rules innumerable, prolonged arithmetical calculations, constant measuring with foot-rules, and the throwing of dice, sprang from the humblest beginnings—a row of soldiers ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... child's with a new toy. And presently he sat down upon the table, sword in hand; the air that he was making all the time began to run a little clearer, and then clearer still; and then out he burst with a great voice into a Gaelic song. ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson

... expostulations, pulls, cracks of the whip, or even kicks, I am sorry to say, seemed to produce the slightest effect upon their determination to remain stretched at full length on the ground. What were we to do? The driver vociferated in Gaelic, but the poor brutes did not mind, and they would have been cruelly maltreated if we had not interfered to protect them. Gilbert said to the man: "You see well enough that they have no strength to work, therefore allow them to rest till they are able to go ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... the guidance of Captain Cargill, an old soldier, who had been chosen as leader of the new settlement. At the head of a fine harbour, which they called Port Chalmers, they laid the foundations of a town, to which they gave the patriotic name of Dunedin, Gaelic for Edinburgh. It was in a fine district, troubled by few natives, and it steadily grew. Less than a year later, it had 745 inhabitants, who could boast of a good jetty, and a newspaper. The life ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland

... rainy; elderly gentlemen would have needed "their lass with a lantern," to escort them from their chambers. The old city guard sputtered their Gaelic, and stamped up and down for warmth. The chairmen drank their last fee to keep out the cold—and in and out of the low doorways moved middle-aged women barefooted, and in curch and short gown, who, when snooded maidens, had gazed on the white cockade, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... you could speak Gaelic," said my father, thinking of his wife, I believe, whose mother tongue it was. "But that is not what you want most to learn. Do you think Kirsty could ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... out into a kind of roar, as near to the above as English letters will sound. Perhaps he was laughing in Gaelic, with a cross of Scandinavian; but, whatever it was, he seemed heartily ashamed of his rudeness, and looked as ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn

... who I was; all of which I evaded, though he seemed fully convinced that I was an American; and amongst other things asked me whether my father had not been American consul at Seville. What, however, most perplexed him was my understanding Moorish and Gaelic, which he had heard me speak respectively to the hamalos and the Irish woman, the latter of whom, as he said, had told him that I was a fairy man. At last he introduced the subject of religion, and spoke with much contempt of revelation, avowing himself a deist; ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... sense, and their trained memories, that we owe much information regarding the British Isles themselves from the ninth to the thirteenth century. The contact of the Scandinavian peoples with the English race on the one hand, and the Gaelic on the other, has been an important factor in the subsequent history of Britain; and this is naturally a subject on which the Icelandic evidence is of the highest value." Prefatory Note to ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various

... aroused at the time by the Ossianic poems of James Macpherson. From 1760 to 1763 Macpherson, then a young Highland Scots schoolmaster, published in rapid succession certain fragments of Gaelic verse and certain more extended works in poetical English prose which, he asserted, were part of the originals, discovered by himself, and translations, of the poems of the legendary Scottish bard Ossian, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... their own. They used their claymores, their dirks, their scythes fastened upon poles, against the horses, then, springing up, put long arms about the horsemen and, regardless of sword or pistol, dragged them down. They shouted their Gaelic slogans; their costume, themselves, seemed out of a fiercer, earlier world. A strangeness overclouded the senses; mist wreaths were everywhere, and an uncertainty as to the numbers of demons.... The cavalry broke. Officers tried to save the situation, ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... his Highland property at Lochshiel, Mr. Hope-Scott personally acquainted himself with his smaller tenantry, and entered into all their history, going about with a keeper known by the name of 'Black John,' who acted as his Gaelic interpreter. His frank and kindly manners quite won their hearts. Sometimes he would ask his guests to accompany him on such visits, and make them observe the peculiarities of the Celtic character. On one of these occasions he and the late Duke of Norfolk went to visit an old peasant ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby

... never be excessive; their social work in the encouragement of the industrial revival by the starting of agricultural and co-operative societies, and, most of all at this time, of the Industrial Development Association; their whole-hearted assistance in the work of the Gaelic League, and their aid in the discouragement of emigration—all these, apart from their spiritual labours, are factors which have increased their claims to the affection of the people to whom they minister and ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell

... I immediately proceeded to break it. The success of a fairy book, I am convinced, depends on the due admixture of the comic and the romantic: Grimm and Asbjoernsen knew this secret, and they alone. But the Celtic peasant who speaks Gaelic takes the pleasure of telling tales somewhat sadly: so far as he has been printed and translated, I found him, to my surprise, conspicuously lacking in humour. For the comic relief of this volume I have therefore had to turn mainly to the Irish ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)

... speak to. An inexpressible longing for home came over him. There was a shop in a by-street which exposed photographs of Galway scenery in its windows for a time. Hyacinth used to go day by day to gaze at them. The modest front of the Gaelic League Hyce was another haunt of his. He used to stand Debating his eyes on the Irish titles of the books in the window, and repeating the words he read aloud to himself until the passers-by turned to look at him. Once he entered a low-browed, dingy shop merely because the owner's name ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham

... from now, with her own Government, with her own language back again—Gaelic—an' what language in the wurrld yields greater music than the old Gaelic?—with Ireland united and Ireland's land in the care of IRISHMEN: with Ireland's people self-respectin' an' sober an' healthy an' educated: with Irishmen employed on Irish industries, exportin' them ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners

... predominant. It drove out the Celtic—it was not driven out by the Teutonic—and it is at this day the basis of the French, Spanish, and Portuguese languages. In our island the Latin appears never to have superseded the old Gaelic speech, and could not stand its ground before the German.' It was in the fifth century that that modification of the German or Teutonic speech called the Anglo-Saxon was introduced into this country. It soon asserted its superiority over the British tongue, which seemed ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... to which Edward sat down, told of the Chief's immense hospitality. After the meal, healths were drunk, and the bard of the clan recited a wild and thrilling poem in Gaelic—of which, of course, Edward could not understand so much as one word, though it excited the clansmen so that they sprang up in ecstasy, many of them waving their arms about in sympathy with the warlike verses. The Chief, exactly in the ancient manner, presented a silver cup full of wine to the ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... of the Shetland Islands, with a handsome, strong-willed hero and a lovely girl of Gaelic blood as heroine. A sequel ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child

... of soul and mentality. Heredity seemed to have done its best for her. The Gaelic fire and the brilliance and irresponsibility of her misguided father seemed to have been balanced and tempered by the gentle woman soul of her mother. And through the eyes of both she gazed out upon the world, inspired and supported by a tireless ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum

... now desolation; and a warlike people occupying its soil, subject to the Danes 600 years and more before the Danes themselves are supposed to have discovered it. In the face of such a revelation as this, nowhere else to be found but in Ossian, what does it signify that the Gaelic text of Inisthona has perished? The fact that it survives in English is only a greater miracle, for which we are indebted solely to the patience and fidelity of a man who has been called a ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, January 1876 • Various

... happened next. Laird Duncan roared something obscene in Scots Gaelic, put his hands on the arms of his wheelchair, and, with a great thrust of his powerful arms and shoulders, shoved himself up and forward, toward Lord Darcy, across the table from him. His arms swung up toward Lord Darcy's throat as the momentum ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett

... The Wee Folk.—In Gaelic they are usually called "The Peace People" (sithchean). Other names are "Wee Folk" (daoine beaga); "Light Folk" (slaugh eutrom), etc. As in the Lowlands, they are also referred to as "guid fowk" and ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie

... called in Gaelic Beal-tene—i.e., the fire of Bel.... Like the other public worship of the Druids, the Beltane feast seems to have been performed on hills or eminences. They thought it degrading to him whose temple is the universe, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... interpretation of life—the age was not less remarkable. Dr. Johnson was still alive when Coleridge came up to school at Christ's Hospital, Goldsmith had died eight years before. But a new spirit was abroad in the younger generation. Macpherson's "Fingal," alleged to be a translation from the ancient Gaelic poet Ossian, had appeared in 1760; Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," a collection of folk-ballads and rude verse-romances such as the common people cherished but critics had long refused to consider as poetry, ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... minds, and when Scotland awoke to political activity (as will appear in Chapter VII) the idea of a General Convention took firm root and led to remarkable developments. For the present, the chief work of these clubs was the circulation of Paine's volumes (even in Welsh, Gaelic, and Erse) at the price of sixpence or even less. They also distributed "The Catechism of the French Constitution" (of 1791), drawn up by Christie, a Scot domiciled at Paris, which set forth the beauties of that child of many hopes. Less objectionable ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... or Gaelic term for a rocky eminence, or rocks on a wash: hence the word hard, in present use. It ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... Gaelic orthography were found to be involved, it was decided to mention the house as standing in a bi-lingual district upon the borders of Wales, and Lord Bute arranged with Sir William Lewis to have these linguistic points represented by ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various

... methods of observation give the following results: (1.) by the deflection of the plumb-line in the proximity of the Shehallien Mountain (Gaelic, Thichallin) in Perthshire, r.713, as determined by Maskelyne, Hutton, and Playfair (1774-1776 and 1810), according to a method that had been proposed by Newton; (2.) by pendulum vibrations on mountains, 4.837 (Carlini's observations on Mount Cenis compared with Biot's observations ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... of the Gaelic land where he walked as a boy, the cliffs were as fantastic as the clouds. Heaven seemed to humble itself and come closer to the earth. The common paths of his little village began to climb quite suddenly ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... it took," went on Drysdale. "I thought old Murdock would have wept on his neck. As it was, he scattered snuff enough to fill a pint pot over him out of his mull, and began talking Gaelic. And Blake had the cheek to jabber a lot of gibberish back to him, as if he ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... Scotland, 43 m. by 28 m., with a bold and rocky coast; has flagstone quarries; fishing the chief industry, of which Wick is the chief seat; the inhabitants are to a great extent of Scandinavian origin, and English, not Gaelic, is the language spoken. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... various denominations, but was particularly interested in my own, the Protestant Episcopal. The Rt. Rev. H. C. Potter, Bishop of New York, and his secretary, Rev. Percy S. Grant, were passengers on board our ship, the Gaelic. The special purpose of the Bishop's visit to Honolulu was to effect the transfer of the Episcopal churches of the Sandwich Islands to the jurisdiction of our House of Bishops. He expressed himself as delighted with his cordial reception and with the ready, Christian-like ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger

... sooner bank on Tuscan, Ay, or even on Etruscan, Than on Erse; But fanatical campaigners, Gaelic Leaguers and Sinn Feiners Find ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various

... which had been already printed in Lewis' "Tales of Wonder." Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong tincture of the supernatural; but the first—Scott himself draws the distinction—is a "legendary poem," and the second alone a proper "ballad." "Glenfinlas," [25] founded on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highland chieftain while hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of "The Lady of the Lake," is lured from his bothie at night and torn to pieces by evil spirits. There is no attempt here to preserve the language of popular poetry; ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... from the Gaelic on pages 77 and 78 were made by the late P. H. Pearse, who was executed in Dublin for his part in the Easter Rebellion. The translations appeared in New Ireland, and I am indebted to the Editor of that review for permission ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... to the creel, handling some of the sods of turf Denis Donohoe knew she was searching a constitutionally abusive mind for some word contemptuous of his wares. She found it at last, for she smacked her lips. It was in the Gaelic. "Spairteach!" she cried—a word that was eloquent of bad turf, stuff dug from the first layer of the bog, a mere covering for the correct vein ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly

... wind, ran at full speed up the steep side of the hill; a panting woman, without bonnet or shawl, following hard upon his track, shaking her fist at him, and vociferating her commands (doubtless for him to return) in Gaelic, fled by. ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... gracious sister-in-law, and Carl drank tea (with lemon instead of milk in it!) and listened to bewildering talk and to a few stanzas, heroic or hauntingly musical, by a new poet, W. B. Yeats, an Irishman associated with a thing called the Gaelic Movement. Professor Frazer had a funny, easy friendliness; his sister-in-law, a Diana in brown, respectfully asked Carl about the practicability of motor-cars, and all of them, including two newly come "high-brow" ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... on the Irish Language Movement. Delivered under the auspices of various branches of the Gaelic League. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... all his strength as if by a miracle. The gaunt look had left his face. Almost it seemed that its contour was already fuller. There is a beautiful old Gaelic legend of a Fairy who wooed a Prince, came again and again to him, and, herself invisible to all but the Prince, hovered in the air, sang loving songs to draw him away from the crowd of his indignant nobles, who heard her voice and summoned magicians to rout her by all spells and enchantments ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson

... grandfather of the first Earl of Cromarty, and was said to have been a man of much ability and considerable culture for the times in which he lived. At the same time he was a man of strong personality though of evil repute in the Gaelic-speaking districts, as the following couplet still current ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... dark mountains, and comes at last to your door in Monterey, charged with tender greetings. Pray you, take him in. He comes from a house where (even as in your own) there are gathered together some of the waifs of our company at Oakland: a house - for all its outlandish Gaelic name and distant station - where ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson

... young blood run cold. Sister Anne is represented, and so are the rescuing brothers, the latter in the person of the heroine's old friend and playmate, Toennis the goose-herd. Several very curious Gaelic versions of the story are given by Mr. Campbell ("Tales of the West Highlands," No. 41, ii. 265-275). Two of the three daughters of a poor widow look into a forbidden chamber, find it "full of dead gentlewomen," get stained knee-deep in blood, and refuse to give ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... gave vent to his feelings in Gaelic when labouring under strong excitement. On this occasion his utterances were terrible in tone ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne

... name. She was Ellen Douglas, and was in banishment on an island with her father. You are Ellen, and Josephine is your old harper—Allan Bane; she talks French, you know, and that will do for Highland: Gallic and Gaelic sound alike, you know. There! Then I'm going out hunting, and my dear gallant grey will drop down dead with fatigue, and I shall lose my way; and when you hear me wind my horn too-too, you get upon your hoop—that will be your boat, you know—and answer 'Father!' ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge

... who—and that the combat took place in this square. Now, my dear fellow, here is the prison, which ought to give you some idea of human vicissitudes. Gil Blas didn't change his condition more often than this monument its purposes. Before Caesar it was a Gaelic temple; Caesar converted it into a Roman fortress; an unknown architect transformed it into a military work during the Middle Ages; the Knights of Baye, following Caesar's example, re-made it into a fortress; the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas

... showed himself, alone, To do his ghostly battling, With curdling groan and dismal moan, And lots of chains a-rattling! But no—the chiel's stout Gaelic stuff Withstood all ghostly harrying; His fingers closed upon the snuff Which ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert

... Society of Scotland, with English-Gaelic and Latin-Gaelic Vocabularies, 2 vols. 4to. (pub. at 7l. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various

... priests or ministers of religion among the ancient Celtic nations in Gaul, Britain, and Germany. Our information respecting them is borrowed from notices in the Greek and Roman writers, compared with the remains of Welsh and Gaelic poetry ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... Mortimer. "A glance at our friend here reveals the rounded head of the Celt, which carries inside it the Celtic enthusiasm and power of attachment. Poor Sir Charles's head was of a very rare type, half Gaelic, half Ivernian in its characteristics. But you were very young when you last saw Baskerville Hall, ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle

... Lydia's pale face and reddened eyes, the smile died away. She clasped her big hands with a pitying gesture, and cried out a Gaelic exclamation of compassion with a much-moved accent; then, "It's time I was here," she told herself. She wiped her eyes, passed the back of her hand over her nose with a sniff, picked up the dishcloth from the floor, and advanced upon a pile of dirty silver. ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... by Liffey's wave That maidens sung. They sang their land, the Saxon's slave, In Saxon tongue. Oh, bring me here that Gaelic dear Which cursed the Saxon foe. When thou didst charm my raptured ear Mo ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan

... remarkable—hardly less than grand, with a certain aquiline expression, although the nose was not roman. His eyes appeared very dark, but in the daylight were greenish hazel. Usually he talked with the girl in Gaelic, but was now speaking English, a far purer English than that of most English people, though with something of the character of book-English as distinguished from conversation-English, and ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... explanation is quite gratuitous. The reason why the Celts used this method is entirely unknown, and need not concern investigators in the least. But the fact that they did use it is important, and commands attention. The five Celtic languages, Breton, Irish, Welsh, Manx, and Gaelic, contain the following well-defined vigesimal scales. Only the principal or characteristic numerals are given, those being sufficient to enable the reader to follow intelligently the growth of the systems. Each contains the decimal element also, ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant

... it. The boy was a good boy, he said to himself; the boy had been to him as the son of his own heart; there was no fault to find with him or in him; he was as brave as he was kind, as sincere as he was clever, as strong as he was gentle; he could play on the bagpipes, and very nearly talk Gaelic, but his mother was a Campbell, and for that there was no help. To be on loving terms with one in whose veins ran a single drop of the black pollution was a thing no MacDhonuill must dream of. He had lived a man of honour, and he would die a man of honour, hating the Campbells ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... riddles were taken from the Gaelic, and are charming examples of the naive beauty of the old Irish, and of Dr. Hyde's accurate and sympathetic modern rendering. From "Beside the ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant

... a prayer rug for which Kenny had toured into the south of Persia and led an Arabian Nights' existence with pursuing bandits whom, by some extraordinary twist of genius, he had conciliated and painted; an illuminated manuscript in Gaelic which he claimed had been used by a warrior to ransom a king; chain armor, weapons of all kinds, climes and periods; an Alpine horn, reminiscent of the summer Kenny had saved a young painter's life ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple

... of party war. Who, then, can hope for peace where into the strife is imported a race difference, where the division is not of party but of people? That is in truth the vain hope. And be it borne in mind the race difference is not due to our predominating Gaelic stock, but to the separate countries and to distinct households in the human race. If we were all of English extraction the difference would still exist. There is the historic case of the American States; it is easy ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... language are far from being so seriously exhausted as we have seen that they are in our own complicated sphere, where the cultivation of all the higher forms of poetic diction through five centuries has made simple expression extremely difficult. I am therefore ready to believe that in Welsh, as in Gaelic and in Erse, the poets have still wide fields of lyric, epic, and dramatic art untilled. We have seen, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Provencal poets capable of producing simple and thrilling numbers which are out of the reach of their sophisticated brethren who employ the worn ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... Dover to Balong, in the year Anna Domino 1818. Steemers were scarce in those days; and our journey was made in a smack. At last, when I was in a stage of despare and exostion, as reely to phansy myself at Death's doar, we got to the end of our journey. Late in the evening we hailed the Gaelic shoars, and hankered in ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... English, French, and American, are for ever passing to view Glencoe, and to write their names in the hotel book after luncheon, then flying to other scenes. There has even been a strike of long duration at the Ballachulish Quarries, and Labour leaders have perorated to the Celts; but Gaelic is still spoken, second sight is nearly as common as short sight, you may really hear the fairy music if you bend your ear, on a still day, to the grass of the fairy knowe. Only two generations back a fairy boy lived in a now ruinous house, noted in the story of the Massacre of ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang

... to the early celebrities already named, Extreme Carelessness, Michael, Brickbat, Poppy II., Moya Doolan, Straight Tip, and Gaelic have taken their places in the records of the breed, while yet more recent Irish Terriers who have achieved fame have been Mrs. Butcher's Bawn Boy and Bawn Beauty, Mr. Wallace's Treasurer, Mr. S. Wilson's Bolton Woods Mixer, Dr. Smyth's Sarah ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... denied in the Gaelic the charge the sheriff clerk read to them in a long farrago of English with more foreign words to it than ever I learned the sense of ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... rustic villages, where creature comforts yet abound, and nowhere is the dolce far niente so easily induced. Why should we be at the trouble of undertaking a hot, dusty railway journey in search of Gaelic tombs, Gothic churches, or Merovingian remains when we have the essence of deliciousness at our very door?—waving fields of ripe corn, amid which the reapers in twos and threes are at work—picturesque figures that seemed to have walked out of Millet's canvas—lines ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... long tale of yours, and we will cut it with a drink; as the Highlander says, Skeoch doch nan skial ['Cut a tale with a drink;' an expression used when a man preaches over his liquor, as bons vivants say in England. S.]; and that 's good Gaelic.—Here is to the Countess Isabelle of Croye, and a better husband to her than Campobasso, who is a base Italian cullion!—And now, Andrew Arnot, what said the muleteer to ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... him, he was in earnest discussion with one of his men, and he was not using English but sputtering a torrent of shrill Gaelic, shrugging his shoulders, throwing his arms about, thrilling with excitement—but for all that, he was the picture of a man that most women would ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... as a matter of course, the royal hunting-grounds. Very probably these were on both sides of the Earn—stretching westward into the neighbouring parish of Dunning, the northmost part of which is still called Dalreoch or Dailrigh, a word which, in Gaelic, means the ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... we have to do with a Scotchman, and a Scotchman never realises anything 'instantly.' The Gaelic mind works slowly, though it works exceeding sure. He will be exceeding sure, when he has contemplated you for a while, that I am a 'verra poor judge o' women,' and that Nurse Gray is a far finer woman than I described. ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay

... went on, "a' the languages o' the earth cam, or luik as gien they had come, frae ane, though we're no jist dogsure o' that. There's my mither's ain Gaelic, for enstance: it's as auld, maybe aulder nor the Greek; onygait, it has mair Greek nor Laitin words intil 't, an' ye ken the Greek 's an aulder tongue nor the Laitin. Weel, gien we could work oor w'y back ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... knowledge of this very ancient race—enough to show us that its peculiar type lingers to this day in a few remote islands on the Galway and Kerry coast, mingled with many later races. This type we find described in old Gaelic records as the Firbolgs, a race weak and furtive, dusky and keen-eyed, subjected by later races of greater force. Yet from this race, as if to show the inherent and equal power of the soul, came holy saints and mighty warriors; to the old race of the Firbolgs ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston

... also not a little of the capabilities of his own language; for, Celt as he was by birth and country and mental character, he could not speak the Gaelic: that language, soft as the speech of streams from rugged mountains, and wild as that of the wind in the tops of fir-trees, the language at once of bards and fighting men, had so far ebbed from the region, lingering only here and there in the hollow ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... are the Gallic, spoken in ancient Gaul; the Breton, still spoken in the modern French province of Brittany; the Irish, which is still extensively spoken in Ireland among the common people, the Welsh; and the Gaelic of ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett

... I had, nevertheless, sense enough about me remaining, to make me aware that the best place for me would be my bed; so, after making Nanse bring the bottle and glass to the door on a server, to give Peter Farrel a dram by way of "doch-an-dorris," as the Gaelic folk say, we wished him a good-night, and left him to drive home the bit gig, with the broken shaft spliced with ropes, to his own bounds; little jealousing, as we heard next morning, that he would be thrown over the back of it, without being hurt, by taking too sharp a turn ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir

... rather suffer and enjoy his hearty grasp than the cold formality of conventional humbug. The hardy old pioneer has realized a very comfortable independence, and he told me his only neighbours were a band of his countrymen at the back of the hill, who speak Gaelic exclusively and scarce know a word of English. They mostly came out with "The Macnab," but from time to time they are refreshed by ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... meanwhile erratic in many directions: twice to America, as we have seen, on telegraph voyages; continually to London on business; often to Paris; year after year to the Highlands to shoot, to fish, to learn reels and Gaelic, to make the acquaintance and fall in love with the character of Highlanders; and once to Styria, to hunt chamois and dance with peasant maidens. All the while, he was pursuing the course of his electrical studies, making fresh inventions, ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson

... thought of his relations, he read the legends of Meath on his way out; he often sat considering his adventures, the circus, the mining camp, and his sympathy with the Cubans in their revolt against Spain; these convinced him of his Gaelic inheritance and that something might be done with Ireland. England's power was great, but Spain's power had been great too, and when Spain thought herself most powerful the worm had begun. Everything has its day, and as England decayed, ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore

... he, "and they talk Gaelic and French also; the first two they learned from their father, and ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... Jocelyn Thew's face as he listened, and the tears stood in his eyes. The man was reciting Gaelic verses, verses familiar to him from childhood. The whole desolate picture seemed to envisage thoughts which he had never been able to drive from his mind, seemed in the person of this old man to breathe such incomparable, unalterable fidelity that he felt himself suddenly ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... meaning himself,—"hersel' may go to ta deevil if he wull; ta little lassie sall be a lady." (Jamie's Scotch always grew more Gaelic as he got excited.) It was evident that he regarded religion as a sort of ornament of superior breeding, that Mercedes must have, though he could do without it. And Mr. James Bowdoin looked in Jamie's eye, and held his peace. In those days deference was rigidly exacted in the divers relations ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... eyeing the bottle, and added with a brutal laugh that "he could weather the roughest gale that ever wind did blow." A whole Gaelic society, he said, wouldn't ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock

... born at Ruthven, a village in Inverness-shire, in 1738. Being intended for the ministry, he received a good preliminary education, and became early interested in the ancient Gaelic ballads and poetic fragments still floating about the Highlands of Scotland. By the aid of Mr. John Home, the author of Douglas, and his friends Blair and Ferguson, he published, in 1760, a small volume of sixty pages entitled, Fragments of Ancient Poetry translated from the Gaelic ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... roughly and cursed him soundly in both English and Gaelic, without avail, but the child's cry so full of pain and weakness roused him with a start. In a minute Dr. Frederick Barner was himself. He took the child gently from his mother and ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung

... Highlanders, was full of imagination, and, when melancholy themes came upon her, expressed herself almost poetically, owing to the genius of the Celtic language in which she thought, and in which, doubtless, she would have spoken, had I understood Gaelic. In two minutes the shade of gloom and regret had passed from her good-humoured features, and she was again the little, busy, prating, important old woman, undisputed owner of one flat of a small tenement in the Abbey Yard, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott

... Country. The Highlanders, whose loyalty to their oath made them fight on the King's side in the Revolutionary War, have been somewhat overlooked in history. Tradition, handed down among the transplanted clans—who, for the most part, spoke only Gaelic for a generation and wrote nothing—and latterly recorded by one or two of their descendants, supplies us with all we are now able to learn of the early coming of the Gaels to Carolina. It would ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner

... strange that the drama is named, not for him, but for the crafty and pitiless executioner of the king's justice. But he is after all the most interesting character in the piece, with his Biblical references in broad Lowland Scots (we may suppose that the Stewarts speak Gaelic among themselves), his superstition, his remorseless cruelty. We should like to see how he takes the discovery that, perhaps for the first time, he has been baffled in his career of ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various

... in Scotland and, as has been said, was a philologist of the better class, is scrupulously exact in spelling proper names as a rule. Perhaps Loch Fyne is not exactly "Le Lac Beau" (I have not the Gaelic). But from Pentland to Solway (literally) he makes no blunder, and he actually knows all ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... Gaelic broke from Duncan, into the midst of which rushed another from Mrs. Catanach, similar, but coarse in vowel and harsh in consonant sounds. The marquis stepped into the room. "What is the meaning of all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... similarities which establish the relationship of the group. As for likeness of roots, here is a specimen: gyordunus is the Turkish for the Finnish naikke.—So here you see a degree of kinship much more remote than that you find in the Aryan. Where, say, Dutch and Gaelic are brothers—at least near relations and bosom friends,—Turkish and Mongol are about fifteenth cousins by marriage twice removed, and hardly even nod to each other in passing. And yet Turks and Mongols both claim descent from the sons of a ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... Ossianic river, was utterly unknown to him; he does not even attempt to translate its name. All that pertains to Arran, and still so distinctly traceable there by the help of his own text in Berrathon—for which Gaelic no longer exists—he transfers in his ignorance to the wilds of Morven. As for Ireland, all that he knows, or seems to know, is that Ullin is Ulster; but the very scenes which are most conspicuous in Ulster he transfers to Leinster—from Antrim, for example, to Meath; and the rest to ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various

... Episcopal Church of Scotland, and applied to the purposes of preaching and education in the Highlands. The sum, in the Scotland of that time, might go as far as L7000 or L8000 a year now, though in England it would have been worth only about L4200 of present value. Spent on an effective Gaelic mission of travelling pastors, and on a few well-planted schools, it might have accomplished a good deal.[2]—Since the beginning of the Protectorate there had been some care in finding new funds for the Scottish Universities ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... woman: she had brown eyes and brown hair. She was not an Irishwoman. She was an Englishwoman. She had no Gaelic. And her English was not our English. This woman could ride a horse, though not too well. She would put a horse at a jump, though ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... form of "ton" is our ordinary "town," which, as often as we use, we are speaking the tongue of the Trans-Alpine Gauls, taking a syllable from the word of a half-forgotten people. From yet another source is the locative "ham." Chester is of Roman origin, tun is of Gaelic; but "ham" is Anglo-Saxon, and means village, whence the sweet word home. Witness the use of this suffix in Effingham and the like. "Stoke" and "beck" and "worth" are also Saxon. "Thorpe" and "by" are Danish, as in Althorp and Derby. These reminiscent instances from over seas will serve ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... the Honourable Caroline Dawson, maid of honour, set out on their ponies, attended only by Macdonald, Grant, another Highlander, and an English footman. The rough road had been improved, and riding was so easy that Prince Albert could practise his Gaelic by the way. ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler

... in his young days. He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination. What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats

... these creatures was of composite sound—now a word of Spanish, then of German, then of French, then of Gaelic, at times of Basque. It was either a patois or a slang. They appeared to be of all nations, and yet of the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... advantage in the full light of day. Yet we question whether we could have been more deeply sensible of the beauty and grandeur of the scene than we were under the unusual circumstances we have described. The boatmen sang a Gaelic joram or boat-song in the cave, striking their oars very violently in time with the music, which resounded finely through the vault, and was echoed back by roof and pillar. One of them, also, fired a gun, with the view of producing a still stronger effect of the same kind. When we had fairly ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... who'd hired the castle from him, if they happened to be people he knew, and would 'do' him well. He and his daughter were mostly in London, where they had a flat, and prided themselves on knowing no Gaelic. They took pains to show that they considered the crofter's son a common brat, and resented the meenister's' expecting them to do anything for his future, just because his name happened to be MacDonald, and he lived in a hut on a remote point of ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... tenement. I believe the auld women wad hae agreed, for Luckie MacPhail sent down the lass to tell my friend Mrs. Crombie that she had made the gardyloo out of the wrang window, out of respect for twa Highlandmen that were speaking Gaelic in the close below the right ane. But luckily for Mrs. Crombie, I just chanced to come in in time to break aff the communing, for it's a pity the point suldna be tried. We had Mrs. MacPhail into the Ten-Mark Court—The Hieland limmer of a lass ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... of verse a Celtic Psaltery because it mainly consists of close and free translations from Irish, Scotch Gaelic, and Welsh Poetry of a religious or serious character. The first half of the book is concerned with Irish poems. The first group of these starts with the dawning of Christianity out of Pagan darkness, and the spiritualising of the Early Irish by the wisdom to be found in the conversations ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves

... speak Gaelic," I said with a tone of triumph, bringing her rarest accomplishment to ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... Great Lady of the Cat, is the Gaelic title of the Countess-Duchess of Sutherland. The county of Sutherland itself is in that dialect Cattey, and in the English name of the neighbouring one, Caithness, we have another trace of the ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... however, are not written by the Editor, as he has often explained, 'out of his own head.' The stories are taken from those told by grannies to grandchildren in many countries and in many languages—French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Gaelic, Icelandic, Cherokee, African, Indian, Australian, Slavonic, Eskimo, and what not. The stories are not literal, or word by word translations, but have been altered in many ways to make them suitable for children. Much has been left out in places, and the narrative has been broken up into conversations, ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various

... heroes, and won immense though momentary fame, by a series of literary forgeries. Macpherson was a Scotch schoolmaster, an educated man, but evidently not over-tender of conscience, whose imagination had been stirred by certain old poems which he may have heard in Gaelic among the Highlanders. In 1760 he published his Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands, and alleged that his work was but a translation of Gaelic manuscripts. Whether the work of itself would have attracted attention is doubtful; but ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... folk-song. The Romance of the Violet, by Gerbert de Montruil, circa 1225, derives its name from the mother's mark of the heroine, which causes her husband to lose his bet. This was probably the source of Boccaccio's novel (ii. 9), from which Shakespeare's more immediately grew. The Gaelic version of this incident, collected by Campbell (The Chest, No. ii.), is clearly not of folk origin, but derived directly or indirectly from Boccaccio, in whom alone the Chest is found. Yet it is curious that, practically, the same story as the ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris

... in July of 1814. Like generals on field of war they laid out their campaign. Duncan Cameron, a United Empire Loyalist officer of the 1812 War, is to don his red regimentals and proceed to Red River, where his knowledge of the Gaelic tongue may be trusted to win over Selkirk settlers. "Nothing but the complete downfall of the colony will satisfy some," wrote one of the fiery Nor'westers to a brother officer. Such was the mood of the Nor'westers when they came back from their annual meeting on Lake ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... violently denounced in those acts, were what are here called "masterful beggars," who, when they could not obtain what they asked for by fair means, seldom hesitated to take it by violence. The term is said to be Gaelic, and to import a soldier. The life of such a beggar is well described in the "Belman of London," printed in 1608—"The life of a beggar is the life of a souldier. He suffers hunger and cold in winter, and heate and thirste in summer; he goes lowsie, he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various

... from the Gaelic word tanaiste, a chief, or the next heir to an estate—have been frequently found. These stones were used in connection with the coronation of a king or the inauguration of a chief. The custom dates from ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... Loch Lomond to the little inn of Rowardennan, from which the ascent is made of Ben Lomond, the greatest elevation in these parts. The boatmen are fine, athletic men; one of those with us this evening, a handsome young man of two or three and twenty, sang to us some Gaelic songs. The first, a very wild and plaintive air, was the expostulation of a girl whose lover has deserted her and married another. It seems he is ashamed, and will not even look at her when they meet upon the road. She implores him, if he has not forgotten all that scene of bygone love, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... us some Scotch and Gaelic songs with remarkable pathos and power; and invariably, after every one else had retired, he remained talking intimately, often confidentially, with my husband ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... of them were treated. At the time when the literati were engaged in investigating the authenticity of Ossian's Poems (to go no farther back), it was stated that there was in the library of the Scotch College at Douay a Gaelic MS. of several of the poems of great antiquity, and which, if produced, would have set the question at rest. On farther inquiry, however, it was stated that it had been torn up, along with others, and used by the students for the purpose ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various

... Ayrshire, and 'Glenalmond,' in Perthshire, are both from the corrupted spelling of the word 'Avon,' which derives from its being very nearly the pronunciation of the Gaelic word for 'a river.' These names are from 'Gleann-abhuinn,' that is,'the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... works. As a boy I remember listening to him with delight, for his memory was stored with a never-ending stock of stories, many of which were wonderfully like those I have since heard while sitting by the African evening fires. Our grandmother, too, used to sing Gaelic songs, some of which, as she believed, had been composed by captive islanders ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... "Except that an hour ago I forgot to tune in on the only TV program I've wanted to hear this year—Finnegans Wake scored for English, Gaelic and brogue. ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... he swore and staunched the gore An' ere Macfee got ae lick, Macfadden cursed him heid an' heels In comprehensive Gaelic. ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie

... Gaelic to know it was not exactly blessing us she was. It is not necessary to know cat-language to distinguish between purring and spitting! What harm have we done? Her voice was fierce, and her eyes were like two live peats flaming at us! ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... find among these poems and ballads a striking threnody called "The Exile's Return," signed with the name of "Patrick Henry"; and it is noteworthy, for more reasons than one, that the volume winds up with a "Marching Song of the Gaelic Athletes," signed "An Chraoibhin Aoibbinn." These Athletes are numbered now, I am assured, not by thousands, but by myriads, and their organisation covers all parts of Ireland. If the spirit of '48 and of '98 is really moving among them, I should say ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert

... appeared upon the scene, the inhabitants call them "the Gars of such or such a parish." This classic name is a reward for the fidelity with which they struggle to preserve the traditions of the language and manners of their Gaelic ancestors; their lives show to this day many remarkable and deeply embedded vestiges of the beliefs and superstitious practices of those ancient times. Feudal customs are still maintained. Antiquaries find Druidic monuments still standing. The genius of modern civilization ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac

... in the general affairs of the world. A secession of Scotland or Wales is as unlikely as a secession of Normandy or Languedoc. The part of the island which is not thoroughly assimilated in language, that part which still speaks Welsh or Gaelic, is larger in proportion than the non-French part of modern France. But however much either the northern or the western Briton may, in a fit of antiquarian politics, declaim against the Saxon, for all practical political purposes ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... either hand of it, full of rugged isles and reefs most perilous to seamen—all overlooked from the eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peals of Ben Kyaw. The Mountain of the Mist, they say the words signify in the Gaelic tongue; and it is well named. For that hill-top, which is more than three thousand feet in height, catches all the clouds that come blowing from the seaward; and, indeed, I used often to think that it must make them for itself; since ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... lawyers!" he cried fiercely. "I will be begging your pardon, Mr. Coulson," he added apologetically. "But it will be a great peety that a fine man like yourself would be hafing anything to do with the tribe. But if they had jist been hafing the Gaelic, I would haf been giving it to them. Och, but it will be a peety about the English. It would be but a ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith

... "although I used to sometimes when you were a little girl and talked very wild English. Don't you remember how vexed you used to be, and how pleased you were when your papa turned the laugh against me by getting me to say that awful Gaelic sentence about 'A young calf ate a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish note: only official languages are listed; German, the major language of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, is the most widely spoken mother tongue - over 19% ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... information as to Eastern matters, was Colonel James Ferguson of Huntly Burn, one of the sons of the venerable historian and philosopher of that name—which name he took the liberty of concealing under its Gaelic form ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott

... possessed several of these dogs, verified as being derived from the best stock on the island, from which their parents—who understood no language but Gaelic—were brought direct, I have noted some of their odd, whimsical ways, a few of which I will illustrate, taking for my exponent one very remarkable little fellow who was a genuine type of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... which King Hacon died; also the ruins of the palace of Patrick, Earl of Orkney. I have been treated here with every kindness and civility. As soon as the people knew who I was they could scarcely make enough of me. The Sheriff, Mr. Robertson, a great Gaelic scholar, said he was proud to see me in his house; and a young gentleman of the name of Petrie, Clerk of Supply, has done nothing but go about with me to show me the wonders of the place. Mr. Robertson wished to give me letters to some gentleman at Edinburgh. I, ...
— Letters to his wife Mary Borrow • George Borrow

... that flood and dishearten the world, that they are so uncandid in their relation of those emotional episodes in life—episodes which have to do with what we know for some curious reason as "the softer passions." Caesar's Gaelic wars, his bridges, his trouble with the impedimenta, his fights with the Helvetians—who cares for them? Who cares greatly for Napoleon's expedition against the Allies? Of what human interest is Grant's tale of the Wilderness fighting? But ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... for instance, lying on a ledge of rock above our Brigade Headquarters with a great gaping shrapnel wound in his abdomen imploring the Medical Officer in the Gaelic tongue to "put him out," and how he died, with a morphia tablet in his mouth, singing at the top of his ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave

... the origin of many of the curious superstitious customs still extant in this country on Hallowe'en. Dr. Smith, commenting in Jamieson's Dictionary on the solemnities of Beltane, says, "The other of these solemnities was held upon Hallow Eve, which in Gaelic still retains the name of Sham-in,—this word signifying the Fire of Peace, or the time of kindling the fire for maintaining peace. It was at this season that the Druids usually met in the most central places of every country to adjust every dispute and decide every controversy. On that occasion, ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier

... of the room, in a deep window, a small boy, with a dog and a cat, was playing at being on a raft. The boy's name was Gervase Taunton, but he was known to a large circle of acquaintances as "the Mhor," which, as Jean would have explained to you, is Gaelic for "the great one." Thus had greatness been thrust upon him. He was seven, and he had lived at The Rigs since he was two. He was a handsome child with an almost uncanny charm of manner, and a gift of make-believe that made ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)

... Peerless brought his beautiful little vessel from the Clyde in 6000 pieces, and is justly proud of her. I sat next him at dinner, and found that we knew some of the same people in Scotland. Gaelic was a further introduction; and though so many thousand miles away, for a moment I felt myself at home when we spoke of the majestic Cuchullins and the heathery braes of Balquidder. In the Peerless every one took wine or liqueurs. There was no bill of fare, but a long list of wines ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... freshness to all the adornable parts of the room. Immediately opposite the lectern, which was illuminated with wax candles, placed in last century candlesticks, and attached to the gallery railings, was a fine collection of Lochaber axes, clustered around a genuine wooden Gaelic shield studded with polished knobs of glittering brass. Long before the hour of eight the company had increased to such an extent that the room was crowded to the doors, but not inconveniently as the ventilation was unexceptionable. With accustomed punctuality, James ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... at present, spoken throughout Great Britain, is neither the ancient primitive speech of the island, nor derived from it; but is altogether of foreign origin. The language of the first inhabitants of our island, beyond doubt, was the Celtic, or Gaelic, common to them with Gaul; from which country, it appears, by many circumstances, that Great Britain was peopled. This Celtic tongue, which is said to be very expressive and copious, and is, probably, one of the most ancient languages in the world, obtained ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... of tales, I owe much to Mr. W. A. Craigie, who translated the stories from the Gaelic and the Icelandic; to Miss Elspeth Campbell, who gives a version of the curious Argyll tradition of Ticonderoga (rhymed by Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, who put a Cameron where a Campbell should be); to Miss Violet Simpson, who found the Windham MS. about the Duke of Buckingham's ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang



Words linked to "Gaelic" :   Celt, Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, Erse, Gael, Celtic language, Goidelic



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