(Download) "Smoking, Drinking, Dancing and Singing on the High Seas: Steamships and the Uses of Smuid in Scottish Gaelic (Critical Essay)" by Scottish Language ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Smoking, Drinking, Dancing and Singing on the High Seas: Steamships and the Uses of Smuid in Scottish Gaelic (Critical Essay)
- Author : Scottish Language
- Release Date : January 01, 2006
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 246 KB
Description
Speakers of Scottish Gaelic are well used to the compound noun batasmuide ('boat of steam, steamship') and its noun-phrase variants, such as bata na smuid(e), which are employed fairly regularly in day-to-day Gaelic. The term, especially in its second form, is particularly common in song and verse. The Skye poetess Mairi Mhor nan Oran (Mary MacPherson, c.1821-98) is one among many Gaelic songsters who travelled on steamships, and who saw the physical outline of their native island through the smoke generously supplied by the furnaces of David MacBrayne's coal-burning vessels in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her verse contains several references to bata na smuid(e), as in the following quatrain (Meek 1998: 205): When teaching Gaelic at first level in a Scottish university back in the 1970s, the writer had the pleasure of taking a class on Mairi Mhor's verse, and conducting students through her spirited song in praise of Ben Lee, the hill at the centre of the dispute which precipitated the Battle of the Braes (1882). Each student was asked to translate one verse, and when the verse cited above was reached, the translator greatly--and unforgettably--entertained both the teacher and his classmates by rendering Mairi's bata na smuide as 'the ship of drunkenness'. Clearly, the student, true to form, was no stranger to an alternative meaning of smuid in Scottish Gaelic, namely 'intoxication', commonly used in the phrase a' gabhail smuid ('becoming [happily] intoxicated [on a specific occasion]').
 "Smoking, Drinking, Dancing and Singing on the High Seas: Steamships and the Uses of Smuid in Scottish Gaelic (Critical Essay)" by Scottish Language ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}