About Seanfhocail
A collection of Irish proverbs and blessings in Irish and English, built so that the words can be checked. There are 92 of them published.
Who this is for
Mostly people who need a line of Irish for something that cannot easily be undone. A wedding reading, a sympathy card, a christening gift, an inscription. The site is written in English because most of the people looking for this do not read Irish. That is the whole difficulty. If you cannot read the language, you cannot tell a correct blessing from a mangled one, and the internet is full of both.
It is also for learners, which is why every saying carries a word-for-word rendering alongside the natural English one. The literal version is usually the more interesting of the two: Irish proverbs tend to say something concrete where English translations go abstract.
What it is not
- Not an Irish course. There is no grammar teaching here.
- Not a quote aggregator. Unattributed wording found circulating online is not a source, and nothing gets published on the strength of it.
- Not Scottish Gaelic or Manx. They look close enough to Irish to fool a careless eye, and they are not what this is.
- Not a collection of “Irish sayings” of no traditional provenance. Modern authored lines that have drifted into circulation as proverbs are a different thing, and where we are unsure we say so on the record.
The standard we will not trade
No Irish text ships without a citation naming where that wording came from. Full detail is on the sources and method page, but the short version is that it is enforced by an automated check rather than by intention, and that sayings we cannot cite are left out rather than passed on.
The other two commitments are worth stating here because they cost something. Irish text is never “improved”, regularised, or reconstructed by translating the English back into Irish: if a source’s wording looks odd, that is something to investigate rather than a licence to fix it. And pronunciation audio, when it arrives, will be human-recorded with the speaker named, or it will not exist. Synthesised and voice-cloned Irish is prohibited here permanently. That rule was written down before there was any audio to apply it to, which is the only time such a rule is cheap.
How the deep record pages are reviewed
The longer record pages: the word-by-word tables, usage guidance, origin notes and questions: are written and reviewed by the site’s editor against the sources each page cites: every dictionary gloss in a word-by-word table is quoted from the linked Foclóir Gaeilge–Béarla entry on teanglann.ie, not paraphrased, and each such page carries the date it was last reviewed. Where we could not find an attestation, the page says what we could not find rather than inventing history.
Built on: Ó Dónaill, Foclóir Gaeilge–Béarla · The Schools’ Collection, National Folklore Collection UCD · Foclóir Nua Béarla–Gaeilge · Government of Ireland · T.F. O’Rahilly, A Miscellany of Irish Proverbs (1922). Derived from the citations themselves: a source appears here only while a published record cites it.
What is unfinished
- Pronunciation guides are editorial. They are approximations written for English speakers, not phonetic transcription, and they are the one part of a record page that no source stands behind. Native-speaker audio is the intended replacement.
- The collection is small on purpose and smaller than it should be. It will grow as sourcing allows.
- Some well-known sayings are missing. Not by oversight. We looked, and could not find a citable source. They stay out until we can.
How it is built
Each saying is a single file holding its Irish text, translations, dialect variants, sources and status. The site is generated from those files, so a page cannot say anything the record does not. Automated checks run on every change: they refuse a published saying with no citation, refuse Irish text that has been corrupted in transit, and refuse a pronunciation audio entry that does not name a human speaker.