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I found these snippets in a recently-published fantasy novel which will remain nameless. See if you can work out what they're supposed to mean, and, if your Irish is better than mine, provide a proper translation There were no diacritics in the original.

mise toil abair tusa faic

muid ga an iarann go cearta airm, ar an cogadh

an dia cogadh

araceli wrote:I found these snippets in a recently-published fantasy novel which will remain nameless. See if you can work out what they're supposed to mean, and, if your Irish is better than mine, provide a proper translation There were no diacritics in the original.

mise toil abair tusa faic

muid ga an iarann go cearta airm, ar an cogadh

an dia cogadh

Google Translate Irish? These are incredibly ungrammatical, but here is my best guess:

1) "I will say you see", literally. Note that the will is actually the noun will, which I heavily suspect means that somebody looked up will in a dictionary and went with it. No idea what this is supposed to be.

2) "We at the iron certainly (armies/weapons), on the war". Still no idea what this is supposed to be but there is something about iron and war, which at least provides a hint to the intended meaning unlike the first one.

3) This is evidently supposed to be "the god of war", but the author forgot to use the genitive (an dia cogaidh).

tl;dr this is a lot of things but not Irish.

mise toil abair tusa faic

"I will tell you nothing!" (Correct: Ní déarfaidh mé faic leat.)

muid ga an iarann go cearta airm, ar an cogadh

Ga here is presumably gá "need (n.), necessity". Cearta airm looks like it might be an attempt to pluralise "right arm", but I'm not sure what the go ("to, till") is doing there. Ar an cogadh is probably "for the war".

Not going to attempt to retranslate this.

Edit: Wait, cearta could be ceárta "forge (n.)", in which case this would read, "We need iron to forge weapons for the war." (Correct: Tá gá againn le hiarann chun airm a ghaibhniú mar gheall ar an chogadh.)

an dia cogadh

*an dia cogaidh isn't really kosher either. "The God of War" or "the War God" would be Dia an Cogaidh. But given the order, perhaps what they were really trying to say was "the God War" or "War of the Gods"?

Well we're at it, can anyone transcribe and translate Altus Silva?

linguoboy wrote: Edit: Wait, cearta could be ceárta "forge (n.)", in which case this would read, "We need iron to forge weapons for the war." (Correct: Tá gá againn le hiarann chun airm a ghaibhniú mar gheall ar an chogadh.)

That had me totally stumped; well done! I've heard my fair share of bad Irish but that had me totally beaten.

linguoboy wrote:

an dia cogadh

*an dia cogaidh isn't really kosher either. "The God of War" or "the War God" would be Dia an Cogaidh. But given the order, perhaps what they were really trying to say was "the God War" or "War of the Gods"?

I would guess it's the natural tendency of Germanic-speakers to put the article where their language requires it and not where Irish puts it (cf me).

Also, minus points for me for forgetting that sense of faic.

Kudos for figuring this out though. Now let us find the perpetrator and burn down their house.

*runs from clanhold to clanhold with a burning cross*

The truth can be revealed!

linguoboy wrote:Edit: Wait, cearta could be ceárta "forge (n.)", in which case this would read, "We need iron to forge weapons for the war." (Correct: Tá gá againn le hiarann chun airm a ghaibhniú mar gheall ar an chogadh.)

This is what the speaker says afterwards in the "Common Tongue"...

linguoboy wrote:

an dia cogadh

*an dia cogaidh isn't really kosher either. "The God of War" or "the War God" would be Dia an Cogaidh. But given the order, perhaps what they were really trying to say was "the God War" or "War of the Gods"?

and this is apparently supposed to be "the God-War", for the same reason. Does this qualify for some sort of Laziest! Conlanging! Ever!?

Nah just bad Irish.

Nessari wrote:Nah just bad Irish.

But of a peculiarly perverse calibre. Just plunking, "We need iron to forge weapons for the war" into Google Translate will get you, "Ní mór dúinn iarann ​​chun airm a bhrionnú le haghaidh an chogaidh". Sure, I could quibble with the word choice etc. (e.g. ní mór do requires a verb-noun complement and better translated as "we must", brionnaigh means "forge" in the sense of "falsify") but the syntax is basically sound and the resulting sentence is entirely comprehensible to a bilingual. I've seen plenty of bad Irish in my time and I literally could not do worse even if I'd set my mind to it.

linguoboy wrote:I've seen plenty of bad Irish in my time and I literally could not do worse even if I'd set my mind to it.

Of course, given the context, it may have just been a presentation of Something Intended To Be Taken As Foreign, but it would have been better to type random characters rather than display one's ignorance of linguistics by doing a word-for-word translation with a random dictionary.

Nessari wrote:*runs from clanhold to clanhold with a burning cross*

Some sick part of my brain forcibly modified that to *runs from klanhold to klanhold with a burning cross* just to make the rest of my brain uncomfortable.

linguoboy wrote:I literally could not do worse even if I'd set my mind to it.

nil si smaoinigh mise an sin mise leithreas dein nios measa da intinn tacar taim si

Wonder what was the source for this folly. muid rather than sinn (for 'we') marks it out as a Northern Irish dialect, I think. Incidentally this is one of the few examples I know of, apart from English possessive 's where an inflexion has broken free and become a free morpheme.

Stuff equally rubbish to this has appeared on 'bilingual' signs in Wales, some of it complete gibberish, thanks to Google and the like. Basically so long as it looks vaguely Welsh who cares? That's their attitude. Probably even worse in Ireland where the "First Official Language" is treated with utter contempt, their Language Commissioner has just resigned in disgust.

WORST book I have ever read, and not only because of being put off because of the painful "Irish". Only got half way through it. Everything was lazy: conlanging, worldbuilding, story, characters, writing.....

When one of the main characters died but I didn't feel ANYTHING, I knew I had no interest in finishing it and regretted the time wasted.

Not even joy at them dying? That's some really bad writing

marconatrix wrote:Wonder what was the source for this folly. muid rather than sinn (for 'we') marks it out as a Northern Irish dialect, I think.

I thought muid was the norm everywhere but Munster. Ó Siadhail gives muid for Cois Fhairrge.

linguoboy wrote:

marconatrix wrote:Wonder what was the source for this folly. muid rather than sinn (for 'we') marks it out as a Northern Irish dialect, I think.

I thought muid was the norm everywhere but Munster. Ó Siadhail gives muid for Cois Fhairrge.

Bar the Caighdeán, that's my experience.