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- Topic: Irish >
- "Le do thoil!"
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I swear it sounded like "what the hell"! I had to make sure I was still on the Irish lesson lol
something like 'with your will' but it'd be extremely rare to see it as anything other than 'please' as far as I know.
compare also to French "s'il te plaît/s'il vous plaît" which literally means "if you like"
No, sorry, "s'il te/vous plaît" literally means "if it pleases you", but you are very close, and le do thoil (with your will) is quite similar.
it really means : if it pleases you in French ( sorry Sean I did not see your post!) my mother tongue IS French.
Consider that English "please" comes from "if you please", meaning "if it pleases you to do so". Modern English please shows far less deference, so we use it a lot more than Irish le do thoil
Thank you! So you mostly use the word "please" instead of "le do thoil", when you speak Irish?
Sounds almost exactly as the Russian word "ледокол" (ledokol) which translates as "icebreaker ship" :)
Cutting through the ice of their objections with the politeness of Please!
It is similar to Croatian "ledolomac", "led" obviously meaning "ice" in both, "o" being an interfix and "-lomac" is literally "-breaker" (I presume that "-kol" is used in similar verb constructions and derivations). Just heard today that we have a very different language than Russians, glad to see there are still very similar word formation patterns!
Ahahhaha ko ti je to reko? Pa svi slovenski jezici su veoma povezani i ipak slicni. Svi se uglavnom razumemo, makar sustinu. Pozrav od komsija iz Srbije :)
Le duh hell is how it's pronounced in both Connaught and Ulster dialects I believe. I actually thought más é do thoil é was more formal. An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas más é do thoil e? May I please go to the toilet... the refrain of my childhood.
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Poor little ones! That construction is fascinating but seems impractical for very young kids who need to go...haha.
Yes, but I think this can often be found in languages which haven't been simplified too much during ages, for example French: "S'il vous plaît". And as NiallT said, Irish people don't use this expression too often.
And in Irish, you'll often hear it with the 'o' of 'do' suppressed: led'thoil—even shorter!
"Le do thoil" has two syllables when I say it. "Más é do thoil é" has more (5 to my ear).
Before this was released in beta, I downloaded an app that's basically just an Irish phrasebook. It lists this as being the formal way of saying "please," and I guess they consider "más é do thoil é" as the everyday usage (there was no distinction given for this one, it just said "please"). Is this true?
I realize this might be covered later, so I'm sorry if I jumped the gun!
Más é do thoil é is what I would encourage the children I teach to use, but both are fine in any situation, imo :)
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What is the name of the phrasebook? I'd like to see and use other resources for Irish. :-)
When I originally learned this phrase, I heard "le do hell". Is that part of the Connaught dialect?
That really confused me, too - "le do hell' was the only way I ever heard it pronounced. But then I lived in the west of Ireland, so probably in other areas it's pronounced like "hall", as it is here.
"t" is very often silent in Irish, isn't it? Is it only when it's accompanied by "h" or are there other instances?
't' and 'th' are never silent.
'th' is pronounced like English 'h'; otherwise, 't' is prounced as 't'.
(there is one two-letter combination in Irish that is truly silent: 'fh'. It doesn't sound like 'h', you just skip it completely.)
Depending on the dialect there are different pronunciations but the two I would tend to use are "lead ah hell" or "lead ah hull" - a consequence of having so many Irish teachers from different parts of the country over the years. I swap between dialects all the time!
my grandmother would say something like mas le do thoil ("marsha da hulla") - is there a version like that?
Yes. Má's é do thoil é. This is what we learned as youngsters in school.
Literally it means: "If it is your will", but is generally translated as "if you please" or just "please".
Má's é is really Má is é but má + is is contracted to má's.
All this discussion of how gaelic resembles other teutonic (or European, with a latin or greek base) languages makes me wonder if there is some collection of words and phrases with the etymology of these expressions, like the Oxford English Dictionary, except for the Irish language.
For basic etymology of individual words, wiktionary.org is a convenient place to check, but, as Ainm10 points out, you can check the etymology of the individual words in an idiom, rather than the etymology of the idiom itself.
One thing I can tell you is that is definetly not munster nor leinster Irish
