Hacker News

1940s Irish sci-fi novel features early mecha and gravity assists

64 points by donohoe ago | 25 comments

colmmacc |next [-]

Native Irish Speaker and Sci-Fi fan here. What an unexpected delight. For those who might not pick it up , the author name "Máiréad Ní Ghráda" is that of an unmarried (that's the "Ní") woman ("Máiréad" which is like a variation of Mary).

Here's my Translations of the Chapter titles. I'm pretty sure many of these have old-Irish style séimhiú (a dot above a consonant denotes what would now be a h after the consonant) in the originals that have not been translated by the OCR, so there are several missing h letters. If I weren't on a plane over Afghanistan, I'd download the PDF to check. Will update the repo when I can!

   Pláinéid na feaca Súil Duine riamh = A planet no person's eyes have ever seen
   An Radarc, tríd an gCiandracán = the view throughout the [Ciandracan] (this is a compound proper noun, "Cian" is "head" or "brain" and "racán" could be visor or rocket)
   An Turas go Manannán = the Trip to Manannán
   Manannán = Manannán (it's a noun, which is very similar to the Irish term for the Manx and the Isle of Mann). 
   Muintear Manannáin = the people of Manannán
   na 'Cráidmí' = the Craidmi (I think it's just a plural noun)
   An tÁrd-Máigistir = the high Magistrate, or possibly the supreme magistry
   An Priorún = the Priory
   Oidce sa Coill = The class/lesson/teaching in the woods/forest
   An tinneall = the fire
   Oidce tar Oidceanta = Lesson upon lesson
   Lug Lám-fada = the long-armed lug
   An Tróid leis na 'Cráidmí' = The war with the Craidmi
   Diogaltas = Revenge
   An téalod = not sure about this one

messe |root |parent |next [-]

> Oidce sa Coill = The class/lesson/teaching in the woods/forest

> Oidce tar Oidceanta = Lesson upon lesson

I suspect these are actually mistranscribed by the project. That looks more like it should be "Oiḋċe sa Coill" or "Oidhche sa Choill" without the ponc séimhithe, and in modern spelling "Oíche sa Choill" - "A Night in the Forest". Comparing the transcription of the first chapter with the source in the PDF they're missing a fada (an acute accent for non-Irish speakers) in "ná".

Similarly, I'd probably render the second one as "Night upon Nights".

colmmacc |root |parent [-]

That does make more sense.

messe |root |parent [-]

Thanks.

Not a native speaker myself, just a former gaelscoil student who's done their best to undo the gaelscoilis tendencies. Probably closer to a "heritage speaker" in the linguistic sense in some aspects.

Sadly out of practice these days, since I've been living in Denmark nearly three years. It's strange to lose competency in a language that you spoke every day for about 13 years.

I hope the project can upload a full scan at some point. I'm a huge sci-fi fan, and there's definitely a dearth of Irish language books in that genre.

ekaryotic |root |parent |next |previous [-]

> An Tróid leis na 'Cráidmí' = The war with the Craidmi

The battle/fight with the Craidmi. troid is singular whereas war is plural.

talideon |root |parent |next |previous [-]

And she's not just any Máiréad Ní Ghráda; this is the same Máiréad Ní Ghráda who wrote An Triail and Progress in Irish!

CyreneOfCyrene |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Not an Irish speaker, but I've seen some of the names and terms while reading folklore. Is it possible that Lug Lám-fada is a proper name/epithet for "Long-armed Lug" (alluding to the god Lug) instead of a descriptor of a "long-armed lug" object?

talideon |root |parent [-]

Yes, she's making a lot of allusions of Irish mythology, and that's definitely a reference to the god Lug Lámhfhada. Also, the word 'lámh' in Irish isn't quite arm. It's your arm below the elbow, including your hand. He has that epithet because for a bunch of reason, not least because of how skilled he is in all things.

The line between folklore and mythology is fuzzy, but this definitely falls on the mythology side of the line.

Y_Y |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Maith thú

arkensaw |root |parent |previous [-]

"An t-Éalod" I think would be "the escape"?

colmmacc |root |parent [-]

That's almost certainly right. I couldn't see that as anything other than "Teal" but Éalú makes perfect sense especially thematically.

messe |root |parent [-]

It's probably an téaloḋ (an tÉalodh without the ponc, t-Éalú in modern orthography) in the original, which lines up with the other missing poncs I mentioned above.

Tsiklon |next |previous [-]

Beautiful, it's typeset in classic cló Gaelach.

pavel_lishin |root |parent [-]

Oh man, you weren't kidding. Part of me wants to print out some of these pages to use in my D&D game, somehow.

(Although, part of me is also uneasy with that idea - using someone's culture & heritage as set dressing, without paying it any of the actual respect it deserves. It would be just as easy to copy a few paragraphs from Wikipedia, & use a Star Trek font to make something look fantastical, which is something I've done in the past.)

leoc |root |parent |next [-]

No-one's going to mind in the slightest if you lift Gaelic type or script for a D&D setting. (If you start larding in corny or inaccurate Irish stereotypes as well then people might start to be offended and/or amused.) If it matters, the writing style is basically just a long-surviving regional variation of what was once a mainstream form of Latin script, anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule#/media/F... . So its story is quite similar to the story of how blackletter hung on as the primary script family for German until roughly the same time in the 20th century.

foxglacier |root |parent |previous [-]

Stop worrying. It truly doesn't matter. No culture deserves respect. You might respect one culture or another for some reason but if you don't, as in this case, then there's nothing to worry about.

pavel_lishin |root |parent |next [-]

> No culture deserves respect.

I don't know if I agree with that, but I will say that people in general deserve respect. If I were playing with an Irish player, I definitely wouldn't want to offend them by treating their language like set-dressing, and I wouldn't particularly want someone using my culture for that, either.

talideon |root |parent |next [-]

Irish mythology gets bowlderised plenty, so we've a pretty thick skin about it these days. If you _do_ treat it well, any Irish players who have even the remotest interest in this kind of thing (which anyone playing TTRPG probably would be), would really appreciate it.

So, thanks for trying to be cool about this stuff!

Y_Y |root |parent |previous [-]

Luckily it's part of Irish culture not to worry about things like that.

Sure some people might be offended, especially if you're an asshole about it. But generally Irish people are glad to share their culture, and delighted to see genuine interest from foreigners. Sad though our history is, we don't have the kind of issues that make some other groups more reluctant to share the symbols of their identity†.

† Notable exceptions apply, especially regarding English upper classes.

cindyllm |root |parent |previous [-]

[dead]

rekabis |previous [-]

I think the biggest stumbling blocks is that not many of us can read Irish (Gaelige).

While I am on mobile and (therefore) have not accessed the files, the ToC and description of the OCR process leads me to understand that the original print is in Irish, not English.

donohoe |root |parent [-]

Yes, which imho makes it more remarkable. I do not doubt an English translation is coming once they can convert it into modern Irish.

dmurray |root |parent |next [-]

It looks extremely accessible. I can puzzle through the pages I looked at with school-level Irish.

The script can be mechanically translated to the modern characters, no ambiguity there. The spelling and grammar isn't the perfectly standardized Irish introduced in the 1940s and 50s - which isn't representative of how anyone ever spoke the language - but its differences are those a good to mediocre student might make anyway while trying to write the official standard.

It helps that this is clearly written for a YA audience. Literary Irish has lots of complicated constructions and idioms which are difficult to translate, but this does not.

talideon |root |parent |next |previous [-]

I mean, it _is_ in modern Irish! It just needs to be transcribed.

jonas21 |root |parent |previous [-]

Here's Claude's translation of the PDF in the repo:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/0c40c3f8-16de-4947-93c1-3...

I couldn't verify it, and a human translation would be preferable -- but it's probably good enough to get an idea of the story if you want to read some right now.

dmurray |root |parent [-]

I can verify it looks fine.

Not absolutely rigorous, e.g.

> "You have far more knowledge of the stars and the planets than any other living man"

Why "far more knowledge"? I don't see any emphasis like that in the original.

I'd have a few nits but they're of similarly small magnitude.