SANAS

The Sanas is a database of obsolete words. It is not a dictionary as the words are no longer in use. There are links to the official dictionaries at the foot of this page. Along with them, there are links to a number of private dictionaries too.

There are approximately 10,000 obsolete words in the Sanas which you can find in the dictionaries of O’Reilly (1817) and O’Brien (1834).

This project will continue into the future with additions from the dictionaries of Begley (1730), O’Brien (1768), Connellan (1814), de Vere (1849) and Foley (1855).

The purpose of this work is to present the Irish that was spoken daily at the time of the Great Famine to a wider audience. At that time the language was alive and the compilers of dictionaries had a wider sample of speakers with whom to authenticate their work.

Thousands of words fell out of the dictionaries when Lane, Dineen and Mac Cionnaith undertook to publish dictionaries between 1852 and 1927. As these were all Catholic priests, words that could be considered scandalous, vulgar, offensive or blasphemous are not in their collections. Apart from these words, the older dictionaries had words for all sorts of food that were available in their time. They have words for household objects and the expressions of particular workers. There is a wide selection of words describing human emotions, interpersonal relations and even 750 verbs that are no longer with us.

Are you finding this text to be a tad difficult to follow? Keep reading and experience what Irish-speakers experience when we read the stuff that is prepared for us. This text is a translation of an Irish original and sticks to Gaelic syntax and expressions just as most official documents in Irish adhere to English-language structures. The results are readable but torturous. Welcome to our world…

In Gaeilge Bheo we believe that every author has the right to increase vocabulary through his or her work. This is a source for those who would like to avail of a word to write that is not totally dependent on Anglicization. As they stand, the words in the Sanas are lifeless but you could resurrect them through your writing.

There is assistance for those who are interested in toponyms or the sources for other words. For this reason we have included Cant and Ulster Scots in the Sanas. At present we have only approximately 1,500 entries for both of these languages in the Sanas but we also hope to increase that in the future.

For orthography:

• We used English (UK) as that is the format by which English is written in Ireland;
• For Irish we used the spelling set to Caighdeáin 2012 as represented on the on-line dictionaries but many of these spellings may be flawed;
• we used the recommended spelling of Philip Robinson and the Ulster-Scots Language Society for Ulster-Scots;
• for Cant, we stayed with the English (and Greek) based system adopted by John Samson because he had a much wider selection of words than there is in Cauley’s collection with an Irish-based spelling;
• In the case of the writing of the older Irish words, in most cases we adhered to the text as written in the published dictionaries. In about 100 cases we adapted the spelling but only where there were four or more aspirated letters in the original.

There is neither masculine nor feminine nor declension numbers connected to the nouns in the Sanas. The reason for this is that there was no importance attached to these elements of grammar and the compilers did not attach any importance to them (exactly the same way as they are not given importance in spoken Irish today)

In the case of the verbs, approximately 150 are given in their gerund form. The rest as listed in the Present Tense, 3^rd person singular, in keeping with the practice of Greek grammar.

There are a few false friends in the collection. These are words that have changed their meanings since the times of O’Reilly and O’Brien. The current usage will also return in the results if you search for a word in this class.

Bain sult as an tSanas

Fergal Jennings