← New Books Network
New Books Network
Manchán Magan, "Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape" (Chelsea Green, 2026)
00:39:40
Loading summary
Transcript36 lines
- [00:01]
Podcast Sponsor/Intro Voice
This episode is brought to you by Peloton Break through the busiest time of year with the brand new Peloton Cross Training Tread plus, powered by Peloton iq. With real time guidance and endless ways to move, you can personalize your workouts and train with confidence, helping you reach your goals in less time. Let yourself run, lift, sculpt, push and go. Explore the new peloton cross training Tread plus@onepelaton.com Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about quite an intriguing book that puts a whole bunch of things together. We're going to be talking about history, place, society, women's history, fairies, magic, and we're going to be doing all of this but by looking at language. So the book we're going to be discussing is titled 32 Words for Lost Words of the Irish Landscape, which came out in 2024 in Britain with Bonnier and is coming out soon in later in 2026 with Chelsea Green in the US and I'm very pleased today to have the author of the book, Mon Can McGann, to tell us all about some of the enchanting words, beautiful words and quite odd words as well, that we're going to be discussing, like 32 words for field. But turns out there's a whole bunch of things here in the Irish language as well. So, Mon Khan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [01:32]
Mon Can McGann
Oh, thank you, Miranda. Gorgeous to talk to you.
- [01:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Would you mind starting us off please by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book.
- [01:41]
Mon Can McGann
Yeah, so Mamkhan Magan is my name and Mankan, it's probably Managhan in Irish and that means little monk. So I'm a writer and a television documentary maker in Ireland, I suppose for about 25 years I made documentaries about minority cultures around the world, in India, in South America, in Greenland, in China. But I was always interested looking at it from the perspective of being from a Guelticht or an Irish language community. Gueltucht is just a word for the places where Irish was still spoken. And so Irish was my first language. I only learned English later when I was five or six and I decided I wanted to write a book that talked about this, the reality and the resonances of having an ancient language. And particularly because in Ireland we tend to either give out about the language, we think, oh, well, this old language is something to do with poverty or it's to do with our primitive past. And we also blame the fact that we're forced to learn it in school and it's taught badly. So I decided I wanted to talk about all the other things about having an ancient language, the insights it gives us into ourselves, into the world, into the past. And so that was the idea. That was the idea behind 32 words for field.
- [02:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
We're definitely going to talk about your connection with this, I think a bit more, but I want to make sure that our listeners understand that this is of course, a book about the Irish language, but the Irish language has a lot of links to other languages too, so we're going to be drawing them in as well. And obviously, given that we're speaking English, and that is my relig relationship with the book, I wonder if you can tell us a bit about some of the connections and overlaps between Irish and English.
- [03:19]
Mon Can McGann
Yeah, so because it's in an Indo European language, in fact, there's so many connections between Irish and other languages and it's as a language that's very similar to proto Indo European. In other words, the first language that those first settlers and early farmers were speaking 5, 6000 years ago as they crossed from, you know, where, where Western Asia meets Eastern Europe and as they brought their farming techniques. So you'll find an awful lot of Irish words connect, also similar words in Sanskrit. In fact, I've just written another book about the connections between Irish and Vedic culture in Sanskrit. But Ireland, in England, you see, Irish was the language of England at one stage. Irish was the language when Irish is a Celtic language, you know, so it's an Indo European language. But one of the families of the Indo European languages were the Celtic languages. And at one time, in about 500 BC, Celtic languages were spoken the whole way from Turkey, from Armenia, across through Europe to Western Europe. So there was a time like when England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales all would have spoken Irish. And then obviously Anglo Saxon languages and Brittonic come in and influence that. But you can still see so many Irish words in, in English, like the word slogan. You know, the slogan comes from sluwa garam, which is a slew, a crowd and a garam, the cry, the cry of a host of warriors. Basically. Basically a battle cry is the root of slogan or keening, you know, keening at a funeral. It's from the Irish queen to cry. Or even the word clock. Clock seems to come from clug. And clug is the Irish word for a bell. Just because in early monastic Society in Ireland from the 8th century on, even earlier, from the 5th and 6th century on, the clock would have been based on the bell. The bell was rung by the monks a few times a day, and that was the clock. Even the word Tory, you know, the Tory party in Britain, the Conservative Party, that's from an Irish word toy, which means a pursuer or an Irish outlaw of the 17th century who were known for their savagery. So the supporters of James ii, it was used to describe them, and then they became known as the Conservatives in 1830s. But actually, Tory is an Irish word, so it can really help us to understand English better today if we look at Irish, like, even taking words like hooligan. You know, hooligan comes from a surname, the hoolhoin, still a popular surname in Irish, but at one time, they must have been rather wild people.
- [05:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is very fun already. There's a whole bunch of words I think maybe I certainly found surprising and intriguing to read in the book, and I think listeners might be as well. So definitely a good start to our conversation. But the other thing I'd like to discuss at this point is what you mentioned earlier of your own experience in learning Irish. Can you tell us more about that?
- [06:11]
Mon Can McGann
Yeah. So my family had actually forgotten Irish. Well, when I say forgot, they had forcibly been made to forget. You know, in 1831, England, in its kindness, gave us the national school system to educate us. But as part of that, they made sure that we weren't allowed to speak Irish anymore. So young children, right throughout the 19th century would wear a bottas scar. And a bottas scar, botta just means stick, and a scar means mark. So it was a stick of marks. And you wore this around your neck. And each time you said a word of Irish, the teacher would just put a little notch or a mark in the stick. And at the end of the day, the teacher would count up the notches or the marks and would give you a beating for every notch. So that proved very successful throughout the 19th century in making sure the younger generation didn't speak. And so the language died out. It wasn't that, but also after the famine, you know, the famine went like, we lost a quarter of our population. Parents realized they saw their children die, they saw the crops die, they saw the elders die. And they realized the only way their children were going to have any chance of success was to learn English. So they could go to Australia or England or America or even just to go to the cities in Ireland, to go to Belfast or Cork or Dublin. You would have needed English by the mid 19th century. So in this great generosity, this act of cultural care, they made sure not to teach their children Irish, and they were only teaching this. So it happened that in the 1890s, my family didn't speak Irish, but it was a time of a cultural revival when there was this stirring among the people that actually there was a danger that we might lose the inherited lore of our people, all the amassed wisdom over thousands of years. And so we set up the Gaelic League, or Conunarna Gaelge. It was an organization to bring back the language, to bring back the old stories, the lore, the culture, the mindset. And my great granduncle, Michael o', Rahali, or called the o', Rahali, the was a. Was a name the. Or the, you know, was used for the head of a tribal or Celtic clan. So he decided he was one of the organizers, as was my great grandmother and my great grand aunt. But then about 10 years later, the O' Rahali and others realized it wasn't going to be enough to set up a cultural organization. You were going to have to fight as well. So my great grand uncle set up the Irish Volunteers, which became the IRA with Owen McNeil, professor of Celtic studies at University College Dublin at the time. And so they then, you know, began the revolution, knowing he knew he was going to die. You know, you don't set up a revolution against this great, great colonial empire at the time without knowing you're going to die. But my granny was 1916. Well, sorry, 16 in 1916. In other words, the year of the revolution, the year of the uprising in Ireland, the rebellion. And she watched her beloved uncle go out to certain death and kiss goodbye to his four children and his pregnant wife. And she determined to continue his fight, to make sure that she would continue with the Irish language that he had started them learning again. He brought my granny and all his sons out to the Blasket Islands, one of these islands off the southwest coast of Ireland, off the coast of Kerry, where the Irish had never died, where the language had never died. And so she determined she was going to maintain his mission to bring back the Irish language and lore and also freedom. And she did. She devoted her life to that. So I was born in 1970, and for her, it was just like one day had passed from 1916 to 1970. So I was the next generation, the next foot soldier in. In this mission to try and bring back the language. And of course, that meant there was political inferences to my speaking of the language. And when I copped onto that in my teenage years because she was still supporting, like, you know, the ira, hunger strikers and terrorists in Northern Ireland, I stopped speaking Irish for a while because I thought, no, I don't want my language as a weapon of war. I want it as this cultural expression. So I took it on. I took it back on my own terms a few years after that.
- [10:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very interesting family history as well as a personal history. Thank you very much for sharing it with us. And with that idea of you taking it back for what you want from it, I wonder if we can continue speaking a bit about your personal experiences with the language. Because one thing I noticed throughout the book is the way in which you discuss how sort of being between the two languages, sort of in one in the other, but also being able to move back and forth. And you speak in a number of places in the book about how you. That has influenced how you experience, for example, natural phenomenon. And I noticed it particularly when discussing light or light related events like a sunrise. Can you maybe help us understand how you experience those things and why perhaps your knowledge of Irish makes you experience them differently than if you didn't have that?
- [11:10]
Mon Can McGann
Yeah, like my life was so different in the two lives I had. So most of my, most of my upbringing was in Dublin in the suburb and leafy suburbs of Dublin. But I would spend a quarter of every year in West Kerry. And that was where the area that the O'Reilly, where Michael O'Reilly had brought my grandmother down first in 1909 to the Blasket Islands. And then the family has been going there ever since. We built a house on the mainland in 1915. Now, of course, Michael O'Reilly never got to see it because he died the next year, but the family had been using that house. But when we were down there, like my granny would always get us up early to see the sun. And the sun for me at the time was a five stage series of events because that's how the Irish language looks at it. So from Bjaka unle, which is the brightening of the day, to Baanu unle, which is the whitening of the day. And then that followed by whany gyal unle, which is the first bright ring of daylight. And then you got sulan lay, which is the eye of the day. Right. Until you eventually get to Eiri Ngrena, the actual rising of the sun. And I, I didn't actually realize that wasn't how everyone in Ireland saw the sunrise until I brought an English speaking friend of Mine down to West Kerry on holidays. And I was mentioning to him, you know, did he notice the five stages? And of course he didn't. For him, it was just the sunrise and it just showed. Oh, right. This language I've been speaking does actually give me a different window on the world.
- [12:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's definitely a really interesting example because, of course, so many of us have experiences with sunrise. And so I'm sure that there could be a really interesting sort of comparative linguistic exercise there, because it's probably different in a number of languages as well. And I wonder if we can start to talk about some of those other linguistic overlaps. Obviously, we mentioned English a little bit on the Vedic languages, but what about the other languages that have sort of similar names? Right, we've got Irish. What about Scottish Gaelic or Welsh or even Breton? Are these languages similar at all by this point?
- [13:06]
Mon Can McGann
Well, they were definitely similar at one point. So 2,000 years ago they would have been identical. But definitely 2,200 years ago, they were just Celtic languages, different expressions of different dialects of the one Celtic language. But then the dialects eventually developed into languages. So in terms of the most similar to Irish, the ones that I could still understand if I was speaking, if they were, if someone was speaking slowly to me, are Scots Gaelic and Manx. Now, Manx as a language, the language of the Isle of Man had died out, but it was revived again in the 1980s and 90s. And in fact, I was, I was there speaking with some of the new speakers, and I could learn, I could, you know, I could understand it. Scott Scallic, it depends. So there's three dialects in Ireland. There's the dialect in the south, which is the monster Irish, which is the Irish I speak, then there's one in the middle. So if we think of the island of Ireland as a big teddy bear, and so all the language speakers are in the west coast, because that's where the English and Cromwell and ever knows pushed them, because that was the cheapest, poorest, rockiest land. So in the three, you have the head of the teddy bear, the belly of the teddy bear and the legs. My language is from the legs of the teddy bear. In the middle is the belly of the teddy bear, and then up North Donegal is the is for the head of the teddy bear. And that Irish is most similar to Scots Gaelic. So they would have been the same language until the 12th century. And in fact, we both shared the same literary language until the 16th century. So there is a very strong connection. You know, basically you can understand them, but Then Welsh and Breton and Cornish because they separated earlier, you know, 2,000 years ago. And because there's this P and Q kelt, there's this slight linguistic difference. It can be harder for my ear to pick up the language, but they're based on the same language. And if you were able to, if I was able to just make that switch, that lettering switch back then I definitely would understand a lot more.
- [14:58]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to think about the differences between sort of something on paper versus something in history. But also then that kind of, as you said, changing your ear and going, oh, hang on a second. If I kind of concentrate for a moment like that might shift a bit of my perspective. Would that work? If we talk about the relations between Irish and languages further away, obviously you mentioned India a little bit. You talk in the book about Arabic. Can you tell us about these connections?
- [15:25]
Mon Can McGann
Yeah, I mean, the Arabic ones are tentative because obviously Arabic isn't an Indo European language. But there are these uncanny connections between Irish culture and Arabic culture. Some people think it's because, well, first where you'd hear it in the singing, in the tones, the tones of the music. You also see it in our boats. Like the traditional Irish glutog or sailboat in the west of Ireland is very like the boats that you find the dhows or the boats that you find on the Nile River. And in some way it's because we did, we know that we are the seafaring people, you know that we had strong connections in Ireland, Britain, Scotland, France and Spain. And they were constantly trading with North Africa. So there was that cultural connection. You get some words like scub and scuba. Scuba is a brush in Irish. But also in some dialects of Arabic it could be coincidence. You get kalla. Kalla is the Irish report. And also is again in some dialects of Arabic is a port as well. The most interesting is Shamrog. So the Irish, you know, the national symbol is the shamrock and in Irish it's Shamrog. And it just happens, you know, obviously when St. Patrick was meant to have picked up the shamrock and said the three leaves represent the three gods. But in pre Islamic pagan Arabic, they had another leaf, a little three leafed flower and they called it the Shamraka. And it represented the three pagan gods of pre Islamic Arabic. So I don't know, are these just lovely? You know, it's very easy to see such strong links between Ireland and India. But Arabic and Irish, there's resonances there. And maybe that's because at one time we were all connected we heard you.
- [17:17]
Commercial Break Voice
Nine years of bring back the snack wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the hot honey snack wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.
- [17:32]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's definitely very interesting to contemplate and investigate. As you said, you've done a bit in some other work as well. One thing I'd like to discuss though, is not just connections between Irish and other countries, but also sort of overlaps or intertwinings within Ireland. Because of course there is. The language which you've mentioned is very, very old and is related to nature, for instance. But if we're going to talk about Ireland over the last especially few centuries, the kind of big looming institution in addition to the English state colonizing is of course the church. So how do we see the influence of the church in Irish, for example? I was sort of surprised, I guess, reading how much the language still has words related to what I would maybe call magic or fairies. I would sort of think that the church would not like that sort of thing to survive.
- [18:25]
Mon Can McGann
The church in Ireland is an interesting thing. You see, when we think of Catholicism in Ireland, that's really only a post famine element. Obviously St Patrick came in the 5th century in 437 AD and slowly got a grip on the country. But it was a very Celtic church. It was a church that almost believed that kept many of the animistic druidic ideas alive of seeing there being a God in every leaf or every raindrop or every river or stone. So it was only really in the 19th century when we were so weakened, when we lost a quarter of our population, that the church came in and took hold. The sort of the Roman, the Vatican, the centralized controlling church, just like they did in or just like different missionaries did in Africa in the 1960s and 70s and 80s. But it meant that we were able to maintain so much of that older, wider, more spiritually in tuned and nebulous way of seeing the world. And it's certainly contained in so many Irish words like I often give the description. So the word for a region or a location in Ireland is counter. Counter. But the opposite of counter is alter. So if counter means this place or this region or this locality, alter is the other place, the netherworld, the realm beyond. And it was always known that there was only a very thin veil between counter and altar. So like we're now in Kountar. Well, at least I presume we're in Kountar. I don't see you, Miranda. You know, we're actually in this nebulous other world, but we take it we are. But there was. The Irish were so comfortable with this idea that, like, there's a word pukin, and pukin means a supernatural covering that allows otherworldly beings appear invisible in this world. So it's this idea that, yes, there can be these other beings here that we just don't see them. And like kolta means cloaked, but kolta fu vrachi means cloaked under a fairy mantle and thus made invisible. And then Kulta is connected to the word kola. And kola means an entranceway or a gate. But then kolevrak is an entranceway to a fairy fort that's halfway up a mountain and surrounded by stones. So we were always very comfortable with this idea that there was like shkim. Shkim can mean dust on a mantelpiece or flower on a board, but it can also mean an enchanted mist that covers the land in the early morning. And it can mean a magical vision. And shikim can also mean succumbing to the supernatural world through sleep. Succumbing to the supernatural world through sleep. So it's definitely a language that although Catholicism tried to exert its influence on, it still has this. This fairy understanding and this understanding that there are magical realms and those words.
- [21:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, even the examples you just gave us there kind of speak to so many different aspects of one's life and sort of ways of encountering one's surroundings. So it seems like really quite a complex area of the language. Why do you think that is?
- [21:27]
Mon Can McGann
I just think it was really important to our mindset long ago. You know, I mean, we didn't have an industrial revolution in Ireland. We didn't really have a renaissance. We weren't one of those logically minded, fact based, empirical people. We're a people who've always believed in the potential of different realms in the world of imagination. So the fact that there was the she there, the she were the fairies, and she. In Scots Gaelic it's the same. It's she, but it's, it's so. So in Irish she is also the root of the word shirn, which is peace. And it's spelled S I D A G. But in Scots Gaelic it's the same. But sid means peace. And also she means fairy. And that lango that would have been pronounced, that would have been spelled in old Irish S I D H e siddha. And siddha is very connected to the Sanskrit word siddha, but which means an enlightened being or a human who has attained a certain degree of evolutionary evolvement and is no longer bound as caught up in this incarnation or in this miasma, this belief. So that was, you know, just as the Indian people, for them, the other world is a. The dream world is a very strong element. It was always part of our culture too.
- [22:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's definitely clearly still very much embedded there, despite perhaps some of the efforts of the church to the contra. Can you tell us maybe about some other aspects of the language that we maybe know existed but don't have access to now? Are there sort of other aspects like that that we can discuss?
- [23:03]
Mon Can McGann
Well, I mean, there was a profound sense of an understanding of ecology, of nature, and that we seem to have forgotten about that. Like, there's a lovely word, far, midbo. It's more a middle Irish or an old Irish word, so it's not used so much in modern Irish. But far. Well, far is used. Far just means man. Mid is the Latin word, middle. And then bo means a hut or a tent. And it refers to a youth, a young man between 14 and 21 who wants to exert his own independence, his own sovereignty. So he goes to the family, he goes to the tribe, and he asks them, he says, you know, I want to set up my own. My own family. I want to find a woman and have a family. So the tribe give him some cattle and send them to the top of a mountain. They tell him in summertime he needs to look after these cattle as they graze in one of the summer pastures up in the mountain and needs to protect them from cattle raiding, which was such a key element of Ireland. You know, the greatest epic story in Ireland is the Toynbo Koil, the cattle raid of K. Just like the main epic of India, the Mahrabhatta, is also a cattle raiding story. But so he has to protect them from cattle raiding and from wolves prowling wolves. But that's not all he has to do. Every night or every few nights, he needs to collect up the cow dung and bring it down to the winter pastures to feed the winter pastures. So it's an example, contained within one Irish word, one Irish phrase, of a really rooted, sustainable way of living in nature where you only extend the tribe, you only allow more children and more cattle to be brought in once, you know, you have created new land or fertilized old land to allow it to happen. So I think there's so many examples like that that we could actually find a deeper way of living within Ireland, of living In a more harmonious way, if we went back to those, to these old words and mindsets.
- [25:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And there are some reminders of these old, old ways of thinking embedded still in the landscape, of course, with place names. Can you give us some unravellings of them, please?
- [25:17]
Mon Can McGann
Yeah. So there's a concept and I suppose an avenue of lore in Irish called Dyn Shanachis, which is the lore of notable places. And in these basically there are stories that are connected to particular places and as you tell the story, the place comes alive. So the Irish place names are so much more than just place names. They're like paradoxical riddles without a clear solution. They offer these tantalizing insights into our ancestors lives and into like knowledge of the, of the environment. So there's a place up in Northern Ireland, you know, a lot of in Northern Ireland they weren't teaching Irish in the schools so much in recent decades. So the locals around Baila Fitmayev don't understand what that means. And Baila is a townland or a town town by Le Fit Maeve, the. The townland of the vulva or the vagina of Goddess Maeve. Now it obviously looked in some way in the landscape that it was this hollow or this cleft or this cave or this estuary type form in the landscape. And so they decided to call it that in the same way also have been. I've been in Northern Ireland in, in Antrim and some, you know, someone who lives in Tandra and I can tell them, I can say, well, you know, so your house is protected from the wind, is it? And they'll say yeah, but how do you know that? And I says, well it's in the name itself. Thoin Regi Toyn is the backside led to the wind which your backs. It's the townland is saying it's got its backside to the wind. In other words, it's protected by the lee of a hill. And there's a lovely bail on Nebriskin or Balin Nebriskin between. It's in Mayo, near Caen. And again, it doesn't mean anything in English, but when you hear Baila, the townland or baal, which is the mouth of Aha, the forge of the Mriska and Mriskin is Tansy. It's this herb that smells a bit of rosemary, a bit of camphor. But it was vital long ago to protect meat. If you wrap meat in it, flies and maggots never went near it. But Tansy was also important. Or briskin was also important long ago. Or Briskawn I should say because it could be used as an abortion to bring on an abortion. So if a woman realized she was pregnant and knew it was unwise to carry through the pregnancy, she could go to the field. She would know that this townland had this Tanzi in it. So actually there was a lot of very important information contained within. Within place names.
- [27:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
We forget now, those are some great examples of place names and so cool that you can understand them from your knowledge of the language. You know, you don't have to walk around with a massive dictionary. You can kind of go, oh, wait, hang on, I'm walking these streets and I've got a sense of what's going on here. So definitely very interesting to understand. And of course, walking around and having an understanding based on the language takes us as well to obviously the title of the book, which I have to ask about 32 words for field. I'm obviously not going to ask you to list all 32, but can you give us a few?
- [28:24]
Mon Can McGann
Yeah, I mean, there's probably a lot more than 32. Even so, like, you know, Machare is an open field and Maneir is an enclosed field and Rayen is an upland field and Qahrin is a field with a ferry fort in it. Branagh is a fallow field. Burakh is a marshy field. Taunach would be a field worked in part. Notanoch is an arable field in an arid area. Quiveran is a field worked in partnership with a neighbor. Raelin is a field for games or dancing. And Balnug is a field made level by years of dancing. I'll give you two more. Budon. Budon is a field that had gorse or furs grown in it, but then they had been cut with a sickle or a side and you had only the stumps or the stalks remained. Budon fields. But let's say if you had that same field that was covered in gorse or furs and that you hadn't cut them down with a sickle or with a side, but had you had burnt them instead, that then would be a Luskov. So this deep insight like we are a farming people. We're not really an indigenous people. We're a, you know, we're not a hunter, gatherer, indigenous people. We learned those techniques of farming along with all the other Indo European cultures, you know, five, six, seven, 8,000 years ago when we were in. On, you know, when. Between in Armenia or Kazakhstan or Russia or Turkey, in that area between West Western Asia and Eastern Europe. And we brought those techniques with us. And so when we looked at the land, we looked at it through the eyes of farmers.
- [29:58]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And therefore that makes sense of why there'd be so many words for something like a field. So thank you for giving us some examples of that and especially the sense through it of how many of these words are so incredibly specific.
- [30:10]
Mon Can McGann
Right.
- [30:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
A field that's in this place, that has this in it, that kind of thing. How does that work then for kind of allowing a language to be adaptable or open to being understood? Because if you're going so specific, of course the risk would be kind of, oh, there's too many words for anyone to ever know any of them, or there's so many hyper specific words that it's really hard to add new things to it or adapt to new circumstances. So how does that kind of having all the specificity still enable adaptation?
- [30:41]
Mon Can McGann
I mean, it's ideal. If you have a language that has so many words, it means, it's actually when we're trying to now bring words in for modern things like, you know, like the Internet or helicopters, you have loads of metaphors you can go for. Because we were isolated on this island and we didn't have much to play with, we played with the language. So, like there was 4,300 words just to describe someone's character in Irish. 4,300. Most of them were negative and most of the words were used actually by women, at other women, but in a playful way. When they were weaving or gathering seaweed or collecting turf, they would just use these 4,000. Like, you know, most of us have only 12,000 words in our entire vocabulary. Shakespeare had 30,000 in all his works. But we had 4,300 words just to describe someone's character. We had 12,000 first names or Christian names, if you could call them that. It was just, it was a, you know, there was this, this richness, this abundance of language. I mean, the sad thing for me is now the language, in one way, it's doing well in the cities of, in Limerick, in Galway, in Dublin, and it's been taught in the Gael Scull, in the Irish language schools. But there's no sense of that wealth, of that abundance of words. It is now being taught as a stripped back, almost a ghost form of the, the ancient language that I knew in West Kerry long ago. And that's, it's inevitable. You know, we're, we now, we're used to these modern, practical, utilitarian languages that do have very specific words for terms, for things. And when you want to have a new Thing you just, you know, you'll take two smaller, specific words and bring them together. That's what modern languages do. But I love the fact that there was unlimited data forms and genitive forms and plural forms. Each community had its own plural of words. It's just the opposite of the practical, you know, efficient languages of the modern day.
- [32:38]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely very different to now. Were there any things then, as you pieced all this together and came across all the different examples and sort of realized different connections? Anything in the process of all of this that surprised you?
- [32:52]
Mon Can McGann
Yeah, one thing that saddened me was that, like, I think I have one chapter in my book about sex, about all the different words for. In Irish for sex. Because the great poet, the great Irish poet Noel Ni Ronald said there were no words for sex in Irish. At least she didn't think there were until she married and then she got invited into the back kitchen and she realized the women had a whole other register, a whole other language she'd never heard before. But none of those words of women's body or women's language were ever recorded, recorded anywhere. And it wasn't because. So in the 19th century, in the late the. Yeah, the 20th century, in the late 19th century, there were folklorists and linguists going around collecting words and stories and they were going to the women, getting them. But they would never have asked the women for words to do with women's bodies or women's gender or women's health or sexuality or even for child rearing. And the women wouldn't have offered them because they would have thought, well, maybe a priest is going to come along at some point. And he didn't want to. She didn't want to embarrass the priest. But, you know, in an Irish culture, just like any rural culture, there was no. There was no embarrassment about sexual or about physical bodily issues. These were a farming people, you know, for Ireland, the curse words and the rude words were all to do with the demons and the devils. But like, I think in my book, I listed about 44 different words for penis. And they're lovely words. They're like. They're diminish of sort of words that just sort of play down the male member. So like kithog is a word for an earthworm, but also a penis. And dulamon is a tiny shell or a small suckable thing or skibberling, a limp hanging thing or schuttin, a little wisp of flax or hair or sch. Tufted seaweed or a fence made of three loppings or strips of wood to protect oars in a rowlock or a schultzer shambling gate. All of those words could have been used for the male organization, but they just weren't there for women. And so hopefully women will go into the gweltach, into the Irish speaking areas and ask the older women, because they're definitely there. Like, I made a brief little book last year of just whatever words I could find in journals and it was beautiful. So many of the words for the Irish, for the vagina, for the vulva, were based on the landscape, like Gawal Mana, which means a woman's estuary. Or it's like where the river meets the sea. Our blame, which is a woman's cave or a cove. Our clash, which is like a gully or a riverlet or a stream. Our moto a bota, which is an embankment but can also be the vulva. So I just think there's so much more that is still in the language but just hasn't been recorded as in danger of. We're in danger of losing it.
- [35:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely worth flagging up as we come to the end of our conversation. And obviously this is something that you are engaged with and working on, not just in this book, but more broadly. So is there any upcoming projects or anything that you'd like to flag as we move further into 2026?
- [35:45]
Mon Can McGann
I don't know. I have like, I'm going to, I'm going to make a film out of this, out of book. I have 32 words for field and it's. I really wanted to be filmed by, directed by a woman and maybe an even non Irish person. So there is, there's going to be a film with a whole team of women who are going to do that. And I've been collecting sea words, coastal words for fishermen. I put them on the website. I, I record fishermen saying the word in Irish and then in English a word like, which is the chewing up of baby crabs and the spitting of them into the sea to be used as bait to catch other fish. Or kablu, which is the otherworldly voices that you hear on the shore when you're walking alone at night. So I collect these words. I get the fishermen to tell me in Irish and in English and I put them up on the website and I'll probably continue to do that because I think there are all of us, you know, whatever language, whether it's a dialect of English or any language, still have these old ways of seeing the world and actually being in the world that are contained within the older dialects of our old folk. And it's just really worth recording them and putting them out somewhere. And, you know, social media is a good place to share them, I find.
- [36:55]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that definitely sounds like a continual project and an endlessly fascinating one, I'm sure. So for any listeners who who want to learn about more of these words and the meanings behind them and the mindsets behind them, you can of course read the book titled 32 Words for Fields Lost Words of the Irish Landscape, published by Bonier in 2024 in Britain and by Chelsea Green in 2026 in the US Monken, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [37:21]
Mon Can McGann
Oh Miranda, it's been so lovely talking to you. I really appreciate Sam.