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Author Topic: Meet Somhairle and Oisín  (Read 4630 times)

Weaver

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Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« on: January 08, 2018, 05:16:06 AM »

These two young fellows are heading northwards from Lockerbie to the Island soon

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cecilward/38669375215
« Last Edit: January 08, 2018, 04:26:22 PM by Weaver »
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kitz

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisean
« Reply #1 on: January 08, 2018, 11:51:46 AM »

2 new furbabies on their way to the Weaver household?   ;D
What breed are they?   The body shape - particularly the wedge shaped head & ears look very distinctive of Siamese or Siamese descent (Balinese/Javanese etc), yet the colouring and points aren't.
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Weaver

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #2 on: January 08, 2018, 04:32:26 PM »

I'm not sure about their ancestry, they came from a woman who breeds extremely posh unbelievably expensive Siamese cats. But we don't care about such nonsense so perhaps these are some of the mistakes.

My old Siamese Daisy, 1987-2003, was a silver tabby-siamese cross, with a posh mother who we are told tore a hole through the back door to get out of her house in Hampstead to some random tabby male and Daisy was the result.

We will know more when the owner brings the two boys up from the south at the weekend.
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burakkucat

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #3 on: January 08, 2018, 04:45:42 PM »

They certainly look very distinctive.  :)
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kitz

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #4 on: January 08, 2018, 05:37:36 PM »

Perhaps they are Oriental Shorthairs as they fit the Standard.   

Quote
Closely related to the Siamese. It maintains the modern Siamese head and body type but appears in a wide range of coat colors and patterns.
Like the Siamese, Orientals have almond-shaped eyes, a triangular head shape, large ears, and an elongated, slender, and muscular body.
Unlike the breed's blue-eyed forebear, Orientals are usually green-eyed.

Whatever they are they certainly have some Siamese ancestry in them....  and regardless I'm sure that they will find a very happy place in the Weaver home.   :)
I bet you are looking forward to meeting them.   We shall expect photos  ;D
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Weaver

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #5 on: January 08, 2018, 05:50:16 PM »

Somhairle was named by Janet after Scottish Gaeldom's greatest poet Somhairle Mac Gill'-Eain, whom Janet once bumped into having a cup of tea near Portree. It's an Old Norse name, not Gaelic at all, mangled by the Gael over the course of many centuries. I have some ideas about what it might mean, but looking it up would be cheating.

Oisín (various spellings) is an old word used in literary Old Irish to literally mean “deer”. It is sometimes translated as “little deer” which I regard as a daft mistake. It is of basically PIE date originally meaning a large animal or a bull, and has a cognate in English "oxen".

As far as I can see is the English word oxen is in fact the correct singular not the plural, but which was reanalysed as a plural because of the -Vn (accidental) final syllable and an entirely new, non existent word ox was cooked up as a new “singular” based on it (like “pea” from ("peas(e)").

The old word was PIE *uksḗn (nom. sing.), where stress is on the last syllable as indicated by the acute. (To confuse matters Irish and Scottish Gaelic use accents to indicate long vowels rather than to mark stress placement, not necessary because stress is always in the first syllable apart from in the extreme SW or Ireland, or in certain compounds in which case a hyphen is used as a warning.) [!] The old -*ēn would have later become -*īn in Proto-Celtic and so we might have had something like *uxsīn later still. Now, I suspect that a false reanalysis also occurred in Old Irish (or earlier) too, where the *-īn syllable was taken as a diminutive ending (hence also the modern idea of it being “little deer”): same class of mistake, different driver. This is suggested because an Archaic Old Irish word oss is recorded as a literary word for deer, so I argue that someone took it upon themselves to remove the supposed ‘suffix’ that imo never was. The -ín diminutive ending of Irish is a feminine diminutive (not used in Scotland, which is a bit odd) and is extremely common for example in females' names.  However this is not feminine, neither grammatically or in reality.

So such a convoluted mess surrounding the oxen word in two languages. I haven't checked all of this supposition regarding reanalysis out properly yet, that would be cheating and so some of this is just straight calculation.

Janet picked the name Oisín as according to legend he was a poet, narrator, and hero near demigod of Old Irish mythology. So two poets. It's also spelled Ossian.
« Last Edit: January 22, 2018, 05:02:50 PM by Weaver »
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Weaver

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #6 on: January 08, 2018, 07:16:29 PM »

Kitz wrote
> Perhaps they are Oriental Shorthairs as they fit the Standard.   

Mrs Weaver said that Kitz is (of course) absolutely right, I had been mistakenly calling them Siamese because I didn't know the correct terms, and what's worse Caoimhe and Fergus are not Siamese either even though I have been calling them that, so she now tells me.
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Weaver

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #7 on: January 10, 2018, 03:11:05 AM »

Once again, I have made a fool of myself, going on about rejects, without knowing what I'm on about. Mrs Weaver showed me a pic of the kittens’ parents, both are extremely posh, dad is all black, the co-owned “Imperial Grand Champion Enigmatic Mr Vain” or something, whatever that might mean, and extremely gorgeous. Mum is a beautiful small cat with large white patches and some smaller stripes bits. Parents: [ https://www.flickr.com/photos/cecilward/39576834172/ ]

They are in a litter of eight.

Here is mum "Enigmatic FlashDance", in mid air: [ https://flic.kr/p/FdaBHE ]

Meanwhile Caoimhe is cuddled up in the crook of my arm, happily unaware of the chaos that is coming.
« Last Edit: January 10, 2018, 03:21:21 AM by Weaver »
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kitz

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #8 on: January 12, 2018, 02:47:51 PM »

Oh my.   Mum certainly deserves her name FlashDance  ;D
Dad is extremely handsome.
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Weaver

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #9 on: January 13, 2018, 03:51:46 PM »

<span lang="gd">’S ann tha na cait bheaga air tighinn !</span>
« Last Edit: January 13, 2018, 04:40:49 PM by Weaver »
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burakkucat

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #10 on: January 13, 2018, 04:47:29 PM »

With the help of Google translate I see that --

Quote from: Weaver
The small cats have come!

  :clap:
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Weaver

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #11 on: January 13, 2018, 06:52:27 PM »

Caoimhe yowled long. Made poor Oisín shake like a leaf uncontrollably. Somhairle just purred. Both <span lang="gd">piseagan</span> have been brought up to see the <span lang="gd">bodach</span> and both have sat on his chest briefly. Janet has been playing with them with a feather duster, they prefer the handle end to the feathers. <span lang="gd">’S beag an t-iongnadh siud.</span>

Now they are asleep in a large cardboard box with a circular hole cut in the front if it, which Janet prepared yesterday. It was predictably a big hit, in and out of the hole. Beileag saw them and ran away!

Ciarán presumably sighed and showed zero interest, <span lang="gd">“tuilleadh chat”</span>, and went to his dog-bed.

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burakkucat

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #12 on: January 13, 2018, 09:31:51 PM »

Google translate has assisted, once again --

piseagan                          kittens
bodach                            bodach
S beag an t-iongnadh siud.        It's a little surprising that.
tuilleadh chat                    more cats


Only a 75% success rate this time.
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Weaver

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #13 on: January 13, 2018, 11:12:10 PM »

Google failed utterly there with the whole sentence, having got the overall polarity wrong. It is literally “'Tis little the surprise, that/there”, in real english “The surprise is little”, in idiomatic proper english “No surprise there”, or “No wonder”. The initial "S" is the reduced form of the copula is, Eng "is", so it's pronounced /spɪk/. The word beag is fronted for emphasis reasons, but the phonetic stress accent is on the noun phrase.

Modern insular Celtic languages are basically VSO.

Modern Breton is arguably an exception according to some, who, understandably, consider it to be V2. It all depends on your point of view though, on what you regard as a basic sentence. (Breton is still considered an insular Celtic language even though it is on the continent, because its speakers all migrated from Devon and Cornwall around 400AD, hence the name.) I can't decide, for want of basic definitions. Most laymen might think it's V2, understandably.

English on the other hand is a SVO language, as is French. German is V2.

This sentence is not a good example of VSO though because some types of copular sentences are exceptional and have obligatory strange word order. But nevertheless, the verb, is, in this case is first in the sentence. (It would be more accurate to say "verbal complex" instead of "verb", because there are generally a load of possible clause-initial particles connected with the verb, question/statement, polarity, status as a relative clause or subordinate or complement clause, and the meaning or status of the whole clause accompany the verb and in fact precede it. [Wackernagel’s Law, iirc.])

Thanks nurse, I feel much better now.
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Weaver

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Re: Meet Somhairle and Oisín
« Reply #14 on: January 14, 2018, 03:41:18 AM »

Worst snap I have ever seen in my life, or compression has chewed it up hideously
   https://flic.kr/p/23rNDtr
Oisín is looking out from the cardboard box Janet prepared for them. Somhairle is in there too.
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