Day 5 and the new kits were curled up with Caoimhe. Last night she was in a heap with two kittens cuddled up to her back, keeping her warm, whilst she was in the crook of my arm in bed. And we all fell asleep like that.
Caoimhe really has been very good with the two new tinies. The spitting only lasted about five days, and I had imagined she would attack them and then be in a state of outrage for weeks.
Oisín, I might have mentioned, is the OIr form. Modern Scottish Gaelic has the form Oiseán too (oisean confusingly means ‘corner’, accidentally). The word comes up in old songs still. “Neart Oisein Mhìn”, if I remember correctly, a big if, comes up in one of the versions of the lullaby Tàladh Dhòmhnaill Ghuirm. I do hope I remember correctly after many many years. One other version explicitly mentions the invoking the strength of the ‘bull (tarbh) that leaps so high’ too, but in that version I’m thinking of “Oisean” isn't named. Many are available for a listen on the web or Youtube. One of my favourites is Cathy-Ann Nic a’ Phì’s haunting version, it is recorded on a stunning CD that she made. Things are made more difficult because of the strong possibility that the form heard in the song is a genitive. (Vocative is, to my mind, not a fit.)
I may have suggested, some while back, that that latter new form has possibly come about by forcing an ‘expected’ masculine diminutive -án ending onto it either (i) after a weakening to an indistinct short vowel (in Insular Celtic unstressed), or else (ii) after reanalysis, after a quite incorrect analysis that the -ín was an (Irish) feminine diminutive form, so driving the creation of a new masculine equivalent. (iii) A third, to me less plausible, alternative is a reanalysis that, when encountered in certain syntactic environments, the high final vowel form is a genitive of some x, and x = -an or -án is the solution.
I’m actually wondering if some of these old references may literally mean ‘a little bull’, not necessarily invoking the hero, but that would imply that a word (which was a non-proper-name) related to OIr oss (and not **os(s)an ) survived for a good while. So for all I know a baby could be sent off to sleep being called ‘a little bull’ and strength invoked for him. If I have mistakenly identified the hero with the word in the song then mea culpa indeed. Anyway if I have misunderstood I need to de-capitalise the song.
Many animal species have got mixed up in Celtic. Locally frogs and toads. Salmon and trout sometimes. Historically, a sheep (caora) and a goat (L caper.)