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362 Gaelic Society of Inverness.
land fisheiMiian. But priomh-shedl, the word used, is known to
nobody. It is a compound made up of priomh, the Latin primus,
meaning first, whether in time, place, or rank ; and seu/, like the
corresponding English word sail, both noun and verb. I am not
awai'e that the uncouth hybrid has ever been used in Gaelic
except in this passage, nor do I think that it was worth the while
of Irish scholars to manufacture the word or of our translators to
borrow it, though it had been more needed and better suited for
its purpose than it is. The jNIanx translation is seol-meadhoin.
Again, we are told that after the fore part of the ship stuck
fast, the stern was being broken up by the vio/eiice of the waves.
The Greek word ^ia rendered violence in English, is translated
ainneart in Gaelic. This is again a compound word made up of
the j)refix (in, and |he substantive nenrt. Now neart is one of
our oldest and best words. The root appears in Greek in a.vT)p, a
man, and in Latin in the proper name Nero. An is an Indo-
European prefix. It appears in Greek as an and a ; in Latin as
in, and in English as un—th'e general meaning being privative or
negative. In Gaelic the pretix is used chiefly in a privative sense
— moch, " early ;" tiiwioch, " unearly ;" i.e., " "
late; " abaich," ripe ;
anabaich, "unripe." Occasionally it intensifies the meaning of
the root syllable : teas is heat, but ainteas is excessive heat. Very
frequently it turns the meaning in malem partem like English mis,
and Gaelic mi : cainnt, e.g., is speech, but anacainnt is not silence,
it is speech put to a bad use, railing. Such is the force of the
prefix in ainneart. In Scottish Gaelic ainneart is not neart
negatived, nor neart intensified, it is neart misdirected or misapplied
; it is not violence but oppression. Accordingly, the word
can only be applied to the doings of an intelligent agent, and is
as much out of place in describing the action of the waves of the
sea as it would be in characterising the attack of a wild animal.
Here, again, the Manx translation has simply neart.
No one who has read the Gaelic Bible from its literary side,
but must have felt that the picturesque jjhraseology of the people
might have been often used to improve the translation as well as
to enliven the style. In that solemn passage, e.g., where our
Saviour rebuked the winds and the sea, we ax'e told thei-e was a
great calm—yaXrjvrj /xeydX-n is the beautiful phrase used. Now, in
the mouth of a West Highlander
—
-yaK-qu-q, {,e., the stillness of the
sea is expressed not by the general term ciuine, the word used in
Matthew, but by the specific term feath (Jiath), the word given in
the corresponding passage in Mark and Luke. And when the
•wind is hushed, and the waves have gone to sleep ; when sky and