“Is iomaí cor i saol an fhocail”

These aim of this site is to provide Irish language scholars or anyone interested in the etymology of Irish with a “bridge” linking entries in the standard reference dictionary for Modern Irish (Ó Dónaill's Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla (FGB), as found on teanglann.ie) with entries in the standard dictionary of Old/Middle Irish (the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of the Irish Language (DIL), as digitized on dil.ie).

The mappings here are based on the ones recorded by Tomás de Bhaldraithe in his Innéacs Nua-Ghaeilge, published by the Royal Irish Academy in 1977, and I'm grateful to the Academy for allowing me to make this valuable resource available online (it is also the source of the quote in the heading above). Prof. de Bhaldraithe's work has been transformed and improved in a number of ways to facilitate the creation of the hyperlinks you'll find here:

• I have added parts of speech for all of the entries in FGB (there are none in the Innéacs), which helps disambiguate many cases (especially nouns and adjectives with the same spelling).
• The disambiguations that exist in the Innéacs are given as short English glosses, e.g. barrann 'surpass' vs. barrann 'hinder'. I have manually mapped each of these cases to a specific headword in FGB (in these two examples, barr³ and barr⁴ respectively).
• Disambiguations on the DIL side are given as numbered senses (acht 3, acht 4, acht 6, etc.) but not on a consistent basis. I manually linked the correct numbered eDIL entry in all ambiguous cases.
• In cases where an alternate spelling in modern Irish was closer to the spelling in DIL, de Bhaldraithe chose the alterate spelling in his mappings (he mentions geafta : gepta in the Introduction). Since these words are not always linkable on teanglann.ie, I have replaced all such alternate spellings with the corresponding headword in FGB.
• Many of the entries in the Innéacs are abbreviated (e.g. ciamhair, -e : ciabair, ciamair, -e). All of these abbreviations have been expanded, which was not entirely trivial to automate since there are cases that involve more than a simple appending (e.g. crístamail, -mlacht, etc.).
• Verbs in the Innéacs are given by their present tense form (e.g. diomlaíonn); all such forms were replaced by the singular imperative (e.g. diomail) to enable linking with FGB, where this is the convention for verbs.
• de Bhaldraithe intentionally omitted fadas on vowel combinations like ae, oe, eo, ua, ia; those have been restored when needed to map to a headword in eDIL.
• Most painful of all was the fact that there were several hundred spelling inconsistencies in the Innéacs, mostly on the DIL side, that needed to be corrected in order to link up with the correct eDIL entry (e.g. deithnesech → deithnesach, eterchert → etercert, meanmnaigid → menmnaigid, sligén → slicén, etc.; a full list is available upon request).
• When a linked word is not a headword in DIL, the Innéacs provides specific page/line numbers in the print edition to where the word appears (e.g. ceannliath : cenn 127.43). Since those subentries are not directly linkable in the current version of eDIL, we provide a link to the headword and you'll need to search from there.

Special thanks go to Caoimhín Ó Donnaíle at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig for his encouragment and advice while I was working on this project.