Gaelic guide for learners

Gu luath

The other day I was trying to think of as many ways as I could of describing someone moving quickly between two points in Gaelic.

We have a host of adjectives that mean more or less ‘fast’ or ‘quick’. Perhaps the first one you’ll pick up as a learner is luath: bha iad nan ruith gu luath ‘they were running quickly’, but there are also clis, grad, cas, sgiobalta … You’ll notice slight differences in meaning and connotation in your dictionary.

Then there are more idiomatic ways of expressing fast movement. If they are in arush,wesay tha cabhag orra lit. ‘there is a rush on them. In some dialects deifir is more common than cabhag. If they, as we say in English, ‘made a dash for the door’, we could use thug iad roid air an doras. If someone was really shifting, hell-for-leather idioms like (bha iad nan ruith) aig peilear am beatha or nan deann would be appropriate. Another useful phrase is cho grad ’s a bh’ aca ‘as fast as they could’.

There are also the similes cho luath ris an dealanach ‘as quick as lightning‘ and cho clis ri feòraig nan craobh ‘as swift as the squirrel of the trees’, to name but two! lsabhal Mòr Ostaig offers Gaelic learning opportunities on site and by distance-learning www.smo.uhi.ac.uk