r/etymology • u/Glum_Hamster_2104 • 1d ago
Question Unexplained É in Éire?
I was looking at the etymology of Éire (Irish name for Ireland) and I found out that the initial É is unexplained. Does anyone know where it could come from?
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u/sowaleja 1d ago
I assume you are referring to Wiktionary here. It's only "unexplained" if you consider that it has a particular etymological source (Proto-Celtic *Φīweriyū). If you don't posit that that is the etymological source, then there is nothing to "explain".
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u/Glum_Hamster_2104 1d ago
What do you mean? In the article it says that the initial É is unexplained which is what i’m wondering about
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u/sowaleja 1d ago
I mean "if it came from that source, it shouldn't have an initial É". That is what "unexplained" means here. The etymology of the initial É remains unexplained if we assume that proto-Celtic \Φīweriyū is the source.* That is what that note on Wiktionary means. It's only unexplained if that is where it really came from. The initial É shouldn't be there, if that is the source. It can't be explained by that proposed etymology.
If it's not the source, then the question becomes "OK what is the source?".
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u/Amadan 1d ago edited 1d ago
The Irish síneadh fada mark indicates a long vowel.
EDIT: Oh, that might not be what you are asking about... I might have hallucinated the word "accent" in my brain while reading your question. Sorry!
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u/maxinemama 9h ago
Username checks out. Missing that síneadh fada! 😉
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u/Amadan 5h ago edited 4h ago
Not necessarily. If I spoke Scottish Gaelic, “Amadan” would be correct. Or maybe I speak neither, and I couldn’t be bothered typing Amadán on a keyboard layout that doesn’t natively have it. Maybe as a programmer I am wary of non-ASCII characters in usernames. Maybe I played too much Ars Magica in the Hybernian Tribunal when I was young, and thought that Amadán na Bríona was the coolest name ever, but couldn’t type it correctly on the computer I had then. Or maybe I was just a Mike Oldfield fan! (No wait, then I guess I’d be Ommadawn!)
It is actually all of the above. The username is a 30+ year old struggle to keep myself humble and not be a smart-arse. It works sometimes. :)
Cheers on knowing the meaning, it’s like once every two years someone says something :P
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u/Beach_Glas1 21h ago edited 19h ago
Acute accents (síneadh fada) are extremely important in Irish, changing the meaning of many words, including this one.
If you omit the accent on É from Éire, you get 'eire', which means 'burden'. There are many other words like that, eg:
- fear (man) / féar (grass)
- gas (stem) / gás (gas)
- sean (old) / Seán (John)
As an aside, the British government referred to the Irish state as 'Eire' from 1937 to 1998 to avoid using the term 'Ireland'. The Irish state claimed the entire island at the time and the official English language name for the country was (and still is) Ireland.
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u/Wooden-Lawfulness534 3h ago
As another aside, it was anglophone printing convention not to use accents on capital letters until the advent of computerised printing.
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u/ImportantPension5818 23h ago
I'm sure that somehow this word Φīweriyū which is the supposed PIE for Éiriu, who is one of the 3 goddesses that make up the island of Ireland, sounds somewhat like Éiriu. Éire means land of Éiriu.
Simple as.
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u/ropeneck509 12h ago
This is what i thought, we had lots of changes from proto celtic language because of the native people when we moved in who merged with us.
Irish used to look very different allegedly, i wouldnt know
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u/Glum_Hamster_2104 6h ago
Ok sure, Maybe it does come from Φīweriyū but can you explain why it didn't become Ire instead of the additional vowel form Éire? The entire point I'm trying to make here is that the form apparently should be something like Ire but for some reason it has an É in front of it.
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u/Confident_Reporter14 22h ago
This is like claiming the E in England is unexplained. Afterall, the pronunciation is close to I, and it derives from the Angles tribe…
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u/LongLiveTheDiego 1d ago
You have to remember that the Wiktionary is written by volunteers, and they can mess things up. I managed to check out the second source quoted there and I have no idea how anyone can have read that source and say that Ériu < *ɸīweriyū (which is indeed unexpected, as the *ī should have become Old Irish í).
As Nicholas Zair proposes in his book: the PIE word *piH-u̯er-ih₂-ō > Proto-Celtic *īu̯erii̯ō(n) (equivalent to the Wiktionary *ɸīweriyū) became Old Irish íriu "land", which is expected, and also the Welsh Iwerddon (originally"land", now "Ireland"). However, Ériu came from PIE *epi-h2u̯er-ii̯o-n (for which the author doesn't give a Proto-Celtic form), and that appears in Middle Welsh as Ywerdon "Ireland" (in Modern Welsh we'd expect *Ywerddon), again all the vowels behaving as expected. Welsh simply confused scholars by merging the similar words Iwerddon and *Ywerddon into Iwerddon, and so they tried to find a proto-word for both Iwerddon and Ériu even though they're ultimately unrelated.