LASID exploration: Gaelic words for "also"

Fri 02 October 2026

Digitising a valuable resource

For a good few months, I have been working on and off on digitising Wagner's Linguistic Atlas and Survey of Irish Dialects, which comprises phonetic records collected in the 1950s and 60s. You can read more about the previous digitisation work by others that I am grateful to be building upon, my specific contributions, and the goals of my work at the Github project.

It will take a while for my vision for the LASID digitisation project to be fully realised, but in the meantime I thought it would be fun to publish some short blog posts on various dialectal observations and analyses, aided by my digitisation work.

Map 85: also

Map 85 in Volume 1 of the LASID shows the word used for "also" at the various survey points. The elicitation prompt was "your shirt is dirty too", with the prior prompt being "my shirt is dirty".

Lexical observations

From the plots above, we can see that leis is ubiquitous in Kerry and Cork. We can interpret this as "with it", i.e. "your shirt is dirty with it [it = my shirt]".

Further east in Waterford and Tipperary, chomh maith is more common. This is analagous to English's "as well". One instance of féin is recorded here, with the full utterance being "thá mo léine-se salach féin"¹. This is of course more directly translated as reflexive: "my own shirt is dirty". I don't think we should take féin to mean "also" generally.²

We also find chomh maith a little around the border of Clare and Galway, but freisin is overwhelmingly recorded in Conamara. O'Rahilly derives freisin from fa ris sin, which he translates as "moreover"³, but from which the meaning "along with that" can be taken: "your shirt is dirty along with that [that = my shirt]".

As we move further north to Mayo, chomh maith returns, before we reach Ulster, where fosta is almost universally recorded. The two exceptions are the variant fostacht in Ardara, and cuideachd on Rathlin Island, as in the Scottish survey points. Fosta is also found just over the border with Leinster in Omeath, and in one spot in Galway on the border with Clare⁴. Wiktionary links fosta to fós, meaning "yet, still". I can see how this could become "also", in the sense of an invariant property across compared items. To put it clumsily: "even though we are considering another item, still the property holds".

Returning to the term found on Rathlin and in Scotland: alongside the adverbial usage found in the LASID, cuideachd also means "company", in the sense of companionship, a meaning shared in Ireland⁵. "Your shirt is dirty in companionship [with my shirt]", perhaps.

On the Isle of Man we find neesht [njɪs], [neːs], which John Rhŷs derives from ina ndís, in Irish orthography, meaning "in their pair"⁶.

The pronunciations I have labelled as gomh maith ([go ˈmɑ], [gə ˈmɑ], [go ˈmaix′]) initially surprised me, as I interpreted them as go maith, which is the adverb form of "good" (i.e. "well") or is used to express subjective opinion that something is good. The Gaelic was all but dead at the time of the LASID in the three points where this was recorded, so I wondered if this might be corrupt. However, this pronunciation of what would more etymologically be written comh maith is the same phenomenon that gives us goidé for caidé, as is commonly heard in Ulster. Quiggin writes⁷:

g arises from O.Ir. [Old Irish] c in pretonic syllables. For gαχ, O.Ir. cach, cech; gən, ‘without’, O.Ir. cen; gə, O.Ir. co; gə·dʹe꞉, O.Ir. cate, cote

The adjective following comh or chomh would be stressed, hence comh would be pretonic. I have plotted the distribution of the initial consonant in this word below, from the elicitation "he is as cute as a fox".

Comparing to other sources

On comparing the LASID results to other sources, we must remember that the LASID does not mean to suggest that no other words could ever be used in an area than those given in the survey. Although freisin is only found in Galway in the LASID data, The Schools Collection, whose material was collected some two decades before the LASID, has some examples elsewhere, though the vast majority are in Galway, followed by approximately a third as many in Mayo⁸. The obvious geographical clustering observed on the maps does suggest that, even if other terms were in use at the survey points, the ones given in the LASID were likely the most natural for the elicitation.

Phonetic comparison of some of the complete utterances

Point 1, Ring, Waterford:

,hɑː də ˈl′eːn′ɪʃĕ ˈsᴌɑx xuːˈmɑ,
Thá do léine-se salach chomh maith.

Point 44, Ros Muc, Galway:

tɑː də l′eːn′əsə sɑləx fröʃən̠
Tá do léine-sa salach freisin

Point 70, Glenvar, Fanad, Donegal:

tɑ də l′eːn′əsə sɑ̣lɑ̣ ˈfosṭə
Tá do léine-sa salach fosta.

Appendix I point e, Lewis, Scotland:

hɑ ḍə l′eːnəsə sɑ̣ʟəx kụ̈ḍ′ə̆xḳ
Thá do léine-sa salach cuideachd.

I enjoy seeing commonalities and differences across different parts of Gaeldom:

• the lenition on tá in the far south of Ireland and the far north of Scotland⁹

• the broad s on the emphatic suffix regardless of final consonant, shared across the points in Galway, Donegal, and Scotland, but not by the one in Waterford.

• the short length of á in both Donegal and Scotland

• the preservation of the palatalisation of the n in léine in the Irish points, lost on Lewis after the preceding front vowel.

In all examples shown here, I note the lenis slender l in do léine. An earlier question in the LASID reveals that without the possessive adjective, léine starts with a fortis consonant in all but the first point (Ring does not maintain a fortis-lenis contrast on l sounds¹⁰). Compare [ʟ′eːn′ĕ] with [də l′eːn′ə] at point 44. It is enjoyable to see phonetic evidence of lenition not represented in the orthography¹¹.