Oh, crap, and other catchphrases.

[catsidhe]

Just saw Hellboy II.

It is as good as I was expecting.

The elves, when they speak to each other in ‘Elvish’, are actually speaking Irish.
Really bad Irish.

(Just off the top of my head, when Nuada turns up to get Nuala, she says ata sin (pronounced like “at a sin”), subtitled “He is here”. I would have said that what she was trying to say was Tá sé atá ansin, which is “it is he who is here” ... the atá marks a subordinate clause. “He is here” would be tá sé ansin, pronounced like “taw shay an-SHIN”.

There's lots of a bhráthar (where, if I remember correctly, they actually get the bh as \v\) and a t-athair (should be a h-athair; O brother, O father). It's mangled Irish.

I had to share. Movie was good, though.

Comments

[enrobso.livejournal.com]

I really liked it as a good Del Toro film, never a bad thing in my book, but not such a good Mignola adaptation.

[flinthart.livejournal.com]

I recognized it as Irish... but I wouldn't know good Irish from bad Irish from indifferent. I did like the fact that it was Irish, though. It grounded the 'elves' in real-world mythology, and gave them a bit of depth and history. That was nice.

[wilhelminabenedict]

Apparently "it was actually authentic eighth-century Old Irish, and the dialogue was written by Patricia Kelly, who is a professor of Old Irish" so that might account for differences? I'm utterly ignorant, but I thought I'd toss that bit of trivia in.

[catsidhe]

It might have been at that... alas, my ear for Old Irish is not as good as for Modern. Write it down, and it's another question entirely.